4.
When Mañach offered to handle Picasso’s work and Vollard sold Matisse a painting by Cézanne, most of the marchands de tableaux in Montmartre were still hardly more than pedlars of bric-a-brac; they sold paintings along with old furniture and miscellaneous junk. If they came upon a painting they thought was valuable, it might be stowed in a cupboard, away from prying eyes. Others accepted paintings in return for payment and redeemed them later, the galleries acting as pawn shops to painters who were down on their luck. The picture sellers were all clustered in the same area of Montmartre, between the rue Laffitte (where, at the far end, the sellers of more traditional paintings and objets d’art kept their shops) and the foot of the Butte. Few of them ever became successful or well known, though their names were at the time familiar throughout the neighbourhood. Portier had a mezzanine in the rue Lepic; Père Martin kept a miserable little place in the rue des Martyrs, but it was well stacked with magnificent paintings – at least, so the rumour went. In the early days, he had bought Renoir’s La Loge for 485 francs (his rent was overdue; that was the sum he owed). Who knew what else he might turn up?
Rumours of significant discoveries quickly circulated and every-one was always on the lookout for a work by a celebrated artist, whether or not he had any real taste in or knowledge of painting. Soulier, like Martin, kept a bric-a-brac shop in the rue des Martyrs, where he sold old beds and other bits of cheap furniture, until he took to buying pictures; he would give the artist a few francs and throw in a drink. He had no aesthetic judgement whatsoever; he simply bought whatever was cheap – in those days, Rousseau, van Dongen, young Maurice Utrillo and, occasionally now, Picasso. Pictures became such a passion for Soulier that he gave up the bric-a-brac trade as a rising tide of canvases rose from the ground floor right up to his bedroom, forcing him to sleep in a hotel. Some shrewd dealer poking around his premises had on one occasion discovered a picture by Manet so, ever afterwards, Père Soulier was convinced that every painting he bought might prove to be another.
A character known as Bouco was regularly seen trailing through the streets of Paris with a donkey cart, calling, ‘Pictures! Frames!’ When Soulier died suddenly of illnesses brought on by alcoholism, Bouco bought his collection en bloc and carried it off to his home in Bicentre. No one ever knew what became of it. The sign outside the shop of Clovis Sagot – a former clown from the Cirque Fernando (now renamed the Medrano), who had turned an old pharmacy at 46, rue Laffitte into a gallery where he sold paintings and dispensed ‘cures’ mixed from potions left behind by the shop’s previous owner – read, ‘SPECULATORS! Buy art! What you pay 200 Francs for today will be worth 10,000 Francs in ten years’ time.’ Père Angely, known on the Butte as Léon – bald, fat, a retired solicitor’s clerk who was losing his sight – collected indiscriminately until, eventually, he had to sell the lot for as little as he had paid for it. He was rumoured to be the first ever purchaser of a Picasso, who afterwards somewhat uncharitably remarked that the only person who had seen the value of his work in those days had been blind. (Many years later, he once avowed that no one who looks at a painting really knows what he is seeing.)
There were also those with money to invest, professional dealers including the Bernheim-Jeune brothers (Josse and Gaston, sons of Alexandre Bernheim) and the fabulously rich Russian textile magnate Sergei Shchukin, regarded as an eccentric in his native Moscow, who had begun to collect contemporary Western art. (German dealers came in later in the decade; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler opened his first small gallery in 1907.) For the time being, young artists desperately needed new outlets and, by mounting one-man exhibitions in their galleries, dealers were now, albeit on a small scale, beginning to provide them. One of their main supporters was Berthe Weill, but, though she actively encouraged these younger artists, her maternal approach never seemed to succeed in making any of them rich. It was at her gallery that Picasso had first met Mañach, to whom he now owed the prospect of the first exhibition of his work in Paris, since Mañach had eventually managed to persuade Ambroise Vollard to show it in his gallery in June.
Vollard was different from the other dealers. Neither a chancer nor, in those days, an established international figure in the art world, he had a shrewd eye for a painting and a passion for collecting. No one could ever be sure what he kept hidden away in his cupboards, accumulating value until he judged it timely to reveal it. He had opened his first boutique, at 37, rue Laffitte, back in 1893, a place with just a shop window, back room and bedroom. When he had the idea of exhibiting the work of a single artist, he was perhaps the first dealer to do so. His inaugural show was an exhibition of works from Manet’s studio; following that show, Mme Manet had introduced him to Renoir and to both Pissarros (Camille and his son Lucien). Between 1894 and 1897, Vollard dealt in the works of Manet, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne, and already by 1895 he was able to move to larger premises.
