secretmodigliani.com

I watched with interest over many years the gyrations of a Modigliani portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne. A good friend of mine once owned it, and I thought it was a fake,
but found it difficult to advise him of that. However, after a while he sold it to one of the large dealers in Modiglianis for very little money, I believe some $2,500.
A year or two later, a collector who had bought the painting died, and it came up for sale at the Parke Bernet Gallery. There it was sold for about $10,000. Most of the
dealers thought it was a fake, including one of the curators of a museum who had a great knowledge of Modigliani, and had two Modigliani files: one file for the good ones,
and one for the fakes – and this painting was in the fake files. The following year the painting again came up for sale at the Parke Bernet Gallery, and this time it sold
for about $11,000. The year after that it came up again, and was sold for a bit more.

Year after year, the last purchaser of this picture would keep it until some art critic or dealer told him that it was a fake, and he would put it up for auction at Parke
Bernet. Having sold it, they were compelled to take it back and offer it for sale again. I believe this painting was sold five different times at Parke Bernet; I had lost
track of it for three or four years when all of a sudden it showed up at Christie’s in London, selling for some $60,000. In the meantime it had built up a long list of former
collectors and been shown at exhibitions. I am sorry for the last person who bought it. During this time there was a Modigliani exhibition at the Boston Museum and the Los
Angeles Museum, and to my surprise the Hébuterne portrait was in the catalogue.[2]As I had some paintings in the exhibition, I went to Boston to see it. I found the fake
Modigliani behind a column, where it was very difficult to see it unless one were looking for it.

I imagine the curator realized what this painting was, and as he was obligated to show it, he picked the worst possible spot to hang it. Later, when I received a thank you
letter from the curator at the Los Angeles Museum, I wrote back and told him that he had a fake picture in the exhibition. I said he was giving that picture credit for being
a real one, and building up a pedigree for it. I subsequently met the curator, and his excuse was that his hands were tied, as the exhibition had first been shown at Boston
and came to them later. He thought it was Boston’s obligation to remove the painting in the first place.

Sometime later, I dropped in on a dealer in London who was bidding on the portrait. I told him to stop bidding, which he did. I figured I helped him from falling into a trap.
He showed me his gratitude in the following manner: he had a Cézanne drawing of Mt. St. Victoire, one of a number of that subject that the artist had done. He didn’t know a
nything about the watercolor, but I told him that I would like to buy it, and arranged for him to send it to me so that I could compare it with one of my own paintings.
He was to forward the work to my New York address, and in the meantime I wrote down that I would pay $8,400 as soon as it arrived. I kept writing him for weeks afterward,
advising that I had not yet received the watercolor, and to this day he hasn’t answered. He probably told some prospective buyer that I was willing to pay $8,400, knowing that
if I were willing to pay that, he wouldn’t have any trouble getting more from some other collector.