The Tamesis
Just weeks after the announcement of a new book on the Institut Restellini’s catalog raisonné of Amedeo Modigliani’s decades of work, Pace unveiled a recently authenticated painting by the artist at Art Basel Hong Kong. This work has a long legal background.
title young female brunette (1917-18), according to data, this work is the highest-priced work at the Hong Kong Art Fair art news‘s Tessa Solomon reports from Art Basel. Marc Glimcher, chief executive of Pace, told Salomon that there were multiple bids for the work, which was priced at 11.5 million euros ($13.3 million). (Glimcher also said that the gallery will bring Modliliani’s works listed in the new catalog to each fair this year to celebrate its publication.)
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This is a far cry from the condition the painting was in nearly 30 years ago, when it was pulled from Phillips auction house in 1997 due to authenticity concerns. Marc Restellini, art historian and founder of the Restellini Institute, told the auction house before the sale that he did not intend to include the painting in the catalog raisonné of Modigliani he was working on at the time, which led to the withdrawal of the sale.
The work’s then-owner, Moshe Shaltiel-Gracian, sued the Wildenstein Institute in Paris, which provided Restrini with an office and research assistant as part of a collaboration agreement. (It’s worth noting that the institute is run by the Wildenstein family, longtime art dealers who have been partners at Pace Wildenstein for nearly 20 years.)
While the lawsuit against the Wildenstein family was dismissed in 2001, issues surrounding the painting resurfaced in 2020, when Restrini sued them over the rights to their Modigliani research. The Wildenstein Institute’s defense in the Shaltiel case – that Restrini was not an employee of the organization and therefore the institute was not liable – formed a core part of Restrini’s argument in the 2020 case. The two sides reached an undisclosed settlement last year.
As for young female brunetteRestrini told art news On Tuesday, he never indicated to Phillips that the painting was a fake, but told them the catalog photo was “extremely ugly” and that he could not determine its authenticity without personally touching the work. He said the auction house told him that was impossible given the speed of the auction.
After Shaltiel’s case was dismissed in 2001, he began trying to persuade the owner of the painting to provide him with the opportunity to examine the work. Restrini said the owner did provide access several years ago, when he conducted a scientific examination of the work, which confirmed that the paint in the painting matched those used in two other authenticated works. Archival research subsequently uncovered a document confirming that the painting was exhibited in 1929 at the Leicester Gallery, a renowned art gallery where Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro and many others had their first solo exhibitions in the UK. The work has been included in Restrini’s upcoming publication, art historians tell us art news Think it’s “impossible” [for the painting] It’s fake. “
“This is actually good proof that our judgment is based on solid scientific and documentary evidence, rather than an impression based on shoddy catalog photos,” Restrini said in an email.
In the forthcoming catalogue, Restrini and his team describe the work thusly: “The authenticity of this painting, which has long been questioned and finally confirmed by recent scientific studies, dates its provenance to the early 1930s. Although the identity of the sitter remains unknown, this portrait of a young woman bears similarities to two other portraits of a dark-haired woman with a bob: “Jeune fille à la robe bleu fonce” (“Girl in Black Dress”, RP 254) and Black Dress (RP 255), the three works are probably portraits of the same model, created as a series: the background, hairstyle and the neckline of the dress look similar, and moreover, it can be observed that in each work the same technique was used to create the volume of the bangs by scraping the paint with the handle of the brush.
