Meryle Secrest

  Put another way, Jeanne’s genuine pride in one parent had to be shadowed by her awareness of his reputation as dissolute and self-destructive. As for the other, the taint of a suicide compounded the image of a mother who had abandoned one child and died with another. Who were they really? She was doomed to see them through other people’s eyes and in a chaos of contradictory impressions. Nothing was certain for someone who had compelling needs for a faith she could depend upon. She found that certainty in Communism, with its convictions about the absolute betterment of mankind and the birth of an idyllic new order. “She deeply believed in this. We all did, for a time,” said Dominique Desanti. It was a short step from belief in a better world to an active role in the Résistance. And if she was looking for a parental figure she found it in the unlikely person of Valdemar “Valdi” Nechtschein, alias Victor Leduc, alias any number of other identities with false papers. He was nothing much to look at: short, fat, soon bald, and with a pair of the coldest blue eyes in the world. Born in Berlin in 1911 of Russian Jewish revolutionaries who emigrated to Paris, Valdi coupled high intelligence and erudition with a ferocious distrust of all authority, a sense of mission, and an infinite capacity to deceive.

  Jean-Pierre Vernant, who wrote the preface to a reissue of Valdi’s memoir about his years as a Resistance fighter, Les Tribulations d’un idéologue, met him in 1935, when he was twenty-four. He recalled that it was something to hear Valdi reciting the poetry of Mallarmé by the hour or discoursing learnedly on philosophy and political theory. (He taught until 1940, when the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy government forced him to resign.) Vernant continued that it was also something to see him in the 1930s, already a Communist, wading into a Paris street fight with fists flying, making up in sheer determination what he lacked in height and build. René Glodek, another companion of the Resistance, described him as a “man of great energy and persistence” who was still lashing out even as he was being loaded into a police wagon. More than once he ended up being so badly battered that he had to be hospitalized. Valdi was famous for going out to do battle in the streets wearing a beret well stuffed with newspapers so as to cushion the blows from the policemen’s batons.

  By the time Jeanne and he met, Valdi had moved to Toulouse and joined Vernant’s underground network. Vernant had formed a successful Resistance cell that continued until the end of the war. All the while he acted as a professor of Greek studies in Toulouse (he never missed a day of teaching) and was never betrayed. Glodek described it as a “secret army” soon joined by Levi and Jeanne, who he thinks knew Vernant in Paris before the war. They were a tight little group of friends united in their hatred of Germans, acting as liaisons between British intelligence and the Maquis—they would arrange, for instance, for parachute drops of weapons and supplies. Vernant wrote, “In the work of the organization as in the midst of a fight, Valdi showed the same tranquil courage, patient tenacity, never defeated, and utter modesty.”

  One can see the attraction for Jeanne of this older man, her senior by eight years, already in a responsible position as editor of an underground newspaper, Action. He was interested in everything: literature, the arts, sciences, philosophy, and the ongoing debate about the future of Marxism. It is fascinating to observe the extent to which she, who never knew her father, chose someone whose inner qualities uncannily resembled his. True, Modigliani, although a Socialist and supporter of Emanuele’s causes, was never politically active. But he and Valdi had the same omnivorous intellectual curiosity, the same love for poetry, the same impulsive ability to jump into the middle of a losing fight, and the same gift for keeping up a false front. Speaking of his Resistance years Valdi wrote, “We were like actors wearing masks,” performing a life-or-death drama in broad daylight before a public that did not know and would not have cared. Modigliani could have said the same.

  Valdi was also married to Hélène and had two young sons, Maxime and Alain. In wartime nothing like that stood in the way of people who were deeply in love. Desanti said that the relationship for Jeanne was “determinant, crucial.” As for Valdi, he wrote, “Her rebellion was full of verve. The exuberance of her intelligence, her vivacity, her frankness and her charm bowled me over. I was seduced. Our union, begun in a moment of common danger, lasted for thirty years.”

