Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde
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Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906). Three Bathers (1879-82). Oil on canvas. 55 x 52 cm (21 7/16 x 20 5/16 in.). Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris. © Photothèque des Musées de la Ville de Paris/Pierrain. |
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Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906). Ambroise Vollard (1899). Oil on canvas. 101 x 81 cm (39 3/4 x 31 7/8 in.). Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris. © Photothèque des Musées de la Ville de Paris/Pierrain. |
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| Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973). Ambroise Vollard (1910). Oil on canvas. 93 x 66 cm (36 3/8 x 26 in.). Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. © 2006 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. |
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| Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903). Manao tupapau (Spirit of the Dead Watching) (1892). Oil on burlap mounted on canvas (72.4 x 92.4 cm) 28 1/2 x 36 3/8 in. © Albright-Knox Art Gallery. |
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| Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903). Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98). Oil on canvas. 139.1 x 374.6 cm (54 3/4 x 147 1/2 in. (139.1 x 374.6 cm). © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. |
By HILDA O’CONNELL-HARRIS
August 15, 2009
The title of the excellent special exhibition Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde was misleading because the show's focus was not on the ensemble of major paintings displayed, but rather on Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), the groundbreaking art dealer who brought Modernism to the public eye. That having been said, the show was a rare visual chronicle of the life of a visionary and astute businessman who purchased paintings for pleasure as well as speculation. Vollard's aesthetic sensibility, matched by an aggressive boldness, enabled him to rescue a number of avant-garde artists from potential future obscurity.
Ambroise Vollard
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 that exhibited Edouard Manet's late drawings and paintings. This venture introduced him to other Impressionists (Edgas Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir) and later to a group of artists called the Nabis (which included Pierre Bonnard and Edouard 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. Upon recognizing the new direction that art was taking, Vollard organized a retrospective for Cézanne that launched his career.
Paul Cézanne
Cézanne early understood 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).
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 was 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.
Paul Gauguin
The exhibition's display of works by Gauguin was 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 were some woodcuts, decorative pots and stoneware by the artist. The Nightmare (ca. 1899-1900) and Crouching Tahitian Woman (1899) were two startling drawings that gave the viewer the opportunity to witness Gauguin's creative process in his innovative technique of transfer drawing.
One of the exhibition's triumphs was 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 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.
In one section of the show, there was an assemblage of prints and books published by Vollard. Included was a charming film of the aged Renoir, afflicted with arthritis and a paintbrush strapped to his wrist, smoking a cigarette in the presence of Vollard.
The exhibition concluded with works by Pablo Picasso, who began to exhibit his paintings when he was 19 years of age. Most of his works in this presentation were 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 was displayed in salon style, an amazing study in printmaking.
The importance of Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde was not only in the assemblage of great paintings made available to the public through the sensitivity of one man. The exhibition reconstructed 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 20th Century.
"Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde" was an overwhelmingly popular exhibition on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musée d’Orsay from 2006 through 2007.
Source
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.