Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard,
Patron of the Avant-Garde
A Special Exhibition Review
About the show:
The title of the excellent special exhibition Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde at the Art Institute of Chicago is misleading because the focus of the show is not on the ensemble of major paintings exhibited, but rather on Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), the groundbreaking art dealer who brought Modernism to the public eye. That having been said, the show is a rare visual chronicle of the life of a visionary and astute businessman who purchased paintings for pleasure as well as for speculation. Vollard's aesthetic sensibility, matched by an aggressive boldness, enabled him to rescue a number of avant-garde artists from potential future obscurity.
Born on the small French island of La Réunion, Vollard came to Paris to study law. His attention, however, quickly drifted into the fringes of the Parisian bohemia. With little finances, few contacts and limited experience, he opened a modest gallery exhibiting Édouard Manet's late drawings and paintings. This venture introduced him to other Impressionists (Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir) and later to a group of artists called the Nabis (which included Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard). Another rare establishment that enabled one to view the rare art was Père Tanguy's paint shop. There Vollard had a major epiphany, for hanging on the wall accompanying works by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin was a painting by Paul Cézanne. Recognizing the new direction that art was taking, Vollard organized a retrospective for Cézanne that launched his career.
Cézanne early recognized the limitations of the Impressionists in their adherence to "honoring the eye" and reacted by constructing a new artistic vocabulary that synthesized reality and abstraction, the backbone of early Modernism. He also revitalized the classical concept of the nude. In 1899, Henri Matisse purchased Cézanne's small painting called Three Bathers (1879-82) from Vollard; it remained with him for three decades as a teaching model. The work's significance lies in its demotion of the nude to an earthbound status that would eventually reach the peak of its final metamorphosis in Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907).
Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906)
Three Bathers, 1879-82
Oil on canvas
21 7/16 x 20 5/16 in. (55 x 52 cm)
Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris
© Photothèque des Musees de la Ville de Paris/Pierrain
A comparison of two portraits of Vollard in this exhibition is most instructive. Unfortunately, Cézanne's painting is damaged due to excessive varnish, making it difficult to study its structural modulation. Its dynamic yet subtle surface is unified by a monochromatic palette of mauve and brown which is energized by the textual polyphony of the artist's brushstrokes. Clarification of the sitter is achieved by depicting Vollard simultaneously from a number of informative views. By comparison, Picasso almost completely dissolved Vollard into the painting's landscape. Here abstraction triumphs over reality.
L: Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906)
Ambroise Vollard, 1899
Oil on canvas
39 3/4 x 31 7/8 in. (101 x 81 cm)
Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris
© Photothèque des Musées de la Ville de Paris/Pierrain
R: Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)
Ambroise Vollard, 1910
Oil on canvas
36 3/8 x 26 in. (93 x 66 cm)
© Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow
© 2006 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York
This exhibition's collection of works by Gauguin is most impressive. An archetypal dropout, he left the world of high finance and bourgeois security to begin a career in painting. Part-Peruvian, he soon began to search for his primitive roots in Brittany and continued his mission in exotic Tahiti. In the provocative Spirits of the Dead Watching (1892), Gauguin chipped below the surface, revealing the psychological fears of an adolescent girl at the moment of her sexual awakening and the realization of her own mortality. Included in the show are some woodcuts, decorative pots and stoneware by the artist. The Nightmare (ca. 1899-1900) and Crouching Tahitian Woman (1899) are two startling drawings that give the viewer the opportunity to witness Gauguin's creative process in his innovative technique of transfer drawing.
Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903)
Manao tupapau (Spirit of the
Dead Watching), 1892
Oil on burlap mounted on canvas
28 1/2 x 36 3/8 in. (72.4 x 92.4 cm)
A. Conger Goodyear Collection, 1965
1965:1
© Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
One of the exhibition's triumphs is Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going? (1898). At that time, ill and destitute, Gauguin thought of this frieze of life as his last testimony before his aborted suicide attempt. The subject of this hieratic composition, of figures locked in arrested motion, remains elusive. Any literal interpretation, Gauguin wrote, would rob the painting of its magic, for it is only through the power of suggestion that one could experience the "mysterious centers of thought." Gauguin elevated color to the status of music. And like music, the frieze, painted in sultry harmonies of blue, green and violet against yellow and orange, vibrates with the clangs of an Oriental chant. This liberation of color further erupted in the Fauve period in a blaze of chromatic energy as demonstrated in the paintings of Henri Matisse, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. Because of its high voltage, Fauvism burned itself out within a few years, but color was never again dismissed.
Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903)
Where Do We Come From? What
Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897-98
Oil on canvas
54 3/4 x 147 1/2 in. (139.1 x 374.6 cm)
Tompkins Collection: Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund
36.270
© Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
In one section of the show, there's an assemblage of prints and books published by Vollard. Included is a charming film of the aged Pierre-Auguste Renoir, afflicted with arthritis and a paintbrush strapped to his wrist, smoking a cigarette in the presence of Vollard.
The exhibition concludes with works by Pablo Picasso, who began to exhibit his paintings when he was 19 years of age. Most of his paintings in this presentation are from Picasso's early Cabaret, Blue and Rose periods, including a few Cubist canvases. In 1938, Vollard commissioned the artist to create an assemblage of prints. The cache of 100 works on paper is displayed in salon style and is an amazing study in printmaking.
The importance of Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde is not only in the assemblage of great paintings made available to the public through the sensitivity of one man. The show reconstructs visually for the viewer the process of dematerialization of the subject matter that took place at the time, having climaxed in the self-sufficiency of form and color as the new subject of art in the Twentieth Century.
Click here for a gallery of additional works of art in the special exhibition.
About the catalogue:
Rabinow, Rebecca, Douglas W. Druick, Ann Dumas,
Gloria Groom, Anne Roquebert and Gary Tinterow.
Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron
of the Avant-Garde (exh. cat.).
New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006.
Intelligently describes the career of Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939) and how he selectively promoted the careers of avant-garde artists at the dawn of Modernism in 450 pages with 350 illustrations (250 in rich color) and a detailed bibliography.
For further reading:
Bailey, Colin B. Renoir's Portraits:
Impressions of an Age (exh. cat.).
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Cachin, Françoise, et. al. Cézanne (exh. cat.).
Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1996.
Cowling, Elizabeth, et al. Matisse/Picasso (exh. cat.).
New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002.
Shackleford, George T. M. and Claire Frèche-Thory.
Gauguin Tahiti (exh. cat.).
Boston: Museum of Fine Arts Publications, 2004.
Tinterow, Gary. Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste
for Spanish Painting (exh. cat.).
New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003.
"Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde" is on view from February 17 through May 12, 2007 at the Art Institute of Chicago (Telephone: 312-443-3600; Website). The museum is open Monday through Wednesday 10:30 AM to 5:00 PM, Thursday 10:30 AM to 8:00 PM, Friday 10:30 AM to 5:00 PM and Saturday and Sunday 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM. General admission tickets are $15.00 per person.
"Cézanne to Picasso..." was previously on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York from September 14, 2006 to January 7, 2007, and travels next to the Musée d'Orsay, Paris from June 11 through September 16, 2007.
