Through June 5, 2016, in collaboration with the Réunion des musées nationaux (RMN), the Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art (LaM) in northern France, is presenting an exceptional retrospective of the work of Amedeo Modigliani.

An Italian painter and sculptor, Modigliani had a brief but fertile career. The museum holds one of the finest French public collections of the famous artist from Montparnasse: no fewer than 6 paintings, 8 drawings, and a rare sculpture in marble, assembled by Roger Dutilleul and Jean Masurel, founders of the LaM’s collection of modern art. Roger Dutilleul was a passionate collector who met Modigliani in 1918, less than two years before the artist’s untimely death. As an homage to that encounter, the LaM orchestrated an exhibition that brings together this exceptional collection, along with numerous loans.

Visitors are offered a choice of exciting approaches to the pieces, such as the discovery of the artist’s dialogue with antique and non-Western sculpture and his practice of portraiture, another central dimension in his work, which occupy a prominent position in the exhibition layout. The exhibition also offers an opportunity to get a better idea of the singular relationship that links Modigliani’s work and the collector Roger Dutilleul.

Some one hundred of the artist’s paintings and drawings are on display, alongside works by Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz, Chaïm Soutine, Moïse Kisling, Henri Laurens and André Derain, among others.

After Lille, the exhibition will travel to the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest in late June and to the Ateneum in Helsinki next October.