Amedeo Modigliani
Long necks, blank eyes, and one of the most comprehensively faked names in twentieth-century art.
Amedeo Modigliani was born in Livorno in 1884 into a Sephardic Jewish family, was ill from childhood with the tuberculosis that eventually killed him, and moved to Paris in 1906. He wanted to be a sculptor and carved elongated stone heads under the influence of Brancusi and African art until the dust became impossible for his lungs, after which the same elongation went into painting: portraits of Soutine, Zborowski, Jeanne Hebuterne and others, with almond eyes often left blank, and a group of nudes whose 1917 exhibition was closed by the police. He died in 1920, at thirty-five, and Hebuterne killed herself the next day.
This name has a forgery problem on a scale that few others do — a 2017 exhibition in Genoa was closed with a majority of the works seized as fakes — and there is no single universally accepted catalogue raisonne, with several competing and contested. The practical consequence is that provenance, exhibition history and scientific examination carry more weight here than connoisseurship, and an unrecorded work with a thin history is a problem rather than a discovery. Drawings are numerous and are faked as heavily as the paintings. The sculptures are extremely few.
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