  That a life of high adventure is not only exhilarating but can bring out the very best in people is a truism that applied to Jeanne Modigliani in particular during the German occupation of France. François Vitrani, who became one of Valdi’s pupils, called her a “grande Résistante,” i.e., a model of courage and “unbelievable audacity.” She and Valdi shared, not only the constant fear of being captured and tortured, but missions calling for resourcefulness and the ability to improvise. But the organization Vernant put together had mastered the art of creating forged papers that were persuasive enough to rescue Valdi several times. Similar documents were also used to free Jeanne from prison. She was arrested in October 1943 and released in January 1944. Glodek said, “During the liberation of Paris she was in the middle of things and always fearless.” He recalled one day when they—meaning himself, Valdi, and Jeanne—had a rendez-vous on the Left Bank that required them to walk in front of a heavy German field battery, installed behind fortifications on the Place Saint-Michel. At the least sign of fear or haste the suspicious Germans might have opened fire. But Jeanne was magnificent. “She looked the Germans straight in the eye and calmly crossed the square, just like that,” he said.

  Jeanne’s defiance sometimes bordered on recklessness. Jean-Pierre Haillus tells the story about one time, during the German occupation, when she and Valdi happened to enter a restaurant full of members of the Gestapo. Jeanne took in the scene, then ordered from the menu. In a loud voice, she would have some “Résistance soup,” or words to that effect. Valdi kicked her hard under the table and hustled her out of there.

  Les Tribulations d’un idéologue, written in 1984 under his alias of Victor Leduc and recently reprinted, is a fascinating account of this French intellectual’s Communist beliefs and his slow disenchantment as the truth about Stalin’s repressive regime became clear. It was written partly to explain to a new generation how someone like himself, so hard to deceive, could have taken up the cause at great personal risk and continued to believe in its tenets until post-Stalinist revelations made such a belief impossible. At the same time it is a kind of admission that life spent in a clandestine world exacts a high personal price. Being with Jeanne on cloak-and-dagger missions during the war was one thing. Setting up life with Jeanne in a Paris apartment was something else. By 1946 Jeanne had divorced Mario Levi but Valdi had gone back to live with his wife. In his memoir he told the story haltingly, with the kind of understatement one would expect. “After the Liberation my family moved to Paris with me. I had not broken my liaison with Jeanne. I suffered very much in this situation because I was very attached to Hélène, I loved my sons … and we were about to have a baby girl to whom I had given my mother’s name of Olga. But I love Jeanne, by whom I also had a daughter, Anne.” What Valdi did not mention was that both babies were born in the same month, May of 1946.

  Maxime Nechtschein said that during the war he seldom saw his father and when he did Valdi was always on the run. He was often obliged to lie for him, something he did not like at all. His father never talked about Jeanne, politics, his work in the Resistance, or anything personal. He was “not much of a talker.” However, “he was a very good organizer, very passionate, indefatigable but not practical at all. He had a double life. It was ‘la culte du secret.’ ”

  G. E. Modigliani in America, 1935 (image credit 14.5)

  Finally, Valdi moved in with Jeanne. Even then he never talked about her, his son said, and Maxime only met her once or twice. Valdi spent his weekends with Hélène and the children, as if he had been away on some secret mission and returned for a brief holiday. That their father had two other children was something Maxime and his brother did not learn for many years.


  One of the reasons for Valdi’s decision to move in with Jeanne had to do with the state of Anne’s health. When she was only sixteen months old she had a cerebral hemorrhage that left her partially paralyzed, with brain damage. Years of therapy and operations would follow before she was able to lead a normal life. All this was happening in 1947, which would have been a terrible year for Jeanne for another reason: her uncle Emanuele had died. After leaving Switzerland at the end of the war, he and Vera returned to Italy in triumph. But his health was fragile and he died there in October 1947, a few days before his seventy-sixth birthday. No doubt Jeanne felt overwhelmed; in any event, this was when Valdi moved in.

