Ambroise Vollard
Encyclopedia
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...
, Aristide Maillol
Aristide Maillol
Aristide Maillol or Aristides Maillol was a French Catalan sculptor and painter.-Biography:...
, Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to...
, Louis Valtat
Louis Valtat
Louis Valtat[p] was a French painter associated with the Fauves.Valtat is noted as a key link that accounts for the stylistic transition in painting from Monet to Matisse....
, Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, André Derain
André Derain
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.-Early years:...
, Georges Rouault
Georges Rouault
Georges Henri Rouault[p] was a French Fauvist and Expressionist painter, and printmaker in lithography and etching.-Childhood and education:Rouault was born in Paris into a poor family...
, Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...
and Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh , and used Brabant dialect in his writing; it is therefore likely that he himself pronounced his name with a Brabant accent: , with a voiced V and palatalized G and gh. In France, where much of his work was produced, it is...
. He is also well-known as an avid art collector and publisher.
Background
Born and raised in a French colony, after his maturaMatura
Matura or a similar term is the common name for the high-school leaving exam or "maturity exam" in various countries, including Albania, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia,...
(final exams) in La Réunion
La Reunion
La Reunion may refer to:* La Reunion , a communal settlement near present-day Dallas, Texas*La Réunion, Lot-et-Garonne, a town in the Lot-et-Garonne department of France*Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar...
, he went to study jurisprudence
Jurisprudence
Jurisprudence is the theory and philosophy of law. Scholars of jurisprudence, or legal theorists , hope to obtain a deeper understanding of the nature of law, of legal reasoning, legal systems and of legal institutions...
in France, for a while in Montpellier
Montpellier
-Neighbourhoods:Since 2001, Montpellier has been divided into seven official neighbourhoods, themselves divided into sub-neighbourhoods. Each of them possesses a neighbourhood council....
, then at the École de droit in Paris, where he received his degree in 1888.
Meanwhile, Vollard himself converted into an "amateur-merchant", and in 1893, he established his own art gallery, at Rue Laffitte, then the center of the Parisian market for contemporary art. There Vollard mounted his first major exhibitions: Manet
Manet
-MANET as an abbreviation:*MANET is a mobile ad hoc network, a self-configuring mobile wireless network.*MANET database or Molecular Ancestry Network, bioinformatics database-People with the surname Manet:*Édouard Manet, a 19th-century French painter....
and others were followed by Gauguin and Van Gogh (4 – 30 June 1895); for Gabriel Mourey, French correspondent of The Studio in Paris, this was simply a matter of "Scylla and Charybdis
Scylla and Charybdis
Being between Scylla and Charybdis is an idiom deriving from Greek mythology. Several other idioms, such as "on the horns of a dilemma", "between the devil and the deep blue sea", and "between a rock and a hard place" express the same meaning of "having to choose between two evils".-The myth and...
".
Much has been made of his physical appearance and countenance (grimly described as a "large, gruff, boorish fellow" with "downcast eyes..."); however, he was also a very shrewd businessman who made a fortune with the "buy low, sell high" mantra. His clients included Albert C. Barnes
Albert C. Barnes
Albert Coombs Barnes was an American chemist and art collector. With the fortune made from the development of the antiseptic, anti-blindness drug Argyrol, he founded the Barnes Foundation, an educational institution based on his private collection of art...
, Henry Osborne Havemeyer, Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
and her brother, Leo Stein
Leo Stein
Leo Stein was an American art collector and critic. He was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the older brother of Gertrude Stein. He became an influential promoter of 20th-century paintings. Beginning in 1892, he studied at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for two years. The...
.
Vollard would later write biographies on Cézanne, Degas, and Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to...
. Vollard was killed in July 1939, at the age of 73, on his way to Paris, when his chauffer-driven car skidded off the road. Vollard died without direct heirs. Much of the art was left to extended family and close friends, although a significant number of works apparently were sold, dispersed, or disappeared during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
.
After his death, 141 paintings and prints were put in a Societe Generale Paris branch vault by his Yugoslav assistant, Erich Slomovic. Slomovic was killed in Yugoslavia in train accident in 1942. The paintings were discovered in 1979 when the bank was allowed to open the vault to recover unpaid storage fees. A legal dispute by the heirs of both men delayed their resale which took place in 2010.
Literature
- Rudolf Koella & Rudolf Velhagen (ed.): Renoir, Cézanne, Picasso und ihr Galerist Ambroise Vollard, Exh. Museum Langmatt, Baden (CH) & Musée Jenisch, Vevey (CH), 2006 ISBN 3-89904-203-4 (German version) / French version forthcoming; the essential contributions by Jonathan Pascoe Pratt, London
- Sales catalogue Trésors du Coffre Vollard (Treasures from the Vollard Safe) - Sotheby's, Paris 2010
External links
- Guardian Unlimited: Portrait of the Week November 30, 2002 article
- Ambroise Vollard: Man for his Times! SohoArt mini-biography
- Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant Garde at www.artic.eduChicago Art Institute
- The Art World's Ultimate Wheeler-Dealer "CBS Sunday Morning"
- artnet "Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of The Avant-Garde"
- Miscellaneous papers regarding Ambroise Vollard, 1890-1939. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California. Collection comprises original and photocopied letters and records related to the art dealer Ambroise Vollard and the artists he represented.