Pace Brings a Newly Authenticated Modigliani to Art Basel Hong Kong, Priced at €11.5 Million
A portrait by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) is emerging at Art Basel Hong Kong with a price tag that would place it among the fair’s most consequential offerings — and with a backstory that has shadowed the work for decades.
Pace is presenting Modigliani’s “Jeune femme brune” (1917–18) for €11.5 million (about $13.3 million), according to the gallery’s CEO, Marc Glimcher, who said several parties are bidding. The painting is the highest-priced work on offer at the fair.
The timing is pointed. Just weeks earlier, Pace announced a book launch tied to Institut Restellini’s long-in-development Modigliani catalogue raisonné, a publication decades in the making. Glimcher said the gallery intends to bring a Modigliani work included in the new catalogue to each fair this year in celebration of its release.
A painting pulled from auction — and a dispute that lingered
“Jeune femme brune” has not always been positioned as a blue-chip certainty. Nearly 30 years ago, the painting was withdrawn from a Phillips sale in 1997 amid authentication concerns. In the lead-up to that auction, Marc Restellini — the art historian behind Institut Restellini — told Phillips he did not plan to include the work in his then-in-progress Modigliani catalogue raisonné, prompting the withdrawal.
The episode fed into a broader legal saga. The painting’s then-owner, Moshe Shaltiel-Gracian, sued the Wildenstein Institute, a Paris-based research center that had provided Restellini with an office and a research assistant under a collaboration agreement. The institute was run by the Wildenstein family, longtime art dealers who, for nearly 20 years, were partners in Pace Wildenstein.
That lawsuit was dismissed in 2001, but the underlying tensions resurfaced in 2020, when Restellini sued the Wildensteins over rights to his Modigliani research. A key element of Restellini’s argument drew on the Wildenstein Institute’s defense in the earlier Shaltiel case: that Restellini was not an employee of the organization and therefore the institute was not liable. The parties reached an undisclosed settlement last year.
From “extremely ugly” photos to hands-on examination
Restellini has since offered a more specific account of what happened in 1997. He said he never told Phillips the painting was a fake. Instead, he described the catalogue photographs as “extremely ugly” and said he could not determine authenticity without examining the work in person. According to Restellini, Phillips said that wasn’t possible given how close the sale date was.
After the Shaltiel case was dismissed in 2001, Restellini said he tried to persuade the owner to grant access for a direct examination. Several years ago, he said, that access was finally provided. Restellini then applied what he described as scientific methods, concluding that the pigments match those used in two other authenticated Modigliani works.
Archival research added another layer: Restellini said documentation was found confirming that the painting was exhibited in 1929 at Leicester Galleries in London, a storied venue known for introducing major modern artists to UK audiences, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Camille Pissarro.
The painting has now been included in Restellini’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné. Restellini has said it is “impossible” for the work to be a forgery, arguing that the combination of scientific examination and documentary evidence resolves doubts that once hinged on inadequate reproduction.
In an email, he framed the shift as a methodological point as much as a market one: “This actually proves perfectly well that our judgements are based on reliable scientific and documentary evidence, and not on an impression formed by a poor-quality catalogue photo,” he wrote.
For collectors watching Art Basel Hong Kong, the offering is more than a headline price. It is a case study in how authentication, documentation, and institutional power can shape a work’s fate — and how a painting once deemed too uncertain for the auction block can return, decades later, as a centerpiece of the fair’s top tier.
