Meryle Secrest

by Modigliani: A Life

  Paintings are not the only works by Modigliani that are faked. Drawings are very easy to forge and can be so convincing that it is almost impossible to tell whether or not they are “right” unless the provenance is absolutely ironclad, as in, for instance, the case of the Dr. Alexandre collection. Modigliani’s caryatids are another popular target but marginally easier to detect. In a landmark study, “Fakes and Forgeries,” by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1973, among the works on view were four caryatids in pencil, crayon, pen and ink, gouache, or watercolor. One was genuine. The three others, masquerading as by Modigliani, could be rejected on stylistic grounds. The genuine caryatid showed the “artist at his best, combining an essential and graceful curvilinear line with an overall feeling of solid, stable support which is the very basis of the caryatid figural type.” The forgeries, with their lumpen limbs and stylistically mangled heads, belonged to figures unable to sustain anything, much less a resemblance to the work of the man whose name they had appropriated.

  The high point for fake Modiglianis—Restellini estimates there are at least one thousand on the market—took place during the thirty years after World War II, the 1950s through the 1980s, when everyone was in the game for easy money. Among them was an art historian named Alberto d’Atri, whose ostensible role as critic and writer about art was a front for his much more lucrative role of salesman and authenticater of Modigliani’s paintings. Or, as was said of another so-called authority, when asked to authenticate a work he would reply that if the owner would let him sell it, meaning for a handsome percentage of the profits, the painting would become whatever he wanted it to be. Conflicts of interest are nothing new in the art world, but some of the d’Atri howlers are so outrageous one cannot believe that anyone would offer them for sale with a straight face. They are now on deposit at the Archives of American Art in Washington, which is open to the public.

  But even reputable auction houses like Parke-Bernet, Christie’s, and Sotheby’s were offering paintings for auction in which one would have to express serious doubts. A portrait of a woman sold by Parke-Bernet in the winter of 1958 came up again for sale at Christie’s in London in the summer of 1974. It was supposedly a portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne, with a Modigliani signature upper left and a certificate of authentication from Hanka Zborowska dated 1956. It was said to have come from the collection of “Mme. Hébuterne” in Paris and then to have belonged to a Mrs. Martin Baer of Paris, “the sister of the sitter.” This flagrant invention of a nonexistent sister should have sent up immediate warning flags for the specialists at Christie’s but, presumably, the sale went ahead.

  Since this was the period in which certificates of authentication were appearing from all directions, one would expect Jeanne Modigliani to make some of the same mistakes. The evidence is that she did. As Marc Restellini wrote in the catalog of his exhibition “Modigliani: L’Ange Mélancolique,” at the Musée du Luxembourg in 2002–03, “the question of Modigliani’s authenticity has plagued Modigliani’s corpus, putting many people off, and constituting a major impediment to the appreciation of his oeuvre … In the 1950s, the often incongruous certificates of authenticity made out by Hanka Zborowska and Lunia Czechowska cast doubt over his entire corpus. For them, it was an answer to their dreams, an unexpected financial resource … Having written a very interesting work on the father that she scarcely knew … Jeanne Modigliani too permitted herself to certify the authenticity of certain works.”

  The art historian and museum director Marc Restellini, author of a definitive catalogue raisonné on Modigliani (image credit 14.8)

  What Jeanne Modigliani inherited was called the “droit morale,” or moral right, over her father’s work. Mark Spiegler wrote in Artnews, “The droit morale was intended to ensure that an artist’s heirs would have significant control over their ancestor’s legacy. In practice it often proves nettlesome; the children of an artist are not automatically experts in his work.”

  For instance, Jeanne was legally allowed to make eight copies each of her father’s sculptures. Although all of them were in stone there was no requirement that the copies be in the same material. So Jeanne licensed them to be made in bronze. There is also a Tête de caryatid now at the Amedeo Modigliani Foundation in Rome that has been reproduced in wood. Many scholars, Restellini among them, believe the practice of reproducing an original work in any other material “runs directly counter to the creative philosophy” of the artist. Marc Blondeau, an art adviser and private dealer in Geneva, said, “Jeanne Modigliani was impossible because she signed authentication certificates in a very subjective way, without doing serious research.” She also certified works that have since been identified as fakes.

