VENICE - A rare oil on canvas by Italian expressionist portrait artist and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani has been bequeathed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation by the Venetian collector Luisa Toso, it has emerged. The 1916 portrait 'Woman in a Sailor Shirt' (La femme en blouse marine) will be exhibited at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in the lagoon city from June.

The canvas augments the artistic patrimony of Venice in line with the wishes of the donor. It joins three other later paintings (1917-18) by Modigliani, nicknamed "Modì" (a pun on the French "maudit", or "cursed"), in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation collection.

'Woman in a Sailor Shirt' appeared in Modigliani's solo show organized by his dealer Léopold Zborowski at the Parisian gallery of Berthe Weill in December 1917. However, paintings of female nudes in the window caused a scandal, and the show closed prematurely. The painting was subsequently bought by Paul Guillaume and shown only occasionally thereafter, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Bruxelles in 1933 and at Kunsthalle Basel in 1934, before entering the Toso collection in Venice in 1952. Since then, it has been shown in Milan, Rome, Padua, Verona, Venice, Ancona, Caserta, and Turin, after being listed by the Italian State in recognition of its high artistic and historical value.

The exhibition in Venice follows a restoration intervention carried out by the chief conservator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Luciano Pensabene Buemi, with funding from global private banking group EFG. During the restoration a thick layer of non-original varnish that had been applied during a previous intervention was removed to reveal the original cold blue and grey tones as well as the peach-coloured face, which had deteriorated to beige. In addition, the oxidation and whitening visible on several parts of the canvas were removed.

