The Modigliani Affair

Description

This documentary reconstructs the sequence of events that began when three sculpted heads surfaced from the water in Livorno in the summer of 1984. It follows how those objects were authenticated as Modigliani and then revealed to be fakes, mapping the hoax's escalation, the art world's public reactions and the procedural confusion that followed. The film was released in 2026. A second strand examines the human and institutional fallout: a death connected to the affair whose circumstances were never fully explained, the competing accounts that circulated afterward, and the unresolved inquiries that turned the episode into one of the most notorious scandals in art history. The film records archival traces and testimony to show how fraud, publicity and unanswered questions became entwined.