  In Clifford Irving’s book Fake, about the masterful forger Elmyr de Hory, who painted over a thousand fakes of everyone from Picasso to Renoir and Matisse, there is a reference to the fact that he collaborated with Jeanne. Irving wrote that the forger “brought some Modigliani drawings to the representative of Mlle Modigliani, the painter’s daughter, secured an affidavit that they were genuine and then sold them to a prominent dealer on the Avenue Matignon.” De Hory worked with Fernand Legros, a Paris art dealer who also sold fakes manufactured by his friend Réal Lessard, an equally successful forger of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. Lessard subsequently published a tell-all book, L’Amour du faux, placing the blame for his nefarious career on his former friend, and publishing three of his Modigliani fakes. All were sold with certificates from Jeanne Modigliani because, he wrote, Legros wanted her imprimatur to silence the critics. Jeanne Modigliani “was a passionate admirer of the paintings of the father she had never known,” preparing “to admire indiscriminately anything that looked plausible.” Still, when he sent her a photograph of Lessard’s not-very-convincing Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne, Jeanne demurred. She wanted to see the actual work. Eventually she was allowed to inspect it with her lawyer, a Maître Hauert, and Legros in attendance. The negotiation was brief, Lessard wrote. Legros and Hauert immediately understood each other and the matter was settled to the mutual benefit of all concerned.

  Nowadays certificates from Jeanne Modigliani have been thoroughly discredited. For the past several years prominent dealers and auction houses have refused to accept paintings without a cast-iron pedigree or an entry in the catalog published by Ambrogio Ceroni in 1958 and updated in 1970. Ceroni, who only listed works he actually saw, omitted at least eighty that did not compare well with paintings he believed to be authentic, a total of 337. His listing does not include many Modiglianis now in the U.S. that he never saw. The provenances also do not include the past history of the paintings but only their whereabouts at the time of publication. Still, Ceroni is considered the reigning authority. Spiegler wrote, “Unless a Modigliani has a perfect provenance, not being listed among Ceroni’s 337 paintings will slash its market value by half or even two-thirds.”

  Christian Parisot is a convicted forger who has published numerous volumes on Modigliani’s paintings and drawings. He met Jeanne Modigliani in 1973 when he was working on a doctorate in art history, and they became friends. Parisot has curated numerous exhibitions and written catalogs and books about aspects of Modigliani’s life and work as well as a sourcebook, Modigliani, published in 2000. Now a professor at the University of Orléans, Parisot claims that the droit morale was passed to him by Jeanne Modigliani before her death in 1984. This repository of several thousand letters, diaries, documents, and photographs that had been assembled by Jeanne and her daughter Laure was now titled the “Archives Légales Amedeo Modigliani.” A prominent authority on Modigliani whom I interviewed said, “How these can be called ‘Legal Archives’ is an absolute mystery.” His understanding, along with that of many other historians, is that the legal right devolves upon the natural heirs and that Laure and Anne could have asserted this right but never have.

  When questions were raised by the police in 2006 about the authenticity of some paintings and drawings with attributions from Parisot, it le
d to a police raid in search of the “Archives Légales.” According to the official website these could be consulted at the Musée de Montparnasse, 21 avenue du Maine. The director, Jean Digne, told the police this was not true. His museum had never housed the archives, he said. In any event the same archives are now housed at the via di Monte Giordano 36 in Rome. Now that the “Archives Légales” have moved to Italy, the French police “will have to work through European authorities if they wish to access them,” Artnews reported in September 2006.

