Word: vollard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cluttered gallery on Rue Laffitte in Paris, stacked floor to ceiling with rolled canvases and folios of prints, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse had their first one-man shows. (Cézanne was 53 when Vollard "discovered" him in 1892 by buying five oils at auction for a paltry 900-odd francs.) Buying cheap and selling dear, he got in on the ground floor of Gauguin, Van Gogh, Bonnard, Vuillard, Renoir and Chagall as well. He then ploughed his fortune back into the publication of artists' prints and deluxe editions of texts classical and modern...
...This blessed Vollard has grandiose ambitions," Camille Pissarro remarked in 1896. "He wants to launch himself as a dealer in prints. All the dealers . . . are waging war against him for he is upsetting their petty trade . . . He is a real moth; I am afraid his fate will be the taper's flame!" It was not. If any single publisher can be said to have created the status of the multiple work of art in our century, it is Vollard. To him, the limited-edition print industry today owes its being...
Last week a survey of Vollard's 45 years of work as impresario went on view at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. It is the kind of show that only a museum with the resources of MOMA could bring together-more than 450 prints, books and bronzes, accompanied by a catalogue raisonné by Art Historian Una Johnson, and all assembled by MOMA's director of prints and illustrated books, Riva Castleman...
Secret of Success. Vollard was a bizarre figure: no wonder other dealers saw him as a métèque, an interloper, before they learned to fear him. He arrived in Paris to study law in 1890, coming from the insignificant French colony of Reunion Island. He had black blood in his veins. A vast, slow-moving creature like a sloth-though one of his artists, Dunoyer de Segonzac, nastily compared him to a giant ape hanging in the shop entrance-Vollard cultivated a strategy of immobility. He stroked his cat, pretended to doze, listened and said little...
...bookkeeping was vague, his meanness unpleasant-it was Vollard who kept Gauguin on short rations in Tahiti-and his narcissism immense. "The most beautiful woman who ever lived," said Picasso, "never had her portrait painted, drawn or engraved more often than Vollard-by Cézanne, Renoir, Roussel, Bonnard, Forain, almost everybody in fact. He had the vanity of a woman, that man." But he also had an exquisitely tuned eye and a great deal of patience; the combination enabled Vollard, as publisher, to master the innumerable problems involved in producing major collaborations between artist and text...