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‘T here is no such thing as abstract or figurative, there is just good painting’, Dutilleul is known to have said. It was surely this attitude that led him to assemble a remarkable collection of Modern Art. As one of the first significant collectors of the 20th-century European avant-garde, Dutilleul played an essential role in supporting the creative development of some of the most daring artists in Paris, including Léger, Picasso, Braque, Modigliani and Miró.
‘Though the painters in his collection were in their own time misunderstood and rejected, Dutilleul himself was certain that their names would go down in history.’
Starting in 1904, his collecting activity spanned the first half of the 20th century. When Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s gallery first opened in Paris in 1907, Dutilleul was its first French client, and he later acquired both the present canvases by Léger from Kahnweiler’s Galerie Louise Leiris. Dutilleul started his collection with works by Fauve painters including Braque, Derain, Vlaminck and Van Dongen, followed by a wealth of Cubist works by Picasso, Braque and Léger. He eventually assembled one of the most significant collections of Cubism of his time, comprised of more than a hundred works by the main proponents of the movement, whose works adorned the walls of his apartment. Dutilleul is also famous as a collector of Modigliani: over the course of his life a total of 55 of Modigliani’s paintings and works on paper passed through his hands.
Discussing Dutilleul’s role in the development of Modernist art in the early 20th century, Francis Berthier wrote: ‘In a 1955 interview, the great dealer Kahnweiler said that, during the heroic period of Cubism, “a gallery, painters and the owner of the gallery could survive on very few collectors, three or four; true, these were loyal friends. First and foremost, in France, Roger Dutilleul, who was from the very outset passionate about collecting”. Collectors like Roger Dutilleul were thus essential to the development of avant-garde art. At that point, the avant-garde was quite unrecognized. Painters hailed some decades later as the most representative and important artists of their day were at the time completely unknown’ (F. Bertier in Modigliani: The Melancholy Angel).
As is typical of an avid collector, Dutilleul would periodically edit and refresh his holdings, either selling or trading his works for others that he admired. Nature morte and Le buste by Fernand Léger, however, were part of a select group that Dutilleul kept in his private collection all his life. After his death a large part of his collection was donated by Dutilleul’s family to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Lille in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, constructed specifically to house Dutilleul’s collection and paying homage to the collector’s native region in Northern France.
