One of Greta Garbo’s favorite paintings was Modigliani’s Portrait of a Girl, believed to be a depiction of his lover Beatrice Hastings. “Garbo would enjoy it with her evening scotch and a Nat Sherman Cigarettello that she held so elegantly with her gemstone-encrusted Van Cleef & Arpels holder,” Gray Horan, Garbo’s grandniece, tells me. The painting, an oil on cardboard, 14 inches by 10 inches, circa 1915, is part of a Modigliani exhibition that will open next week at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, in Osaka, Japan.
“She used to call it ‘The Garbo Modigliani,’” Horan says. “I think it was because it was a painting of a woman, and it was hers and it came with a title which you know is very antiseptic.” The painting is now owned by Horan and her brothers. Their grandfather was Garbo’s brother. The Modigliani hung, along with Renoirs, Rouaults, a Bonnard, and other works of art, in Garbo’s seven-room apartment overlooking New York’s East River, where she lived for many years.
