Inside the Making of the Landmark Modigliani Catalogue Raisonné

On April 30, Pace Gallery in New York will host a day-long symposium centering on new ways of thinking about how these publications can be produced and utilized, offering perspectives and insights from scholars and experts in several fields. Next year, Pace will present a major exhibition of Modigliani’s work, organized in collaboration with the Institut Restellini, in New York.

The conversation that follows has been edited and condensed.

Marc Restellini:

My background with Modigliani goes back many years. I was born into a family that knew Léopold Zborowski, Modigliani’s dealer and my grandfather’s dealer. My grandfather, Isaac Antcher, was a painter of the School of Paris. He never knew Modigliani, but he was very close with Jonas Netter, who collected my grandfather’s work and was also one of the biggest collectors of Modigliani in history—he had around 60 paintings by Modigliani. The friendship between the Antcher and Netter families has persisted for three generations, and I have remained extremely close to the Netter descendants. Currently, I’m the curator of the Netter collection, structured as a foundation, which is also the largest collection of Isaac Antcher’s paintings.

My first physical contact with Modigliani occurred when I was six or seven years old in Netter’s house. I touched a painting, and I remember my mother told me, “Don’t touch! It’s very expensive.” I was shy and didn’t understand what the work was. Years later, when I was studying at the Sorbonne University, I had a professor who knew my family’s background and encouraged me to study Modern art and the School of Paris. This was complicated because, to me, a historian needs to be objective and can’t have this kind of family interest. I was fixated on this problem, and for a long time it felt impossible. But ultimately, I began my research on the School of Paris at university, and I wrote my master’s thesis specifically on Zborowski and the painters he collected.

I organized my first exhibition of works by Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and my grandfather in 1989. A few years later, in 1992, I made an exhibition of more than 55 paintings by Modigliani at the Tobu Museum in Japan. This was when I really started my work with Modigliani.

When I pursued my PhD in the 1990s, I started using the computer for art historical research. I got a microcomputer with dBase III and created a database and methodology that could support the production of a catalogue raisonné. I was hired to work on uniting computers, research, and art history as a lecturer at the Sorbonne.

Marc Glimcher:

It’s very hard for people to understand the role of technology and the way we thought about art and research back in the 1990s. In 1994, Pace got dBase III as well, and we started to design a system to hold the inventory and history of the gallery. Now it seems like crude, old technology, but at the time it was the beginning of the basic ideas of scientific methodology for humanities research. It felt like the first possibility of objective truth coming into our world, which was very radical. Before then, truth was defined by people—this expert or that expert, this opinion or that opinion. Computers challenged that. It's amazing to hear about how technology shaped your research and your work with Modigliani. Can you speak more about the beginnings of your work on the catalogue raisonné?

MR: I was put in contact with Daniel Wildenstein, the dealer and art historian, in the mid-1990s and he encouraged me a lot to start the catalogue raisonné. He suggested that I use his Institute as a workspace and as support to the project. He knew all about the Modigliani exhibition I had organized in Japan and my strong connection with the Netter family. I was a little reluctant because I knew how difficult it would be—I wanted to create a catalogue raisonné with the least outside intervention, the least subjectivity, as possible. Only with facts, information, and scientific results. I wanted to remove and erase the expert, which was a real paradox at that time.

I started working on provenance, style, and scientific analysis. I asked Daniel Wildenstein to invest in an infrared camera and tools for pigment analysis, and he agreed. We used a control group of pigment samples from paintings in major Modigliani collections—including that of Jonas Netter and Paul Alexandre, who were two of the earliest collectors of the artist’s work.

I created a methodology based on three pillars: scientific analysis, stylistic comparisons, and provenance research. With this documentation, we decided whether a painting would be included in the catalogue raisonné or not.

MG: That’s an amazing story. I think it’s worth noting a few of these points that are essential not only to the historical record and legacy of Modigliani but also to the future of art historical research. It’s interesting that this idea of eliminating the expert, eliminating subjectivity, is so recent in our world. It’s a very new idea, but, of course, it’s an idea from the Enlightenment. And then, centuries later, we get the principle of the null hypothesis—we make a hypothesis and then we attempt to disprove it.

We’re now seeing this penetrate the world of catalogues raisonnés. By and large, catalogues raisonnés include essays about artists and some brief conversation about the making of the publication, but they are essentially tantamount to scientific journal papers with no methodology section, which would never be accepted in any other field. We have catalogue raisonné after catalogue raisonné that present us with a set of facts that we are to take as truth, but with no methodology. It gets lost in a kind of tradition instead of an analysis, or an adherence to the null hypothesis. That’s not how we do science, nor how we do rigorous humanities research. For this to be acceptable, there must be results, and there must be a conclusion that can be tested and verified.

Could you talk a little bit about how you came to the decision to create volume one of this book, which gives a full explanation of your methodology?

Join us for A Symposium Celebrating the Release of the Landmark Amedeo Modigliani Catalogue Raisonné by Institut Restellini

Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, 7th floor

Thursday, April 30, 2026 | 9:30am-5pm