Amedeo Modigliani: When Things Come Full Circle

By Michele Robecchi

Like that of many of his peers who rose to global fame after meeting a premature demise, Amedeo Modigliani’s work has been over the years the subject of furious litigations, dubious authentications and endless debates about who has the authority to legitimately run (i.e. control) such hefty heritage. The dispute raged for decades, and despite the number of players involved, it eventually boiled down to two main contenders-the family of the artist on one side, and the scholars and academics who dedicated their lifetime to study the work of the artist on the other. One of the most significant battles occurred in the early 1980s, when a large Modigliani exhibition organized by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris was soon challenged by one in Madrid and Barcelona put together by Jeanne Modigliani’s Archives Legales, an association whose existence, according to Daniel Marchesseau, the then director of the Musée in Paris, was known only as “an address on the street map.”

In the middle of the conflict, a third show, mainly dedicated to Modigliani’s sculpture, opened in the Villa Maria Museum in 1984 in the artist’s hometown of Livorno. Admittedly a low-key affair, the exhibition was dismissed by all parties concerned as little more than a too-little-too-late attempt by the Tuscan port town to reclaim a child who had left for good at the age of 20, and not exactly on very good terms. What no one could have ever anticipated was the massive stir that this modest venture would cause, an explosive chain of events that would cost jobs, destroy reputations and that three decades later still stands as a unique chapter in the history of Modigliani and art in general.

What happened? Legend goes that before bidding farewell to Livorno forever, Modigliani bade goodbye to a group of large sculptures he carved in stone and had no interest in keeping by throwing them in the town’s canal. The rumor survived for almost a century, and to capitalize on the momentum generated by the exhibition, museum director Vera Durbé and the town mayor came up with the idea of investigating the matter further by combing the canal in search of those lost pieces. Eight days into the operation, on July 24, 1984, the dredge picked up two flat stones covered by 15 inches of mud that, once cleaned, turned out to be two heads chiseled in Modigliani’s iconic style. The overenthusiastic climate created by the discovery predictably dominated the ensuing months. Time talked about “an historic scoop,” the art community grew increasingly excited, politicians jumped on the bandwagon, and more of the sort. Under international pressure, and split between the long-term option of waiting 20 months for a conclusive scientific pronouncement and a short-term answer based on the opinion of luminaries and art historians to determine their veracity, the town of Livorno incautiously chose the latter. The likes of Giulio Carlo Argan and Cesare Brandi deemed the sculptures genuine, and within eight weeks they were added to the Villa Maria exhibition in a triumphant opening.

A few days after the celebration, the party hit the wall. Three local boys confessed in the national press to be the real authors of the sculptures. Bored by the hot summer and tired of the Modigliani fever that affected everyone in town, they picked up two old stones in the country, worked on them with a drill and a screwdriver, and threw them in the water. To corroborate their action, the boys also showed a photograph of one of the sculptures in their garden when they finished the job. Questioned about why they had done it, they replied “for fun.” But when asked what they learned from the experience, they waxed unexpectedly philosophical. “We learned that the value of an artwork is determined by art critics, and that the value of their opinion is suspicious to say the least.”

The words of the boys weren’t trusted without reserve. The timing of the revelation was suspicious, and the press was busy with its own credibility issues, with the echo of the Hitler Diaries hoax sanctioned by none other than Hugh Trevor-Roper the year before still fresh. Ultimately, the controversy proved to be too much. The stone heads were removed from the show, legal action was taken against the boys and the curators of the show, and a major wrangle between the principal actors in the whole drama erupted on the front page of every newspaper, while waiting for a verdict that, in tune with the worst Italian judiciary tradition, never really materialized.

Aided by a solid temporal gap, this spring Livorno finally felt confident enough to return to the subject, promoting an exhibition of the fake Modiglianis along with 27 panels recounting the whole story and a series of conferences on the theme. In what comes across as a disconcerting time warp, motivations resemble the spirit of that 1980s summer, putting Livorno at the center of the art world, regardless of the fact that people are lining up to see as fake now what they were lining up to see as real then. In this happy ending, the only casualty left on the floor now and then is art criticism, a practice that suffered a deep battering due to its inability to tell the hand of a respected artist from the one of three kids, and that 30 years on is still limping.

Michele Robecchi is a writer and curator based in London. A former managing editor of Flash Art from 2001 to 2004 and senior editor at Contemporary Magazine from 2005 to 2007, he is currently a visiting lecturer at Christie’s Education and an editor at Phaidon, where he has edited monographs about Marina Abramović, Francis Alÿs, Jorge Pardo, Stephen Shore and Ai Weiwei.