Musée de l'Orangerie devotes a retrospective to Modigliani and his relationship with his merchant

From September 20, 2023 to January 15, 2024, the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris is dedicating a retrospective exhibition, entitled Amedeo Modigliani. Un peintre et son marchand, to Leghorn painter Amedeo Modigliani, curated by Cécile Girardeau and Simonetta Fraquelli.

The exhibition aims to focus on the relationship between the artist and his dealer, Paul Guillaume. Modigliani had come to Paris in 1906 as a painter, but after meeting Constantin BrâncuÈ™i he devoted himself almost exclusively to sculpture until 1914. Then until the year of his death, 1920, he returned to painting again, focusing on the human figure. It was Guillaume himself who encouraged him in this direction: he rented him a studio in Montmartre, made his paintings known in Parisian artistic and literary circles, and bought and collected his works.

The exhibition thus aims to restore one of the emblematic moments in Modigliani’s life, namely when Guillaume became his dealer, and to analyze how the relationship between the two can shed light on the artist’s career. Modigliani immortalized his gallerist in a series of portraits: he made as many as four between 1915 and 1916. The first of them, preserved at the Musée de l’Orangerie, expresses the privileged relationship between the dealer and the artist.

In addition to the five Modigliani paintings preserved today at the Musée de l’Orangerie, more than one hundred paintings as well as fifty drawings and ten sculptures by the artist would have passed into the hands of the merchant.

The exhibition will evoke, through the selection of emblematic works, the diverse characteristics of this corpus by exploring the links between the painter and his merchant in the Parisian artistic and literary context of the 1910s, as well as Guillaume’s role in the dissemination of Modigliani’s work on the art market in both France and the United States in the 1920s.

Image: Amedeo Modigliani, Elvira Seated, Leaning on a Table (1919; oil on canvas, 92.7 x 60.5 cm; Saint-Louis, Saint Louis Art Museum © Saint Louis Art Museum

Musée de l'Orangerie devotes a retrospective to Modigliani and his relationship with his merchant

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