Is 1917 the most subversive year in the history of art? An adolescent two-fingers directed at the old guard, and the Paris Salon, yet simultaneously, a bold and pre-punky rupture that set a new precedent for the century to come. In the year Sigmund Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis saw light of day, the art cognoscenti experienced aesthetic delirium when Marcel Duchamp presented a urinal, which he called Fountain, the most provocative of his so-called Ready-Mades at the Independents of New York exhibition, and declared it 'art'.   The seismic gesture still rumbles the art world today as much as it did then. 

Sculptural titan Auguste Rodin died the same year, although not from the shock of Duchamp's scatological prank we assume, and with his death the history of art turns a prestigious page just as Duchamp is subverting it. Edgar Degas follows on Rodin's heels. Remarkably, French impressionist Claude Monet is still painting water lilies in his beloved Giverny garden and will go on doing so for another nine years. Meantime in Holland, an avant-garde movement is born when Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg publish the first edition of art magazine De Stijl (The Style). Simultaneously, they establish Abstract Geometric painting and Mondrian's Neoplasticism, a reaction to the Cubism invented by Picasso and Braque. Meanwhile, French artist Ferdinand Leger, gassed at Verdun one pristine, sunny morning during the war paints The Game of Cards, while recovering from burns at Villepinte Hospital in the suburbs of Paris. The work depicts men playing cards between attacks in the trenches, nothing Cezanne hadn't dealt with before, yet in Leger's image, the French soldiers are depicted as disjointed robots, dehumanised like the steel of their helmets and shells.

So for real fiesh and blood of the highest - and most artfully kinetic - order in 1917, if you'd be standing at Berthe Weill gallery, 50 Rue Taitbout in the 18th arrondissement of Paris on the early evening of December 3, you'd have been in the thick of the action, at one of art's most epicentral moments. Police were said to have been "free with their hands" when they confiscated pictures and drawings by Amedeo Modigliani (all nudes) during his vernissage at the gallery. Acting on complaints, they confiscated several paintings by the Paris-based Italian painter "because they were offensive to modesty".

One of which, Nu Couché, sur le côté gauche, above, carried a brief text by the poet Blaise Cendrars in the programme praising "the coming and going of passion". A point not lost on all its viewers before or since it came to Hong Kong in April and prior its May 14 sale in New York through Sotheby's. How was, or wasn't, or will it be, for her. Or is it all a bluff, the only nude of Modigliani's to have her back turned to us, yet staring so directly into our eye, are we, the viewer, unwittingly disturbing her reading. And why is her face so distinctly and geometrically rendered while her feet are all putty and puff. 

Modigliani was floating on success at this point. In addition to being the finest example from the series, Nu couché is distinguished further as the largest painting of his entire oeuvre – measuring nearly 58 inches / 147 centimeters across – and the only one of his horizontal nudes to contain the entire figure within the canvas. 

And while painting nudes was nothing new in art history, it was Modigliani'a ability to mash-up so much art provenance that made his work so dazzlingly dangerous and glamorous. In this work alone we observe myriad cultures, from Egyptian, Japanese, African, Indian and even Iberian sculpture, to Renaissance frescoes, the influence of Sandro Botticelli, through Romanticism to the cutting-edge of Cubism. It's the history of art with no clothes on in a bunch of rapidly and deftly rendered brushstrokes. Says Simon Shaw, Co-Head Worldwide of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Department: “There is the nude before Modigliani, and there is the nude after Modigliani.” That may be but neither category comes close to his vibrancy and remarkable modernity. Now the only question remains, will she or won't she... exceed US$200 million? And counting. 

NB: Amedeo Modigliani's Nu Couché, sur le côté gauche sold for US$157.2 million on May 14 in New York. It represented the highest auction price in Sotheby's history. The sale makes Modigliani the first artist to cross the US$150 million auction threshold twice.

Image courtesy of Sotheby's, 2018