The exhibition “Modigliani. The Artist and His Marchand”

Art exhibition

The exhibition “Modigliani. The Artist and His Marchand”. It is dedicated to two of the most prominent characters in Parisian artistic life at the beginning of the last century: the artist Amedeo Modigliani and the art dealer Paul Guillaume. The Parisian Orangerie Museum, which received Guillaume’s fabulously rich inheritance in the 1960s, was naturally appointed as the place for their new meeting, says Kommersant’s correspondent in France Alexey Tarkhanov.

The exhibition at the Orangerie is called “Modigliani. The Artist and His Marchand”. The gaze seems to be focused on the artist; Marchand, the dealer of his art, is, as expected, in the shadows, even without a name. The Italian Jew Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) is known to everyone, replicated in pop culture, endlessly loved, and so shamelessly expensive at auction that he wouldn’t believe it if anyone told him. But the Frenchman Paul Guillaume (1891–1934), who is remembered only by art historians and museum workers, tried for this – during his life and after his early death.

When Guillaume and Modigliani met in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century, everything was the other way around. The French capital already knew a talented self-taught collector, a promoter of new art, whose dealer networks even extended to America, the publisher of the magazine “Art in Paris”, the owner of galleries and apartments furnished with the wealth of the current Orsay Museum. And his Modigliani was a talented young man from Livorno, who came to the light of French (in fact, quite international) art.

If you look closely at the name, everything turns out to be more complex and fair. The phenomenon of “Modigliani” is signed on equal terms by the artist and Marchant, who created it together. And although the poster for the exhibition features a Modiglienne female head, its main exhibit is a tough, loving, but without flattery, portrait of Paul Guillaume.

In the first room there are several of his images created by Modigliani, paintings and drawings, as well as photographs of heroes in the workshop that Marchand rented for the artist. The two are very different. An alcoholic hard worker Modigliani in a work jacket, almost jeans and sneakers, who would not be noticed today in the Tuileries Park. And the dandy Marchand Guillaume in a jacket, tie, shoes and gaiters, with a hat and cane. The point is not at all in the internal difference, they say, one is a creator at heart, the other a trader, but rather in the fact that each of them honestly wears his special clothes. The first is an exemplary wild artist, the second is a secular dandy who should be accepted everywhere where the paintings of the first are bought from him.

In the next room, Modigliani’s sculptures, which are not so often shown, are surprisingly similar to his paintings and graphics. Not so much sculptures in the classic salon sense, but rather drawings on stone. Two influences can be discerned in them. The first is a Parisian friend and teacher, the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, the second is African culture, which became fashionable following the trophies and purchases that poured into Europe. Paul Guillaume was then one of the few who appreciated the potential of this “primitive” or “negro” (as it was then called) art, exhibiting African gods and ritual masks in his gallery next to the works of his Parisian contemporaries.

For the first time, the influence of African artists on Modigliani is so clearly visible. He abandoned sculpture partly due to lung diseases that had plagued him since childhood, but the sculptural images simply turned into painting. His portraits, where lines are so important, are undoubtedly African masks.

And it was Paul Guillaume who brought Modigliani back to painting, who oriented him toward portraits, faces, human figures—what was easily sold. He did not, however, bring the artist to the famous “nudes”, which were then considered pornography, but have now become the hallmark of his art. “Naked” was intercepted, ordered and sold by Modigliani’s new dealer, the Pole Leopold Zborowski, and there is only one “Reclining Nude” from 1917–1918 on display.

In addition to the five paintings that remained in Guillaume’s collection and are stored today in the Orangerie, Marchand sold, judging by the archives, more than a hundred canvases, about fifty drawings and about ten sculptures by Modigliani. He turned out to be among its most productive art dealers and art promoters.

The temporary exhibition “The Artist and His Marchand” has a natural complement: a basement gallery where Guillaume’s collection has been kept since the 1950s – with his portraits by other artists and the treasures he collected: a dozen Matisses and Utrillos, a dozen Picasso, Rousseau, Soutine, van Dongen . This is only a small part of the collection that he dreamed of transferring to France and which eventually became a much more visible monument to Paul Guillaume than the mausoleum in the Passy cemetery in Paris, decorated with a bas-relief of Zadkine.

The story ends with a children’s workshop, in keeping with the current fashion, where primary schoolchildren are taught the best, low-fat way to learn art. How to become Amedeo Modigliani, but without alcohol, tuberculosis and drugs. Although the exhibition suggests: being Modigliani is not everything. The main thing, children, is not to make a mistake with the dealer.