Modi.

On what grounds did Modigliani deserve his place of honor? Little, in the eyes of leading art historians of the period. Modigliani is absent from Meyer Shapiro’s authoritative survey, Modern Art. Kenneth Clark’s classic study The Nude ignores him. The Visual Arts: A History, by the eminent Hugh Honour and John Fleming, makes no mention of him. Collective silence testifies to the formulaic monotony of an artist who never equaled his sources: Cézanne, Picasso, and Brancusi. Secrest notes the omissions but rushes to attribute them to the prodigious number of forgeries on the market. The politics of fakes distracts from the issue of Modigliani’s status as a minor modernist. Yes, Modigliani is one of the most counterfeited modern artists. Like Willie Sutton, forgers go where the money is. (“Nude Sitting on a Sofa” sold at Sotheby’s last November for $68.9 million.) The huge number of fraudulent Modiglianis has held up publication of the catalogue raisonné for nearly a decade. But that bears on the market, not the life. (The single plum in this book is Gary Tinterow’s admission that the Metropolitan Museum has never risked having its Modiglianis subjected to forensic analysis.) The high-stakes minefield of attribution is outside a biographer’s domain, but Secrest plays referee, eager to discredit Jeanne Modigliani (her drinking, her bad haircut) and Restellini’s rivals in judgment. Her presumption of tubercular intrigue is less plausible than Carol Mann’s insight into her subject’s slow suicide: “There must have been a moment when Modigliani saw with great clarity the dead-end his art was heading for, and it must have terrified him.”

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Secrest's book is here, but, do yourself a favor ... look no further than here.