Ambroise Vollard
Born St-Denis, Réunion, c. 1867; Died Paris, 19 Feb 1939.
French art dealer and publisher. He was the most notable contemporary art dealer of his generation in France, as well as an innovative publisher of prints and illustrated books. Brought up in Réunion, he arrived in Paris c. 1890 as a law student and soon started buying and selling prints and drawings for his own pleasure. After a period working at L’Union Artistique for Alphonse Dumas, an established dealer, he set up on his own and in 1894 opened a small gallery near the Opéra on the Rue Laffitte, then the centre of the Paris art trade.
Vollard made his first major impact as a dealer in 1895 when he organized Cézanne’s first one-man exhibition. Over the next ten years he built up, at relatively low cost, a large stock of paintings by Cézanne, which eventually provided him with enormous profits. Concurrently he acquired work by van Gogh, Gauguin, Bonnard, Denis, Redon, Vuillard, Derain, Rouault, Vlaminck, Rousseau, Picasso, Maillol and Matisse, as well as by more established artists such as Degas and Renoir. Vollard kept his gallery on a modest scale. It was his practice to buy paintings outright from artists, and he often purchased the contents of their studios en bloc. Works acquired in this way appear often to have been kept in reserve for years, unseen until Vollard considered it opportune to put them on the market. Although he was respected and liked by the artists he supported, this method of promotion had disadvantages for them. Georges Rouault, for instance, whose studio Vollard bought up in 1913, suffered from the fact that his paintings were rarely exhibited, and hence little known, in the 1920s and 1930s.
Vollard began his career at a time when printmaking had been successfully revived as an original art form. He edited two mixed albums of prints in 1896–7 and several portfolios of prints by individual artists, including Vuillard’s set of colour lithographs, Landscapes and Interiors (1899). After 1900 the print boom subsided, and although he continued to publish prints he henceforth turned his attention to the illustrated book. His first books date from 1900–04, and by commissioning artists (mainly from the Nabi circle) rather than illustrators and liberating them from the traditional subservience of image to text, he created almost single-handed the genre of the ‘fine art’ book (see Livre d’artiste), later taken up by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Albert Skira, Tériade and others. The masterpiece of this group is Verlaine’s Parallèlement (1900), illustrated with lithographs by Bonnard.
After 1915, helped by increasing profits from his picture stock, Vollard launched over 40 publishing projects with artists, of which many remained incomplete at his death. His choice of authors and artists ranged from Virgil to Baudelaire, and from Emile Bernard to Picasso, who illustrated Balzac’s Chef d’oeuvre inconnu (1931), one of Vollard’s greatest publishing achievements. Rouault occupied a special place, working for Vollard almost continuously throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Of the seven publications they planned together, only three were completed in Vollard’s lifetime: Les Réincarnations du Père Ubu (1925), for which he provided his own satirical text, with aquatints by Rouault; André Suarès’s Passion (1939), with Rouault’s etchings; and Cirque de l’étoile filante (1938), which was both written and illustrated by Rouault (see Rouault, georges). Among Vollard’s other writings are his studies, serious if anecdotal, of the three older masters he had known—Cézanne, Degas and Renoir. His memoirs provide an amusing account of the foibles of the art world, particularly of the cupidity and ignorance of other collectors. Vollard commissioned portraits of himself from many of the artists he admired, including Cézanne (1899; Paris, Petit Pal.), Renoir (1908; U. London, Courtauld Inst.) and Picasso (1909; Moscow, Pushkin Mus. F.A.). His distinctive, burly figure was memorably recorded in the 1930s in a series of photographs by Brassaï, and his wry, secretive nature is summed up in an etching by Bonnard of 1914, showing Vollard with his cat (see F. Bouvet, Bonnard, l’oeuvre gravé: Catalogue complet, Paris, 1981, pl. 89).
Malcolm Gee. "Vollard, Ambroise." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T090092 (accessed March 8, 2012).
