Works recorded by the Modigliani Project

The Modigliani Project, founded by Kenneth Wayne, presents itself as a scholarly effort to enlarge the accepted corpus of the artist’s paintings beyond Ambrogio Ceroni’s 1970 catalogue. It emphasizes committee review, technical examination (pigment analysis, imaging, canvas studies), and the publication of an online resource focused on works omitted by Ceroni. In principle, this multi-expert, science-informed model addresses longstanding complaints about sole-author catalogues. In practice, however, the Project’s cautious posture raises questions about its independence of judgment.

Its methodology closely tracks the scientific and documentary standards now associated with MR recently published six-volume catalogue raisonné. R work, which expands the corpus to roughly 421 paintings while excluding fifteen previously listed by Ceroni, has set a high-visibility benchmark for laboratory-backed research. By aligning its procedures with those standards, the Modigliani Project may reduce the risk of direct contradiction or legal challenge from R circle; yet the same alignment invites skepticism about whether the Project is primarily testing new attributions or primarily seeking compatibility with an already dominant authority. Works that survive its committee process tend to be those that can be presented without colliding with R exclusions or with the market’s continued reliance on Ceroni as a baseline.
A further difficulty is the limited transparency surrounding the committee’s deliberations and the precise weight given to technical data versus connoisseurship. While the Project stresses that inclusion requires unanimous agreement and does not constitute a commercial certificate, the absence of a full, publicly available critical apparatus makes it difficult to assess how thoroughly dissenting views are recorded or how provisional many of its positive decisions remain. In a field already crowded with competing catalogues, this opacity can leave the impression that the Project functions more as a cautious supplement than as an autonomous revision of the oeuvre.
Looking ahead, the Project’s principal challenge will be to demonstrate that its scientific and collective procedures can produce results that are not merely safe relative to R’s catalogue. If it continues to select candidates largely on the basis of non-conflict with existing authoritative lists, its contribution may remain incremental and its claims to methodological independence harder to sustain.

So, lets give them time to work and a bit of trust.

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. Modigliani Project and Modigliani Initiative are marked YES when a work is published or otherwise recorded by those projects, even if no catalogue number is assigned; otherwise the field is marked ?.