Provenance of two paintings possibly by AMEDEO MODIGIANI

I found these paintings in an out-of-the way second hand/junk store on the edge of Montmart in the mid-eighties. I was travelling on business from Washington to Africa, and took a weekend between flights to visit galleries, and perhaps buy something of interest. Imagine my surprise when I found a small box with what seems to have been studio detritus, including the small unsigned pictures and shown here. The owner was unsure of their provenance, but since the firm from which he had secured this box had been the repository of a miscellany of items which were not taken by galleries or friends following the 1920 deaths of Amedeo Modigiani and his wife Jeanne Heburterne (by suicide) a couple of days later, the possibility that they were by Amedeo could not be 100% discounted.

While these pictures – sketches really – had some characteristics of Modigliani’s style, they were much smaller than most of Modigliani’s output, and were lacking the multiplicity of marks typical of the artist’s work. But the apparent clincher for their being fakes was that these paintings were not on canvas, but on mdf (medium density fiberboard) the first version of which was discovered in the USA by accident in 1925, but only became widely available in the 1970’s.

How could an artist who died in 1920 make paintings on an uninvented ground? The notion of time travel was common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. H.G. Well’s The Time Machine was published in 1895, and such was its popularity it is just possible that some real world inventor stumbled on a working machine. Could it be that Amedeo, perhaps in one of his drunken interludes, managed to visit our present day and then return to Paris? Tiny as that probability is, it could also help explain these paintings’ rough ressemblance to two well-known (at least to ArtPod members) Metchosinites.

$50,000

Amadeo Modigliani

see evidence below

Who is not attracted by attractive people? Each is

oil on board