L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2017 www.italoamericano.org 8 FRANCESCA BEZZONE " Modì": his artsy entourage in the Paris of the early 20 th century used to call him so. M odì, M odigliani. But als o M odì, m audit, " curs ed" in French and pronounced in the same way. Dedo, a familiar, lov- ing form of Amedeo, was how his closest friends and family would say. To the w orld, h e remains Amedeo Modigliani, troubled soul, genial painter and sculptor, embodiment of the very essence of that Paris bohémienne made famous by great names of the arts like Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera and his wife, Frieda Kalo, Max Jacob and writers like Jean Cocteau and Blaise Cendrars. It is to that Paris we think of, when imagining the lives and adventures of penniless artists, living off cigarettes and their own infatuation with Beauty. Modì was one of them, indeed. Born in Livorno, he showed a distinct creative vein since child- hood. He studied in Florence, then in Venice, but it was Paris that made him great: his por- traits, characterized by simple lines and chromatic schemes and by delicate, fragile neck lines, were mostly conceived and pro- duced in the French capital. As you may expect when it comes to a true artist, Modì's life w as marked by pas s ion and tragedy, dispensed in equal mea- sure and strength. Plagued by perennial poverty and tuberculo- sis, alcohol became the way to cope with the foulness of both, the only comfort to be found in painting and Jeanne Hébuterne, student first, lover and mother of his daughter after. Jeanne: an artist, whose life and pos thumous exis tence remained entw ined w ith the name of his teacher and lover. Jeanne, who killed herself two days after her Dedo died, aged 35, in the Hôpital de la Charité. She was 22 and heavily pregnant with their second child. It was the end of January, 1920. It w ould take 10 years to Jeanne's family to agree to move her mortal remains from the cemetery of Bagneux to that of Père Lachaise, where Modì had been buried. There they rest, still today, one beside the other. If you think M odigliani's tumultuous existence found, at least, artistic quiescence after his death, you're setting yourself for a surprise, as his work has been at the center of one of the most notorious cases of art forgeries of the past 50 years. Never in the history of contemporary Italian art a fake did manage to cause such a stir and, more important- ly, to convince s uch a large amount of art critics – and so adamantly – of its authenticity. S ummer 1984: Livorno, Modigliani's own native town, had been getting ready to cele- brate the artist's one hundredth birthday with a monographic exhibition curated by siblings Dario and Vera Durbé dedicated in large part to Modigliani's sculptures: yes, Modì, mostly known for his paintings, was also a well know sculptor, who found much inspiration in the tribal w orks of A frican art. Unfortunately for the Durbé brothers, the exhibition didn't meet the favor of the public, possibly also because only a very limited amount of works had been gathered for it: only four of the twenty-six sculptural works attributed to the artist. A failure would have been pro- foundly detrimental for both Vera and Dario, curators respec- tively of the Museo Progressivo d'A rte Contemporanea of Livorno and of the G alleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna of Rome. Vera, resilient as all women and probably feeling desperate, decided to gamble it all, taking for fact a urban legend according to which Modigliani, in 1909, had thrown in the Fosso Reale, Livorno's river, some of his sculptures after being repeatedly derided by fellow artists. Vera Durbé "sensed" their presence in the river, reports of the time say: and so it began the greatest art swindle of the 20 th century. Searches started, creating a wave of curiosity among people, whose presence along the river in placid observation became corollary to the hard work of all those involved. After a few days of digging and dragging, with no results obtained, however, public interest turned into mockery. Things took a totally different turn when, on the 24 th of July 1984, the sculpture of a head was found. A while after a second one was rescued from the muddy waters of the Fosso Reale and finally, on the 10 th of August, a third was fished out. The Durbé brothers were ecstatic: their intu- ition had proven right, their place in the history of art discoveries guaranteed. A plethora of well- known art critics were quick to declare the three sculpted heads authentic, among them Giulio Carlo Argan, famous intellectual and art historian, known also for having been the first mayor of Rome after the declaration of the Italian Republic. The D urbé brothers waxed lyrical about the discovery: Vera considered the first sculpture "the most beauti- ful, characterized by the noblest of noses" and the second similar to "a painting". Dario defined the three pieces works of "touching, inquisitive incertitude". Now, the whole story is about to tak e an unexpected tw is t: three university students, one of them relative of the director of popular Italian magazine Panor am a, decided to come clean on its pages: those sculp- tures were not Modigliani's, they had made them with a Black and Decker drill, convinced no one would have fallen for the joke. Upon realizing their handy work had been causing a stir in the arts world, they felt the necessity to let everyone know that, no, Modì w as not the author of thos e heads, they were. Or at least, of one of them. Yes, you read it right: the mystery gets thicker, because the students declared only one of the three sculptures was their own and they knew nothing about the other two. For a bunch of days, there was hope at least those may have been the original work of Modigliani, but on the 13 th of S eptember young Livornes e artist Angelo Foglia admitted to be the author. He apparently had decided to dump them in the Fosso Reale as an act of rebel- lion against the fine arts estab- lishment. When the three stu- dents ended up on Italy's most popular live Sunday afternoon s how , and reproduced a "Modigliani head" with their trusted Black and Decker drill, they had already become nation- al mascots. In 2014, when interviewed to commemorate the 30 th anniver- s ary of the forgery P ietro Luridiana, one of the three impromptu sculptors, declared to "Il Fatto Quotidiano" that, con- sidering Modì's personality and his relationship with art critics he, w herever he may be now, probably enjoyed the joke very much. False heads of Modigliani (Modi) exposed to the thirty years of the great hoax. Photos taken in Livorno, Italy during the inauguration of the exhibition What you See is not What you Get: Italy's Forgers and Forgeries throughout the Centuries : Modigliani's Lost Sculptures (Part II) LA VITA ITALIANA TRADITIONS HISTORY CULTURE

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