Paul Guillaume represented Amedeo Modigliani for roughly two years, from around 1914 to 1916, before Léopold Zborowski took over as the artist's main dealer^[1]. Guillaume was young for the role, still building his reputation, and Modigliani was far from an easy artist to sell: unstable, often ill, and working in a style that did not fit comfortably into the fashionable movements of the day. The arrangement did not last, but it placed Guillaume inside the same circle of painters, dealers and collectors that would define his career for the next two decades.

Guillaume's lasting significance had little to do with Modigliani specifically. In 1917 an exhibition at his Paris gallery marked what is considered the official recognition of African sculpture inside the Parisian art market, following earlier, smaller shows in Germany and New York^[2]. Before this point, serious collectors of African sculpture were few, and Guillaume was consistently named among the handful who mattered, alongside Félix Fénéon, Frank Haviland and Sergei Shchukin^[2]. Two years later, in 1919, a further exhibition at the Devambez Gallery drew crowds on a scale nobody had previously seen for this material. Guillaume's gallery sat at the centre of both moments.

Among Guillaume's clients was the American collector Albert Barnes, who had begun buying European avant-garde painting after a trip to Paris in 1912 and soon extended his interest to African sculpture, buying directly from Guillaume^[3]. Barnes used this material to found the Barnes Foundation in 1922, intending the collection to serve an educational purpose: demonstrating, through formal quality alone, that African sculpture belonged alongside the Greek and Egyptian objects held in major museums^[3]. Guillaume's Paris gallery was, in effect, one of the sources that made Barnes's American collection possible.