The Dealer as Superstar

...Vollard countered by observing that the stories derived from Aesop and other older, more Oriental sources, and that Chagall's Russian-Jewish background made him a lot closer to the fount than any Frenchman...

...Incidentally, objections were raised when a foreigner was hired to illuminate so French an institution as La Fontaine...

...A laughter that chokes itself...

...when not feigning sleep in his chair, the better to eavesdrop on visitors to his gallery, he would often stand in the doorway "glooming," as one contemporary put it, out at the world...

...A typical page consists largely of margin, adorned almost casually with lithographs of nudes drawn in chalk that impinge on or overlap a small body of text set in a large, elegant italic...

...I suspect that most entrepreneurs lead rich inner lives, but there is something special about one who could identify, as Vollard apparently did, with Alfred Jarry's pre-Dada creation, Ubu Roi...

...Mattisse was another to begin on rue Laffitte, with a one-man show in 1904...

...at the show, they make a glittering checkerboard of one wall of the gallery...

...In Ambroise Vollard, Editeur, a 1944 monograph and catalogue raisonne reprinted by the Museum of Modem Art to accompany the present show (176 pp., $17.50 hardbound, $7.95 paperback), Una Johnson notes that before he began publishing, Vollard had already produced suites of prints by such artists as Renoir, Fantin-Latour, Bonnard, and Vuil-lard...

...Dealers have played a vital part in the nistory of modern art, so it is reasonable for the great ones to be given their share of the billing...

...Among the color lithographs are exquisite Paris street scenes by Bonnard and interiors by Vuillard, along with several pieces by their lesser contemporary Maurice Denis, a rather syrupy painter who helped found the Nabis...

...he would ask specific individuals to illuminate books of their preference now a relatively common practice, but then highly innovative...

...Whether the subject is Duveen or Bernard Baruch, we hear great tales of prescience, luck, timing, and the judo-like skills of buying low and selling high...

...It is easy to imagine the impact of Paris on a young Creole from a small and remote place, and to understand how he could so quickly have been diverted from his aim of becoming a lawyer...

...Roualt was one of the artists who suffered most from these quirks, although his own temperament was also a contributing factor...

...Champaign, Illinois...

...Once he embarked upon publishing in a serious way, scarcely a year went by without a Vollard issue of some kind print portfolios and albums, books (a few written by himself) and bronzes, notably by Maillol, Renoir and Picasso...

...Still, his words do not detract from the splendor of his characteristic images...

...Pissarro declined on the advice of his father, Camille, who rightly contended that Vollard was both demanding and stingy...

...Roualt's relationship with Vollard lasted 33 years, and for much of the time the artist did no painting...

...A stifled sob...

...He was traveling on a Paris bus one day when a very poor-looking man got on...

...Clearly exulting in the possibilities of sooty black and silvery grays, Redon was never more inspired than in these lovely images of angels, demons, serpents, and unidentifiable sea creatures...

...It was at an auction of Tanguy's goods that the aspiring dealer picked up five Cezannes for next to nothing...

...The commission thereupon went to Bonnard, and the collaboration produced what may now be regarded as the emblematic French edition de luxetoo beautiful to be read, let alone touched, since the handmade paper itself is a work of art...

...And why not...

...With this controversial gesture, Vollard in effect launched both himself and his artist...

...Finally, there are the extraordinary lithographs done by Odilon Redon for Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint-Antoine...

...In the category of black and white, the Degas monotypes translated into etchings are noteworthy, as are Derain's engravings for Petronius' Satyriconheavy, coarse line drawings that nevertheless manage to recall the work of Beardsley...

...Then came the obligatory purchase of a book...

...On Art THE DEALER AS SUPERSTAR BY VIVIEN RAYNOR Kurt Valentin and now Ambroise Vollard: In the art world, the dealer seems to be assuming the same degree of importance given to movie directors by auteur theorists...

...It may have been an awareness of the limitations of dealing that prompted Vollard to enter the field of publishing, where he could leave his mark through his limited editions of prints and books...

...In part, this is because the lives of middlemen tend to read pretty much alike, regardless of the commodity...

...There was Durand-Ruel for the Impressionists...

...Johnson writes that Vollard was primarily interested "in the artist and his chosen images...

...The show, which is jointly sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and Exxon, will travel to Toronto...

