In the art world, reputation is everything. It can elevate a painting’s value by millions, seal the legacy of an artist, or — even more dangerously — legitimize a lie. That’s exactly what happened when Kenneth Wayne, once considered a leading expert on Amedeo Modigliani, became the face of one of the most unsettling forgery scandals in modern art history.

How One Man’s Reputation Helped Sell a Lie The Kenneth Wayne Modigliani Disaster

For years, Kenneth Wayne was regarded as one of the most respected voices in Modigliani scholarship — an academic with a passion for protecting the legacy of the Italian master. He founded the Modigliani Project, gave lectures across prestigious institutions, and published research that influenced curators, collectors, and galleries worldwide.

Kenneth Wayne Exposed as the Hidden Force Behind One of the Art World’s Biggest Modigliani Forgery Scandals

Kenneth Wayne is an art expert specifically on Amedeo Modigliani’s paintings. With his Modigliani Project he’s soliciting and requests big amounts of money to fraudsters between $200,000 to $1,000,000 to authenticate false paintings and claiming that those are authentic Amedeo Modigliani’s paintings. The fraud is a multimillion dollar scam to auction houses and private collectors. Kenneth Wayne has been doing this scam for several years and publish the false Amedeo Modigliani’s paintings into his catalogue raisonné with a made up report in order to fool collectors and to cover his tracks. To collect fraudulent money he uses several bank accounts based in the UK under different names of people that he trusts and returns the money to him (company and family members) as forgivable loans in order to avoid paying taxes in the USA.

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