  Another case involving attributions by Parisot went to court in the spring of 2008. The problem began in 2002 and involved more than seventy drawings by Jeanne Hébuterne that Parisot had borrowed for an exhibition about Modigliani and his circle, held in Venice in October 2000. The drawings were lent by Luc Prunet but he became dissatisfied with aspects of the exhibition and uncorrected errors in the catalog. So when Parisot asked for permission to include the Hébuterne drawings in a new exhibition that would travel in Spain, it was refused. The drawings were returned and Prunet assumed the matter was closed.

  Prunet was subsequently astounded to learn that a sizeable group of drawings and watercolors purporting to be by Jeanne Hébuterne were being exhibited in Spain. The modest value of work by an unknown French artist was not the issue. At issue for Prunet was the patent inferiority of what was being shown as his great-aunt’s work, along with the deception involved. The case took several years to move through the French courts. When it was eventually heard, in 2007, Parisot claimed he had bought the drawings at a flea market in Paris, but his explanations were not convincing and sentence was passed.

  The sentence was appealed and the case reheard in November 2009. That second hearing took on the flavor of a Feydeau farce when, as Parisot prepared to leave the courtroom, he was arrested on a new charge of selling fake certificates for Modigliani drawings. A final verdict on the Hébuterne issue was handed down two months later, in January 2010. The original sentence had included several months in jail. This was suspended, but the appeals court greatly increased the cost of damages, to fifty thousand euros, and Prunet’s original award of one euro was also increased to fifty thousand euros. Although only tangentially related to Modigliani’s work, the Hébuterne case, involving as it did an expert on Modigliani, was bound to call into further question the still thriving trade in Modigliani fakes, of which the presiding judge who had given the original verdict was evidently well aware. Parisot, the judge said, had “used his well-known role as expert and archivist of Modigliani” to invent fraudulent provenances.

  Osvaldo Patani, who has also published his opinions in several volumes, stopped work in 1999. He explained, “I am disappointed, demoralized and also annoyed. I am an honest man and nowadays I have to reckon with too many vested interests and too many fakes in circulation.” The same problems have dogged Marc Restellini, who originally planned two volumes of his catalogue raisonné, one of paintings and the other of drawings. When a prominent collector of Modigliani’s drawings learned that Restellini did not plan to include them in his new volume, he embarked on a campaign. One day Restellini received a phone call from his mother. “Marc, what have you done?” she asked reproachfully. “I haven’t done anything, maman,” he protested. It turned out she had just received a very large check in the mail. Meantime, he was receiving anonymous death threats. Lawyers were contacted, the check was returned, and the idea of a drawings catalog was dropped.

  There is a coda to this subject. It seems that about ten years ago the art expert and museum director Daniel Marchesseau was contacted by a department dealing with forgeries in the Police Judiciaire. The police had seized a Modigliani painting, quite unlike his usual style, in which a man wearing a hat and a moustache sits at a café table with a carafe of wine and a glass. It is no. 275 in Ceroni’s list, painted in 1918 and listed as being in a private collection. Marchesseau had known about it for years but had never seen the original. In due course he was sent documentation by mail and invited to police headquarters to discuss his findings.

  He told them, “This has to be a complete fake and a bad one at that.” He was interested because “problems appear when fakes are very well done and forgers are usually pretty talented. But this one was just bad, muddy and amateurish.”

  After a minute or two, other officers, who had apparently been observing his testimony through a two-way mirror, suddenly appeared. They said, “What you are telling us is pretty interesting.” After about half an hour it transpired that they were part of a companion unit investigating currency fraud. The fake Modigliani was being offered for sale by a criminal gang. The prospective buyers were from another gang, they were paying with fake money, and the sellers were quite indignant about it. That reality, in the world of art, can triumph over illusion is the rarest of all.

  Throughout the 1940s and 1950s the lives of Victor Leduc and Jeanne Modigliani centered around their ardent belief in Communism. All the pain, the sacrifices, poverty, imprisonment, the secrets, subterfuges, and lies—it would all have been worthwhile because of the future that lay ahead, idyllic and serene. That faith would receive a shattering blow. It came in 1956, three years after the death of Stalin. Speaking at the Twentieth All-Union Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev, who had succeeded Stalin as premier, delivered a supposedly secret report that was immediately leaked, “The Personality Cult and its Consequences.” It was a denunciation of Stalin, his character, politics, rule, and role in the mass imprisonment and execution of thousands of political prisoners, the so-called gulags, that had been rumored and were now being acknowledged for the first time.