  Ten years later Valdi divorced Hélène and married Jeanne. By then they had a second daughter, Laure, born in 1951. Their father belatedly acknowledged his two illegitimate daughters a year or so before his death in 1993. That would have been in character. Dominique Desanti said, “It is true that the two of them lived only for politics. Militants of that epoch essentially abandoned their children. The best thing was if there was a grandmother on the scene … It was a Bohemian household; they all were. If you wanted to eat, well, you went to a restaurant. Otherwise it was ham and frites or you bought something at a delicatessen. I don’t know if Jeanne ever cooked but I’d be astonished if she did. Of course they were very poor. Communist journalists were very poorly paid, considered working class.”

  A rare photograph of Valdi and Jeanne together, postwar, in the countryside with cat (image credit 14.6)

  Jean-Pierre Haillus agreed. He recalled one time when he was living in Guadeloupe and Valdi arrived there for a conference. They met at the airport. Valdi was in complete sartorial disarray. Everything was unbuttoned and his sole covering above the waist was an undershirt. “A completely Bohemian lifestyle. Jeanne was capable of leaving the house wearing one red shoe and one blue one. It didn’t bother her at all. Possessions didn’t exist for them. If they had a car it needed repair and wouldn’t run. Their apartments were full of old furniture and covered with dust. Books and magazines all over the place.” At home they often walked around in the nude, in a curious repetition of Modigliani’s fondness for disrobing.

  Living with Jeanne meant constant theatrical arguments, “very Italian,” and family crises played out against a chaotic lifestyle in which parents came and went at unpredictable hours. Jeanne was, as it were, all for her husband, with nothing much left for her children, particularly Laure, in an echo of her mother’s attitude. Laure went on to study psychology; her doctoral thesis was the incidence of death among psychotic infants, and also the very rare condition that causes children to mutilate themselves. She is not married and has a daughter, Sarah, now in her twenties. She is unemployed and lives in a working-class quarter of Paris. Haillus believes that Christian Parisot formed a charity and a group of art collectors helps provide for Laure. Her sister Anne, who now lives on a small state pension and is cared for by Haillus, her guardian, does not share in this largesse.

  One of the reasons why Emanuele fought for Jeanne’s legal status had to do with her artistic inheritance. Zborowski and Guillaume had the usual financial arrangement: four-fifths of a work’s sale price went to them and one-fifth to the artist or his heirs. Once an artist died it was axiomatic that prices shot up. But when Gerald Reitlinger, author of The Economics of Taste, visited Zborowski’s quarters on the rue Joseph Bara in 1922, the Modigliani works were still modestly priced. He found portrait heads for sale from fifteen to twenty pounds. Half-length portraits went for more, from fifty to sixty pounds, and “two or three life-sized odalisques,” unframed, sat on the floor for about eighty each. These tantalizing, if brief, descriptions of lifesize works reveal aspects of Modigliani’s oeuvre that have since disappeared. The whole stock “might have been worth” about one thousand pounds, Reitlinger wrote. In 1961, when his book was published, Modigliani’s oeuvre was then worth half a million pounds. Reitlinger added, “No modern painter’s works have advanced so fast.”

  Emanuele could not have known how quickly Modigliani’s works would become valuable but he was concerned enough to safeguard Jeanne’s legal right to royalties and percentages if any were to be had. What was left to inherit, apart from a few drawings and juvenilia? Quite a bit, as it turned out, in the form of consultant’s fees. In France, the artist’s heirs could legally pronounce on a work’s authenticity. The experts might strenuously disagree, but the family had the last word, and that translated into a tidy percentage.

  What was authentic and what was not? Most artists, with an eye on sales, kept a running list of what they did when, and some gave their work an inventory number. Modigliani, that least practical of men, never bothered.

  A further complication, before the advent of reliable color reproductions after World War II, was the matter of making stylistic comparisons. Early catalogs are maddening for their laconic entries of Head of Woman, with no dimensions and usually no photographs either, and if there are, they are of poor quality black-and-white. There was the matter of Modigliani’s distinctive style as well. Michael Findlay, director of Acquavella in New York, said, “Modigliani left a body of highly stylized work, an image, a logo. They may look superficially like his work and may not survive close inspection. Nevertheless for a faker this is a dream come true.”