...Of the numerous portraits made of Vollard, Clark remarks that none indicates his majestic height or how his "craggy old face could sometimes dissolve into a sardonic but rather engaging grin...

...Picasso is represented by several etchings from his Blue and Rose periods, and, most notably, by his aquatint illustrations of Buffin's Historie Naturelle...

...Vollard's edition of Verlaine's Parallelement was, however, his own inspiration, bom in a personal experience...

...Rather a perfectionist himself, the painter developed for his magnum opus, Miserere, a laborious technique involving the processes of photogravure, etching and engraving...

...Vollard actually wrote further adventures for this character, aptly described by R. H. Wilenski as "the symbol of all swollen-bellied idiotic bullies and humbugs...

...Yet this does not seem to have discouraged artists from converging on him...

...Born the eldest of 10 children in La Reunion, Vollard left for France in 1890, at the age of 23...

...If so, he would be pleased to know that examples of his efforts are on view at the Museum of Modem Art, through September 6, under the title Impressario Ambroise Vollard...

...and] we must remember that it was Vollard who first showed things by Picasso, in 1901...

...I found it interesting that quite a few artists renowned for their color looked better in monochrome...

...Vollard overheard one passenger telling another that this was Verlaine A poet, the greatest next to Stephane Mallarme...

...He went on to say, though: "Each great period has its dealer...

...It had to be paid for in cash, so one had to return the next day with an attache full of notes...

...These may be imagined if one considers that he saw his art in general as "A cry in the night...

...First and foremost a bibliophile's show, Impressario Ambroise Vollard is also a rewarding visual experience for nonspecialists, thanks to the organizational skills of Riva Castleman, director of the moma's department of prints and illustrated books...

...Since making art is as much a form of guerrilla warfare as trafficking in it, Vollard's hold over his artists probably had more than a little to do with their seeing a part of themselves in this odd man...

...Chagall, for instance, loses all sentimentality in his fine stark etchings for the Bible and La Fontaine's fables...

...Vollard drove hard bargains, grew rich on his artists, and soon began to realize his ambition of becoming an editeur...

...Until recently, the collective image of brokers had been at best bland and at worst shady...

...He was intelligent and shrewd, and evidently worked at his eccentricity...

...After working for a while in a gallery, he opened his first shop in 1893, selling contemporary paintings...

...Twenty volumes were published in his lifetime, and there remained at his death in 1939 (the result of an auto accident) 25 more in various stages of production...

...There was Vollard for those who came afterwards cezanne, Gaugin, then the Nabis and many other painters...

...Una Johnson believes that Vollard's habitual inability to finish or release certain important works was caused partly by his perfectionism and partly by simple procrastination...

...Vollard's career received a special, if indirect, boost from the death of Pere Tanguy, color-grinder, picture-dealer and friend of artists...

...Engaged in many printing projects, he even moved his studio into Vollard's premises, complaining throughout of his financial distress...

...At the instigation of Renoir and Pissarro, Vollard contacted Cezanne, who had long since left Paris for the country, and offered him a solo exhibitionhis first, at the age of 56...

...In the course of reminiscing about his own life in the business, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler described Vollard's place on rue Laffitte as "a funny little hole in the wall with nothing but an old frame in the window...

...The 58 prints were based on a text by Andre Suares, but the theme suited Roualt's Old Testament outlook so well that eventually, according to Johnson, he made the project histo the point of insisting on writing the captions...

...Titillated by the exchange, Vollard found and read examples of both men's work and, preferring Verlaine, asked Lucien Pissarro to illustrate Parallelement...

...None of them sold well, and it was to take some time for collectors to be persuaded that prints were not merely a specialty of printmakers, but could be made by painters...

...In his Preface to Miserere (begun in 1916, it was finally published in 1948), Roualt wrote that Vollard had "taste and a passion for making beautiful books, regardless of time, but it would have taken three centuries to have completed the works which he wanted...

...Vollard, unmoved, continued to press him for more work...

...and Toledo...

...In his autobiography, Kenneth Clark provides a sharp vignette of Vollard, whom he visited in 1933, when the dealer had more or less stopped receiving people particularly collectors...

...Clark bought three Cezannes from him, priced as usual according to size...

...He had some Negro blood he was called un Laurent de Medici negre...

...A lifelong bachelor devoted to his cat (included in a charmingly inept Bonnard drawing of the dealer), Vollard was obviously a tough operator, and possibly a rapacious one...