  This was painful for Valdi, but even more agonizing for Jeanne. It was a betrayal of her dearest hopes, one more way that life had let her down. She abandoned politics to concentrate on her art. She had been painting for several years and won a scholarship to work on a study of Vincent van Gogh. She wrote, “The contrast between his own ideas and artistic aims … and the myth of the ill-fated painter whose genius was conditioned by his madness, led me to examine the crystallization of this type of legend.” In her refusal to be misled she wrote with so much restraint that, John Rewald commented, “her portraits of Modigliani and his friends actually lack warmth and life.”

  Although Jeanne Modigliani’s biography makes frequent references to her father’s family there seems to have been little or no contact with her mother’s, a curious omission given that they all lived for many years in the same city. For explanation one need not look much further than the personality of her uncle André. Whatever anger was left for his sister’s actions quickly dissipated. Sometime early in 1920 he left Paris for a painting trip through the countryside. He wrote to his mother (“Ma chère Petite Me’ ”), “You know from experience how difficult it is to drive from one’s mind sad memories which overwhelm one sometimes.” As soon as he started painting he thought of Jeannette, and “it seems to me that she is just about to appear and I will soon be showing her what I have done and imagining what she is going to say.” In years to come André would keep a memento of hers close at hand.

  After André Hébuterne died in 1992 at the great age of ninety-eight Georgette Hébuterne did try to explain, in an interview with Parisot, what she had not been able to discuss for decades, but perhaps it was all too long ago. She did, however, indicate one reason for her husband’s silence, and Anne Modigliani offered the same explanation. The family’s anger, no longer directed at Jeanne Hébuterne, had turned itself on her baby. That was in keeping with the popular view that if there was one thing worse than having an illegitimate child, it was being one.

  At the time her book was published Jeanne Modigliani was professor of Italian at a lycée in Lille. She had her first exhibition as an artist at a gallery on the rue des Francs Bourgeois in the Marais, showing some splashy, Abstract Expressionist paintings. The name of Modigliani ensured a few sales. But her efforts were not a critical success. Jeanne had once worn her hair upswept off her forehead in a flirtatious little bun that len
t an impish gaiety to her appearance. In later years she cut her hair within inches of her scalp and combed it forward. The result was monkish and not becoming at all. At the same time Jeanne, a moderate drinker to this point, became a compulsive one.

  Dominique Desanti said, “She had an inner conviction that she was responsible for the gulags. She found out about them the same time we did, but for her it was unbearable to think she had supported this. After that, in order to paint and forget the fact that she was personally responsible for the gulags, she began to drink. She would say, ‘You know, we are all mass assassins, serial killers’ and, ‘Nobody has the right to live after that.’ ”

  Jeanne Modigliani, not long before her death in 1984 (image credit 14.9)

  Jeanne was repeatedly treated at programs for alcoholics that helped for a time, but she always started again. Valdi, who had given up so much to be with her, burdened by continuing financial responsibilities for his two families, in poor health, finally despaired of ever helping Jeanne and asked for a divorce. That came in September 1980. Valdi and Laure joined forces; Jeanne and Anne moved in together into an eleventh-floor studio apartment in a complex of high-rise buildings owned by the city of Paris on the Place d’Italie. It was comprised of a single large room with a kitchen and bathroom. It was then that Jeanne’s compulsion, lacking any remaining restraints, plunged her into the depths. One day Anne returned to the apartment unexpectedly to find her mother, completely drunk, completely naked, in the company of two or three men she had picked up off the street. Desanti said, “Everything in her life fell to pieces. Anne was ill. Laure had emotional problems. Certain people appreciated her paintings but they did not sell. She had the sense of guilt we all shared, and then Valdi left her.”