  Gil Edelson, cofounder in 1960–61 and retired executive director of the Art Dealers Association in New York, believed that Zborowski had hired people to finish Modigliani’s unfinished works and pass them off as originals. Moïse Kisling’s son Jean was sure his father had been one of them. He stated that both artists had often worked on the same canvas and even, occasionally, signed each other’s work for a joke. Art historians have, however, expressed doubts on stylistic grounds. It is true that among the miscellany of paintings and drawings being offered to an increasingly curious public were paintings that have since been identified as fakes. In 1925, the Hôtel Drouot auction house in Paris sold a head and shoulders, titled Young Woman, that was supposedly listed by the respected Ambrogio Ceroni in his catalogue raisonné; the attribution given was false. A few years later René Gimpel noted that the expert on Modigliani for the same auction house of Drouot, a M. Hessel, had bought a Modigliani from his own employer for fifty-five thousand francs. Hessel then showed the painting to Zborowski, who had to tell him that it was not “right.” In other words, a fake. Hessel was furious but in order to safeguard his own reputation there was nothing he could do. Three years after that, in 1932, Jeanne was thirteen and Margherita was in charge of authentications. She wrote to tell Giovanni Scheiwiller, Modigliani’s first biographer, “that the number of fake Modiglianis grows by the day; there must be a factory making them in Paris. The last note of sale made in Paris stated that I had certified a painting called ‘Étude in Tunis.’ The only catch was that poor Dedo was never in Tunis!”

  The British artist John Myatt, one of whose specialties is painting fake Modiglianis (image credit 14.7)

  So just how easy was it to fake a convincing Modigliani? John Myatt had a successful career in Britain as a forger of over two hundred works by Braque, Matisse, Chagall, Giacometti, and other modern masters before being unmasked ten years ago. After serving a prison term Myatt turned his versatile facility into the legitimate business of painting what he calls “genuine fakes.” Myatt said he had seen Modigliani’s work at a touring art show when he was at college in the 1960s. “I can remember standing there and thinking, ‘What a superb line.’ The speed and confidence of the line almost made me shiver.”

  What makes the work seem easy to fake is the fact that Modigliani’s style simplifies facial features and does not articulate anatomical details, such as cheekbones, shoulders, and rib cages. It looks so simple that a child could do it. But on close inspection, the work reveals the brio of a master—Modigliani worked very fast—along with a dramatic energy that was uniquely his. One could reproduce this artist at the height of his powers exactly and still not have caught that animating spirit, that ra
pturous response that makes his work so compelling.

  Given the size of the problem—Modigliani is one of the ten most faked artists in the world, along with Corot, Dalí, van Gogh, Utrillo, and Giorgio de Chirico—the actual paintings themselves have been subjected to remarkably little study. One of the most important was undertaken in Paris almost thirty years ago when the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris launched an exhibition of Modigliani’s work for its twentieth anniversary in 1981. Bernadette Contensou, then conservateur en chef, and Daniel Marchesseau, conservateur, decided they would subject a few doubtful works to a battery of technical tests to see what could be learned. To make sure there could be no question about the validity of the conclusions, the chief investigator would be Madeleine Hours, chief of the research laboratory at the Louvre. They studied several paintings but paid particular attention to three. One was a doubtful portrait in their own museum, La Femme aux yeux bleus in the Dr. Girardin collection, the second, a known fake in the National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and the third, a puzzling portrait of Diego Rivera in a private collection.

  The most interesting discovery followed an investigation of the underpainting, i.e., how the artist prepared his composition. They discovered that details of the face, nose, mouth, and eyes were uniformly drawn in “large and violent” rings of brown paint. These circular brushstrokes were so unvarying that this was a conclusive way to identify Modigliani’s hand. Genuine works always showed this artistic signature; faked works never did. Using this analysis along with other indications made it easy to identify the Diego Rivera portrait as atypical, but genuine, and the French and Scottish portraits as fakes. Most museums, presumably secure about the provenances of their works, or less curious, do not subject them to technical analyses. Gary Tinterow, curator of nineteenth-century and modern paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, told the author that the museum has never subjected its Modiglianis to technical analysis.