Paintings listed by Christian Parisot
Amedeo Modigliani — investigation file
Christian Parisot is an Italian-French art historian who became the principal custodian of the Archives Légales Amedeo Modigliani after Jeanne Modigliani named him her scientific successor in 1982 and transferred to him her personal archive of roughly 6,000 documents together with authentication stamps.
He founded the association in 1983 and has published successive volumes of a catalogue raisonné (Graphis Arte and later editions), listing several hundred paintings—recent statements cite around 414—along with drawings and sculptures. The catalogues expand the corpus beyond Ceroni and incorporate many works previously accepted by Lanthemann under Jeanne’s endorsement.
Parisot has also organised exhibitions and continued to issue certificates and opinions.
His position has been repeatedly challenged in court. In France he was convicted in 2010 of forging 77 drawings attributed to Jeanne Hébuterne (Modigliani’s companion); the appeals court imposed a two-year suspended sentence, a €50,000 fine, and damages to Hébuterne’s grand-nephew.
Italian proceedings have included the 2010 seizure of works from an exhibition he organised at the Archaeological Museum in Palestrina and later charges involving the authentication of dozens of drawings, graphic works, sculptures, and a painting valued at several million euros. He has denied the accusations, stating in some cases that the works were presented as reproductions.
An Italian civil court in 2013 rejected a claim by Jeanne’s daughter Laure to recover the archive and upheld Parisot’s control; the same ruling noted that French droit moral is inalienable and that Parisot does not hold the moral right itself.
Technical examinations and rival scholars (including R) have identified specific works in his catalogues as inconsistent with Modigliani’s materials or technique, including the presence of post-1920 pigments.
The product of a “typical European connoisseur” whose word is treated as more authoritative than documentary evidence, and notes that the Archives Légales function “exactly the opposite to the name.” Major auction houses do not accept a work solely on Parisot’s authority; his listings appear in catalogues mainly when a Ceroni number is already present.
The combination of documented convictions for fraudulent attribution, contested archive ownership, and the inclusion of works later rejected by laboratory analysis has left his catalogues without standing as an independent reference. They remain a significant but unreliable expansion of the literature, useful chiefly for the documents they reproduce and for the market confusion they have prolonged.
Published a large list of documents, books, etc and created the Archives legales Modigliani that are The title of that archive is retained here as published.
The number of additional paintings and drawings listed by Parisot is not fixed in a single published numbering.
Parisot published extensively and founded the Archives Légales Modigliani.
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.