When it was first exhibited in Paris in 1917, Amedeo Modigliani’s female nude Nu couché (sur le côté gauche) caused such a stir that the police were called and the gallerist was accused of outraging public decency.
On Monday it is expected to sell for more than $150m (£111m), becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever and helping push auction sales this fortnight to more than $2bn as the world’s wealthy splash out on masterpieces for their private museums.
The pre-sale estimate is a record. Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which sold for $450m in November, had a pre-sale estimate of $100m.
The Modigliani sale, at Sotheby’s in New York, will generate a huge profit for the Irish thoroughbred stud owner John Magnier, who bought the piece from the Las Vegas casino magnate Steve Wynn for $26.9m in 2003.
Simon Shaw, the co-head of Sotheby’s impressionist and modern art department, said the increase in the painting’s value “reflects the growing love of Modigliani’s work and the significance of this piece in his oeuvre”.
He added: “It’s a masterpiece-driven market, collectors are increasingly good at differentiating the best from the rest and this is an A+ piece from an A-class artist.”Shaw said that the Italian masterpiece, which was the star of a recent Tate Modern exhibition, could easily exceed the record $170.4m paid for a Modigliani in 2015, when another of his 22 nudes from the period was sold to the Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian and his wife, Wang Wei.
Liu, a taxi driver-turned real estate and pharmaceuticals billionaire, bought the painting to display at one of his two private museums, which are designed to introduce Chinese people to western art as well as display the couple’s traditional Chinese art collection.
Lui told the New Yorker in a rare interview that he was interested in Modigliani for the way he lived and died as for his paintings. “It’s not just his art but his life. Every object has its story,” he said.
Liu also broke the record price for Ming dynasty porcelain when he bought a tiny piece known as “chicken cup” for $36.3m in 2014 and immediately sparked outrage by drinking from it for the cameras.
Liu is expected to be in the bidding for the Modigliani when it goes under the hammer.
“There is tremendous connoisseurship in China,” said Shaw, who will be the auctioneer for the Modigliani sale. “There are a number of very sophisticated investors with deep pockets and a desire to collect the best of the best. The masterpiece market is truly global and we also expect collectors from America, Europe and Russia to be among the bidders.”
At 147cm wide, it is the largest work that Modigliani painted. The majority of his reclining nudes are in museums, mostly in the US. In New York, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) and the Met own one each. The only one in the UK is in the Courtauld Gallery in London.
The Sotheby’s impressionist auction will end a remarkable fortnight of sales in New York, where the rival auction house Christie’s has been selling more than $1bn of art from the estate of Peggy and David Rockefeller. Among the highlight of this week’s sale was Picasso’s 1905 Young Girl with a Flower Basket, which fetched $115m, and Monet’s Nymphéas en fleur, part of the Water Lilies series, which sold for a record $84.6m.
While still huge sums, the prices do not come close to the record $450m paid last year for Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi by the Saudi Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed Al Farhan. The piece is to go on display at the Louvre Abu Dhabi.
