[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Modigiliani_Nu-au-canape-Almaisa_1917.jpeg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tAfter over 40 years in the making, Institut Restellini\u2019s Amedeo Modigliani catalogue raisonn\u00e9 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\u2019s 540 West 25th Street space in New York.<\/p>\n
\n\tTo say the publication is a labor of love for Marc Restellini, Modigliani scholar and founder of the Institut,\u00a0would 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 raisonn\u00e9 seems poised to redefine the field of authentication, or at least Restellini hopes so.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI would like our approach to become the standard,\u201d Restellini told ARTnews<\/em>. \u201cI hope that with this catalogue people will see what can be achieved. My hope is that after this catalogue, people will say, \u2018This is really the right method.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tRestellini\u2019s team combined various scientific analyses\u2014including spectrometry, carbon 14, infrared, and X-ray imaging\u2014with 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. <\/p>\n \n\t\u201cSomeone 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,\u201d Restellini said. \u201cWe now have a great deal of scientific\u00a0data on\u00a0around\u00a050 percent of the corpus of the catalogue raisonn\u00e9 because of the scientific analyses we have conducted. That means we have information covering every period of the artist\u2019s life\u2014every 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\u2019s life, but also whether they correspond to Modigliani\u2019s palette. If we find an unusual pigment, that immediately becomes very problematic.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAccording to Restellini, when he started the project in 1985, it was unheard of to use such methods in catalogues raisonn\u00e9s. Now, he said, the pendulum has swung the other way.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAbout a decade ago, everyone discovered that scientific analysis is very useful. But many people think it can do everything\u2014that 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,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat I hope this catalogue will demonstrate is that when you combine scientific analysis, stylistic analysis, and documentation\u2014and all three agree\u2014you greatly reduce the risk of fakes.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAs for the new hot trend in authentication\u2014artificial intelligence\u2014Restellini 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.<\/p>\n \n\tRestellini\u2019s catalogue raisonn\u00e9\u2014the sixth produced on Modigliani\u2014may also help loosen up the artist\u2019s market. Modigliani\u2019s 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\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n \n\tIn 2015, Modigliani\u2019s auction record was set at Christie\u2019s New York, where\u00a0Nu couch\u00e9<\/em>\u00a0sold for $170.4 million to billionaire investor Liu Yiqian, one of China\u2019s leading art collectors. A comparable work sold in 2018 at Sotheby\u2019s New York for $157 million. But only seven Modigliani works priced above $10 million have come to auction since, the most recent being\u00a0Paulette Jourdain<\/em>\u00a0(1917), which sold at Sotheby\u2019s Hong Kong in October 2023 for $34.8 million.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIt is important for Modigliani\u2019s legacy that some paintings that have been rejected\u2014or effectively boycotted\u2014are recognized as Modigliani when the evidence supports it,\u201d he said. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHe continued, \u201cWe found some masterpieces that were incredible. But\u00a0we\u00a0have\u00a0also\u00a0authenticated\u00a0some paintings that are not so beautiful.\u00a0Sometimes, with an ugly painting, you have people who deny it\u2019s authentic just because of how it looks. But, like every artist, Modigliani made good and bad works.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe Modigliani symposium at Pace will be comprised of a series of panels on catalogues raisonn\u00e9s featuring experts from across the field, including Ekaterina Bembel, president of La Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Internationale des Catalogues Raisonn\u00e9s;\u00a0Satoko Tanimoto, senior research scientist at Scientific Analysis of Fine Art, in New York; Tiffany Bell, editor of the Agnes Martin Catalogue Raisonn\u00e9; and David Grosz, editorial director and chief digital officer of Cahiers d\u2019Art, among others.<\/p>\n \n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/market\/institut-restellinis-amedeo-modigliani-catalogue-raisonne-1234776379\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Modigiliani_Nu-au-canape-Almaisa_1917.jpeg?w=1024″] After over 40 years in the making, Institut Restellini\u2019s Amedeo Modigliani catalogue raisonn\u00e9 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\u2019s 540 West 25th Street space in New York. To say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1818825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1818825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1818825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1818825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1818825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}