Modigliani : Un Peintre Et Son Marchand

Exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, 20 September 2023 - 15 January 2024

When he arrived in Paris in 1906, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) was a painter. His meeting with Brancusi in 1909 was a revelation for him: he took up sculpture and devoted himself almost exclusively to it until 1914, when he met the art dealer Paul Guillaume. The Italian artist's break with this practice was as sudden as it was total: from 1914 until his death in 1920, Modigliani returned to painting, producing a large number of pictures devoted mainly to the human figure.

It was this practice of painting that lay at the heart of the relationship between the artist and the dealer. Over a hundred paintings, as well as around fifty drawings and a dozen sculptures by the artist are thought to have passed through Paul Guillaume's hands. This number reflects both the gallerist's involvement in promoting the artist and his personal taste for his works, which are widely present on the walls of his various flats: portraits of the leading figures of Paris at the time, Max Jacob, André Rouveyre, Jean Cocteau, Moïse Kisling, as well as unknown models, and some very fine sets of portraits of the women who shared the painter's life, Béatrice Hastings and then Jeanne Hébuterne.

Through a selection of emblematic works, this exhibition catalogue analyses the characteristics of Modigliani's body of work, as well as the links between the painter and his dealer in the Parisian artistic and literary context of the 1910s, their shared love of African art, and Paul Guillaume's role in disseminating Modigliani's work on the art market in both France and the United States in the 1920s.

Also available in English