Post-Impressionist art dealer profiled in exhibition

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ART INSTITUTE
OF CHICAGO

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Influence of formidable Parisian dealer Ambroise Vollard on the history of modern art explored in ravishing detail

Cezanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde opens Saturday, February 17, 2007

CHICAGO - Matisse called him a thief.

Gertrude Stein remembered "a huge dark man glooming."

He saved Cezanne's career.

Picasso said he had the "vanity of a woman."

He was Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), one of the most significant dealers and patrons of modern art.

The Art Institute of Chicago is pleased to announce the exhibition Cezanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, which will run from February 17 to May 12, 2007 in the museum's Regenstein Hall.

Vollard [shown in a detail from Paul Cezanne's 1899 Portrait of Ambroise Vollard] was the seminal dealer of the post-impressionist era, having an active hand in the sale, commission, and exhibition of thousands of works of art by such masters of modern art as Cezanne, Picasso, Rouault, and Van Gogh.

He "became the single greatest source, before World War I, for the spread of modernism in Europe and across the Atlantic," according to Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times.

This vast exhibition of more than 250 works - paintings, sculptures, prints, ceramics, and books - also features works by Pierre Bonnard, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, and Edouard Vuillard, among others.

Highlights include paintings from Vollard's landmark 1895 Cezanne exhibition; a never-before-reassembled triptych from his 1896-1997 Van Gogh retrospective; the masterpiece Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? from his 1898 Gauguin exhibition, a work never before seen in the city of Chicago; paintings from Picasso's first French exhibition (1901) and Matisse's first solo exhibition (1904); and three pictures from Andre Derain's London series, painted in 1906- 1907 with Vollard's encouragement and financial backing.

Also on view will be numerous portraits of Vollard by leading artists, among them Cézanne, Bonnard, Renoir, and Picasso.

Many of the works in the exhibition are from the Art Institute's permanent collection.

Vollard was born in Ile-de-la-Reunion, a French colony in the Indian Ocean, and arrived in Paris to study law, like his father, at the age of 21.

His nascent legal career was brief, and within a few years of leaving law school he was dealing paintings out of his dining room.

Shrewd early sales of Manet's drawings and unfinished paintings launched Vollard into the impressionist circle, and his gallery - which moved into successively more lavish spaces - became a wildly successful business as well as an artistic hub of fin-de-siecle Paris.

Artists and collectors met there in informal salons, enjoyed Vollard's home-cooked meals, and traded their works for those of their friends and colleagues.

Vollard is best known for rescuing Cezanne from obscurity.

When Vollard mounted his solo exhibition of Cezanne's work in 1895, the artist had not been regularly shown in Paris for nearly 20 years.

Vollard's gamble - he acquired 150 canvases from Cezanne largely via Paul, his son - paid off and established not only Cezanne's career but Vollard's as well.

He became the principal dealer of Paul Gauguin and a number of Fauve artists.

Vollard gave Matisse his first solo exhibition and Picasso an exhibition when the artist was just 19.

He assembled the largest exhibition of Van Gogh's work seen up to that point.

And when he died, somewhat suspiciously, in 1939, he was a multimillionaire who had shaped the history of modern art.

Throughout his career, Vollard remained an enigmatic figure.

He was notoriously rude to potential patrons, insisting that they wait for hours in his gallery before he would display works or refusing to admit he had paintings by a particular artist when they were in plain view.

He napped and dozed constantly - a form of narcolepsy that has yet to be determined as intentional rather than physiological - and practiced a relaxed form of bookkeeping that the curators of this exhibition are the first to shed real light on.

At the same time, he was a savior to many artists who relied on the dealer to keep their works in circulation or support them with stipends, as Vollard did for Gauguin, despite their mutually vexed and mistrustful relationship.

No more convincing evidence of some artists' affection for him is a series of portraits of the dealer included in this exhibition - often pictured with his cat, also named Ambroise - by such figures as Picasso, Cezanne, Renoir, and Bonnard.

Never have all the riches of the works that passed through Vollard's hands been brought together in such number and quality.

Cezanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, which opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in September, has already received wide praise as a window into the history of modernism, a profile of a fascinating figure, and an exhibition of rare excellence.

From the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition will travel to the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.

The exhibition has been organized by Gary Tinterow, Engelhard curator in charge, and Rebecca Rabinow, associate curator, both of the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Douglas Druick, the Searle chairman of medieval through modern European painting and sculpture and prince trust chairman of prints and drawings, and Gloria Groom, the David and Mary Winton Green curator, both at the Art Institute of Chicago; Anne Roquebert, curator, and Isabelle Cahn, documentary researcher, at the Musee d'Orsay; and Ann Dumas, a London-based art historian.

A 450-page, fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

Twenty-two essays examine Vollard's career and expertise in the art market, his relationships with individual artists and collectors, and the wealth of previously unpublished material from Vollard's archives and from those of the artists he represented.

The catalogue will be available in the Art Institute's Museum Shop or online.

Special dated tickets to Cezanne to Picasso are required, and advance tickets are strongly recommended.

Tickets go on sale to the public December 15, 2006 - call 312-930-4040 or purchase them at the museum.

Tickets are $15 (Monday-Wednesday visits), and $18 (Thursday-Sunday visits), and include general admission in to the museum.

The exhibition was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, and the Reunion des Musees Nationaux, Paris.

An indemnity for this exhibition has been granted by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

To reach the Art Institute on the World Wide Web, please click here.

The Art Institute of Chicago is a museum in Chicago's Grant Park, located across from Millennium Park.

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