After over 40 years in the making, Institut Restellini’s Amedeo Modigliani catalogue raisonné will finally release next month. Pace will host a book launch at its London gallery on April 21, with a day-long symposium to follow on April 30 at Pace’s 540 West 25th Street space in New York.
To say the publication is a labor of love for Marc Restellini, Modigliani scholar and founder of the Institut, would be an understatement. At six volumes and over 2,000 pages, with 100 works newly confirmed as authentic, half of which are already in major museum collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the catalogue raisonné seems poised to redefine the field of authentication, or at least Restellini hopes so.
“I would like our approach to become the standard,” Restellini told ARTnews. “I hope that with this catalogue people will see what can be achieved. My hope is that after this catalogue, people will say, ‘This is really the right method.’”
Restellini’s team combined various scientific analyses—including spectrometry, carbon 14, infrared, and X-ray imaging—with stylistic evaluation and extensive document research to get as close to a guarantee of authenticity as possible. An explanation of the methodology takes up an entire volume of the catalogue.
“Someone can imitate a style or try to model their work after a certain type of paint, but no matter how brilliant they are, they can never know the exact chemical composition of each pigment used in an authentic Modigliani,” Restellini said. “We now have a great deal of scientific data on around 50 percent of the corpus of the catalogue raisonné because of the scientific analyses we have conducted. That means we have information covering every period of the artist’s life—every year, and almost every month. When we analyze a work today, we can determine not only whether the pigments match the period of the artist’s life, but also whether they correspond to Modigliani’s palette. If we find an unusual pigment, that immediately becomes very problematic.”
According to Restellini, when he started the project in 1985, it was unheard of to use such methods in catalogues raisonnés. Now, he said, the pendulum has swung the other way.
“About a decade ago, everyone discovered that scientific analysis is very useful. But many people think it can do everything—that it is the alpha and the omega of authentication. That is not true. A very skilled forger can use an old canvas with old pigments, and in the end the scientific analysis will say the materials are very old,” he said. “What I hope this catalogue will demonstrate is that when you combine scientific analysis, stylistic analysis, and documentation—and all three agree—you greatly reduce the risk of fakes.”
As for the new hot trend in authentication—artificial intelligence—Restellini is not impressed. He said that he has tested three such systems, which all authenticated a work he knew to be fake. AI, he added, is useful for analyzing and organizing documents, but not actual authentication.
Restellini’s catalogue raisonné—the sixth produced on Modigliani—may also help loosen up the artist’s market. Modigliani’s work has long been subject to a high number of fakes and forgeries, as the artist was known to sell or gift paintings and drawings without documenting them. Additionally, according to Restellini, the problem has been compounded by a lack of family or an estate to help protect the artist’s legacy.
In 2015, Modigliani’s auction record was set at Christie’s New York, where Nu couché sold for $170.4 million to billionaire investor Liu Yiqian, one of China’s leading art collectors. A comparable work sold in 2018 at Sotheby’s New York for $157 million. But only seven Modigliani works priced above $10 million have come to auction since, the most recent being Paulette Jourdain (1917), which sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in October 2023 for $34.8 million.
“It is important for Modigliani’s legacy that some paintings that have been rejected—or effectively boycotted—are recognized as Modigliani when the evidence supports it,” he said. “It is not our right to say that a painting is not authentic simply because it does not appear in one book or another. If we have all the information about a painting, and the evidence leads us to conclude that it is genuine, then it should be recognized as such.”
He continued, “We found some masterpieces that were incredible. But we have also authenticated some paintings that are not so beautiful. Sometimes, with an ugly painting, you have people who deny it’s authentic just because of how it looks. But, like every artist, Modigliani made good and bad works.”
The Modigliani symposium at Pace will be comprised of a series of panels on catalogues raisonnés featuring experts from across the field, including Ekaterina Bembel, president of La Société Internationale des Catalogues Raisonnés; Satoko Tanimoto, senior research scientist at Scientific Analysis of Fine Art, in New York; Tiffany Bell, editor of the Agnes Martin Catalogue Raisonné; and David Grosz, editorial director and chief digital officer of Cahiers d’Art, among others.
