Paintings listed by Joseph Lanthemann — nos. 1–150
Amedeo Modigliani — investigation file
Joseph Lanthemann (died c. 1982) was a German philosophy teacher who became a Modigliani specialist through his collaboration with Jeanne Modigliani, the artist’s daughter. She invoked her droit moral to position herself as the sole authoritative judge of her father’s work; Lanthemann served as the principal vehicle for that claim. His 1970 catalogue, Modigliani, 1884–1920: Catalogue Raisonné – Sa vie, son œuvre complet, son art (Gráficas Condal, Barcelona; limited edition of 2,500, with a parallel Vallecchi edition), listed roughly 420 paintings, 602 drawings, and 32 sculptures. A 1978 volume, Modigliani inconnu, appeared under joint authorship with Christian Parisot.
The catalogue is widely regarded as the most inflated and least reliable of the early inventories. Kenneth Wayne has described it as accepting “any painting that looked vaguely like a Modigliani.” Secretmodigliani.com documents specific cases in which Lanthemann included works later shown by laboratory examination to be fakes. The 1981 Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris technical report on two of his entries (including “Femme aux boucles d’oreilles,” no. 253) found disordered underdrawings, brushwork inconsistent with Modigliani’s method, and, in one instance, pigments indicating a 1930s forgery. Provenance is frequently absent or minimal; dimensions are often reduced to generic French canvas sizes rather than measured values; and stylistic commentary substitutes for documentary evidence.
Lanthemann’s files were later merged, at least in part, with the Archives Légales associated with Parisot. A work listed solely by Lanthemann is not accepted by major auction houses. His opinion appears in catalogues only as supplementary documentation when a Ceroni number is already present. Because the catalogue systematically expanded the corpus without corresponding rigorous filtering, it became a convenient source for doubtful attributions and remains effectively discarded as an independent reference. In the hierarchy of Modigliani catalogues it occupies the position opposite to Ceroni’s: where Ceroni was excessively restrictive, Lanthemann was indiscriminately inclusive, and the market has treated the latter as unusable on its own.
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The works below follow the published Lanthemann / Jeanne Modigliani selection.
The works are recorded as listed by that compiler.
1 to 150
151 to 310
311 to 420
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Legal note on MR: This investigation has not had access to MR’s catalogue raisonné; all research here is based on open sources, publications and exhibitions. By no means has that catalogue been copied at any point.