Amedeo Modigliani

Paul Guillaume, Paris
Valentine Dudensing Gallery, New York
Maria Martins, London (1963)
Sale: Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, 9^th December 1965, lot 110
Eugene V. Thaw & Co., Inc., New York
Herbert Singer, New York (acquired from the above in December 1967)
Thence by descent

Arthur Pfannstiel, Modigliani, Paris, 1929, catalogued p. 8
Arthur Pfannstiel, Modigliani et son oeuvre, Paris, 1956, no. 50, catalogued p. 70
Leone Piccioni & Ambrogio Ceroni, Tout l'oeuvre peint de Modigliani, Paris, 1972, no. 90, illustrated p. 92
Osvaldo Patani, Amedeo Modigliani. Catalogo generale, dipinti, Milan, 1991, no. 93, illustrated p. 113

Painted in 1915, Portrait du peintre Rouveyre is a powerful example of Modigliani's portraiture. It was executed during a pivotal period in the artist's career, while he was living and working in a small studio in Montparnasse (fig. 1). He moved from Montmartre to Montparnasse in late 1908 or early 1909, and his output between 1913 and 1916 consisted primarily of portraits of people from his artistic milieu there. Having painted a number of his fellow artists including Picasso, Gris (fig. 2), Kisling and Lipchitz, writers such as Max Jacob (fig. 3), and art dealers Paul Guillaume and Léopold Zborowski, Modigliani created a chronicle of the artistic circles of Montparnasse. In the first two decades of the twentieth century this part of Paris became synonymous with the avant-garde artistic community that developed there, which included a large number of foreigners. With his Italian-Jewish origin and his culturally rich and diverse sources of inspiration, Modigliani became the quintessential figure of this cosmopolitan community, whose members he immortalised in numerous portraits.

Werner Schmalenbach observed this documentary quality of Modigliani's portraiture: 'They are unequivocally portraits and, contrary to all the artistic precepts of the age, they possess a documentary value. Even a portrait such as that of Max Jacob, for all its formalization and stylization, is still a likeness - incontestably so, since it is actually based on a photograph. At the same time, however, the sitter's individuality is reduced to the extent that the stylization creates the effect of a mask. This brings African masks to mind, but here there is nothing alien, mysterious or demonic about the mask; it masks nothing. On the contrary, the sitter has sacrificed to the form some of his individuality, his emotions, his affective life, just as the painter, for his part, keeps emotion well away from that form. He looks at his fellow man with great coolness. The warmth of the painting lies solely in its colour. This combination of cool detachment with painterly warmth lends the painting - like many other works by this artist – its own specific temperature'' (W. Schmalenbach, Amedeo Modigliani: Paintings, Sculptures, Drawings, Munich, 1990, p. 35).

The sitter of the present work is André Rouveyre (1896-1962), a well known figure in the Parisian artistic circles of this period. Rouveyre had a career that combined both the visual and literary arts, and was renowned for his witty caricatures, many of which were published in Parisian satirical journals at the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as for his satirical writings. He was a close friend of Modigliani as well as of Guillaume Apollinaire and Henri Matisse, with whom he maintained a long and intense correspondence, and who also painted his portrait.

Modigliani rendered Rouveyre's facial features with a strong sense of line and contour, accentuating the linearity of the sitter's jaw, sharp nose, eyebrows and hairline. This linear, geometricised style demonstrates the important influence of African and oriental masks on Modigliani, an effect that is further emphasised by the blank, hollowed out eyes of the figure. Discussing Modigliani's portraits from this period, Werner Schmalenbach wrote: 'Gradually, the conspicuous formalism of Modigliani's art gave way to a more relaxed naturalness. The portraits, which now more frequently showed the upper half of the body and the arms, were set free from the formal constraints in which, paradoxically, his formal freedom and self-confidence had hitherto manifested themselves. It was these formal manipulations, transcending the depiction of the person, that had given the portraits of 1915 and 1916 their high aesthetic charm' (ibid., p. 39).

The first owner of the present work was Paul Guillaume, the most prominent Parisian avant-garde dealer during the First World War. Modigliani was introduced to Guillaume in 1914 by his friend, the poet Max Jacob and, having started to buy his paintings in the same year, Guillaume became the artist's first dealer, until Léopold Zborowski took over in 1916. Modigliani executed several portraits of both his dealer Guillaume and his friend Jacob.