Genius Disguised As a Sloth

By ROBERT HUGHES

"Modern pictures, editions of books and modern prints"--the eight words above Ambroise Vollard's name on his business letterhead make up one of the inn signs of our century. Occasionally, there emerges from the scrum of picture salesmen a dealer with an almost mediumistic sense of the art of his time and place. Genius, of a sort, is needed to pick geniuses, and in the past 75 years fewer than a dozen art dealers, from Kahnweiler to Castelli, have had it. Vollard was their great prototype.

In his cluttered gallery on Rue Laffitte in Paris, stacked floor to ceiling with rolled canvases and folios of prints, Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse had their first one-man shows. (Cezanne 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 raisonne 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 meteque, 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. "You sleep a lot," was his advice to a fledgling dealer who asked the secret of success.

His 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 Cezanne, 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.

Atrabilious Power. He was never in a hurry. Indeed, from the artist's point of view, he was. sometimes not hurried enough: Vollard was quite capable of holding onto an artist's designs and plates for years before releasing them, and one edition of a work by Pierre Louys with aquatint-etchings by Degas came out in 1935--18 years after Degas died. But Vollard's graftings--Picasso onto Balzac's Chef-d'Oeuvre Inconnu, Bonnard and Verlaine's Parallelement, Chagall with the Old Testament and Gogol's Dead Souls, Odilon Redon with Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony--were inspired. They produced some of the finest illustrated books made in Europe since the 18th century.

Artists rose to the challenge. One does not realize how well Segonzac could draw until one has seen his sweet, nervously articulated pastoral etchings for Vollard's edition of Virgil's Georgics. Picasso's Vollard Suite, 98 of whose 100 images are on view in an upstairs gallery of the museum, remains the greatest of his etching cycles, just as Georges Rouault would never produce images of a more terse and atrabilious power than the 58 plates of his Miserere series, 1916-27. Vollard's appetite for new ideas, fresh artists, was perfectionist and insatiable. Did he, as was grumbled, exploit the painters who made his prints and illustrations? Yes and no. Those whom, like Rouault, he could dominate, he did; but there was no way past the shrewdness of Degas or Picasso. Per haps, at this range, Vollard's business tactics hardly matter beside what he gave the artists in the first place--backing, confidence and an unprecedented access to the print, its possibilities laid forth at the most exacting standards of craftsmanship.

Robert Hughes

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