Word: vollard
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These expats were keen to soak up the local culture, but unlike most Florentines, their interests extended beyond city and national boundaries. Fabbri and Loeser became clients of Ambroise Vollard, the foremost art dealer of the time, based in Paris, and one of the few contemporary champions of Cézanne. The painter, who would be recognized after his death as one of the fathers of modern painting, the direct inspiration for Cubism and Fauvism, spent his twilight years living in isolation in Aix-en-Provence, France, scorned by critics and ignored by the public. Outside attention, when it came...
Such rebuffs did not cool the Americans' ardor for Cézanne's work, and by 1913 they had between them amassed the largest collection of Cézannes outside Russia (several of Vollard's best clients were Russian industrialists). Neither man's collection would remain intact. Fabbri plowed much of his fortune into building a Romanesque church in an earthquake-ravaged town. By 1928, he had to sell 13 Cézannes to finance a property deal. In the same year, Loeser died, leaving eight paintings to the White House...
...could be that no more new dealers of the traditional sort will actually come to power, so that the tradition that stretched from Ambroise Vollard to Leo Castelli and Paula Cooper will be lost. Big dealers will have their tame resident critics, as princes their poetasters. There will no longer be much distinction between collectors and dealers, and the collector-as-amateur will be extinct. On the boards of many museums, a new breed of broker, the collector-dealer-trus tee, will hold sway. And art will keep draining out of America toward Japan and Europe. Welcome to the future...
...Muslims (what about those scenes of false prophets in hell with Muhammad?) or, for that matter, to atheists offended by the intrusion of religious propaganda into a museum. A radical feminist could plausibly argue that her "nonreligious" beliefs were offended by the sexism of Rubens' nudes or Picasso's Vollard Suite. Doubtless a fire worshiper could claim that the presence of extinguishers in a theater was repugnant...
...river gods, nymphs, Minotaurs and classical heads that fill the Vollard suite and spill over into innumerable drawings and gouaches of the 1930s are not the conventional decor of antiquity. They are more like emblems of autobiography, acts of passionate self-identification. Picasso's Minotaur, now young and self-regarding, fresh as a Narcissus with horns, now bowed under the bison-like weight of his own grizzled head, is Picasso himself. His Mediterranean images are the last appearance, in serious art, of the symbols of that once Arcadian coast...