At the Met the drawing is still by Bronzino but now depicts an unnamed "seated man".
The aim of this study was to assess the effect of the lower limbs in transmitting vibration to the whole body of the seated man.
The earliest, by the 17th-century French painter Valentin de Boulogne, depicts a full-length, seated man playing the lute and singing.
Works like "Man Kicking World" (2002), in which a seated man pushes an enormous globe with his foot, imply broad political themes.
And presto, the whole uneasy balance is resolved: The 1950 "Seated Man (Conrad)," a portrait of her brother, with its exuberant squiggles of greeny-ochre paint, is one of the most satisfying pieces in the show.
But a number of slightly earlier sculptures blaze with her usual painterly panache, like the brilliant orange hands and tie, yellow shirt and multicolored face she gave to "Seated Man Foot Poised on World".
Its image of a standing girl in a short skirt watched by the older seated man in a sparsely furnished room is loaded with psychological potential, but the painting is so thinly realized that it leaves richer possibilities untapped.
Also revelatory are the works by Alberto Giacometti (portraits and busts of his brother Diego) that accompany Cézanne's "Seated Man" (1898-1900), and the dialogue between Madame Cézanne and Matisse's hollow-eyed women.
The youngest are fearful in the extreme – one of them cannot even bear to look at this poor, suffering bird – and the oldest (that seated man on the right of the table who leans on his cane) is the most steadily ruminative.
"Seated Man (Leaning on a Cane)," a 1918 painting by Modigliani that the Nahmad family, dealers with galleries in New York and London, bought at Christie's in London in 1996 for $3.2 million, was estimated at $18 million to $25 million.
Van Gogh's "Old Peasant Sitting by the Hearth" (1881), a man seated in a straight-backed chair leaning forward in a weary pose, was directly taken from Plate III, 39, of the course ("Seated man, hiding his face in his hands").
