Lolotte

In 1932 the French national museums bought this portrait for the Jeu de Paume, which had just been inaugurated as the museum of contemporary foreign schools. Modigliani had been dead 12 years. He was an Italian who had spent a decade working in Paris, and foreign was the shelf he went on. The inventory number still begins with the letters JP, for that building. He painted the picture in June 1917. Who Lolotte was has never been established. It is a French pet name for Charlotte, and it arrived attached to the canvas. The Centre Pompidou, which owns the work today, once listed it under the plainer title Femme au chapeau, woman in a hat, and neither the Pompidou nor the museum now showing it puts a surname to her. That museum is the musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme in the Marais, which opened in 1998 and took the painting on deposit the same year.