In April 1895, he moved to 39, rue Laffitte, where his new gallery was not the dark and gloomy cubbyhole people later remembered but actually (though memorably dusty) a sizeable place, with a mezzanine floor and large window, strategically placed near the fashionable boulevards so that, as he once pointed out, the ladies could go shopping for outfits while their husbands looked for a bargain work of art. While the rest of Paris was still admiring the paintings of the Belle Époque, Vollard celebrated the opening of his new premises by mounting the first exhibition in Paris of the works of van Gogh (loaned by the artist’s brother, Theo). That autumn, he mounted the first ever solo show of Cézanne’s work, comprising approximately a hundred and fifty pieces. He timed the exhibition to coincide with the wake of the Caillebotte legacy, when the State had just accepted Caillebotte’s gift of his Impressionist collection but had refused several works by Cézanne. Vollard chose one of the rejected paintings, Baigneurs au repos, to display in his window to advertise the exhibition. Outside on the pavement, a row broke out between a young Montmartrois and his fiancée, who was demanding to know why he had brought her here to look at such obscenities. If casual passers-by were easily shocked, however, the exhibition was greeted enthusiastically by Renoir, Degas and Monet, who understood that, in his final years, Cézanne still had a future as an artist. In 1899 (the year Matisse purchased Three Bathers), Vollard commissioned Cézanne to paint his portrait.
Since the works of the Impressionists had gone on display in the Musée du Luxembourg, the students at the academies had had an opportunity to study them. Though, generally, they admired them, they found them unchallenging; most were searching for ways of painting that would feel more iconoclastic, wanting to find methods of capturing the more radically political spirit of the turn of the century. In general, Cézanne’s work, with its emphasis on breaking forms, interested them more than that of Monet, Sisley or Pissarro. Although Matisse certainly admired, and gained from discovering, the work of the Impressionists, as a friend of his (writer Marcel Sembat) once put it, even Matisse was ‘never a real Impressionist. One couldn’t be any more, since Cézanne.’
In 1889, Cézanne, then fifty, was still renting a studio in Montmartre, in the Villa des Arts on the western slope of the Butte. The building had a Belle Époque hallway and a grand double staircase and held twelve north-facing studios; the artist lodged in a studio-apartment in the long, low house on the opposite side of the leafy, tranquil courtyard. He continued to move between Provence and Paris and, in his last years, was still painting what are now regarded as some of his major works, including (in the mid- to late 1890s) his paintings of card players, his still-life studies of oranges and apples and his landscapes of the countryside around Mont Sainte Victoire, as well as the occasional commissioned portraits he produced in Paris. Cézanne was always the odd man out among his fellow Impressionists, and his style eventually departed fully from theirs, as he continued to develop the experiments with perspective he had begun with Pissarro back in the 1870s, applying his radical reappraisals of structure to figures now, as well as landscapes. In his work of the 1890s and early 1900s, using chalky surfaces and exploring the inner structures of figures and objects so that they seemed to be brought up close to the viewer, he created virtuoso correspondences between surface and depth. It almost seemed as if the viewer were enfolded within the formal spaces of the picture.
Cézanne had suffered major emotional upheavals in the years preceding. His friendship since childhood with writer Émile Zola had famously ended with the publication in 1886 of Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre, which many assumed was based on Cézanne’s struggles as an artist. (Cézanne’s letter acknowledging receipt of his copy was graciously formal, as he may have thought befitted the occasion; Zola never replied.) The following year, Cézanne’s mother died, and her instructions regarding the division of her estate meant that the Jas de Bouffan, the family home in Aix-en-Provence, had to be sold. In 1899, Cézanne moved to a small apartment at the centre of Aix, where he lived for the rest of his life, journeying deep into the countryside to work. In Paris (since Vollard’s second exhibition of 1889), his work was at last beginning to attract the attention of ambitious young art students – including Matisse.
In 1901, in Cézanne’s studio in the Cité des Arts, Vollard posed, as ‘still as an apple’ on 115 occasions while the artist worked on a portrait that would depict the dealer as ‘a man of learning and introspection’. When Cézanne finally announced he could do no more, there remained two unpainted areas on Vollard’s right hand. In Cézanne’s late work, areas left unpainted invariably contribute to the sense that the painting appears before the viewer still in the process of coming into being (or into focus, perhaps, as the spectator enters into the final stage of the process of the artist’s dialogue with the viewer). No such explanation, however, would have served to satisfy Vollard; to him, the painting merely looked unfinished. While he painted the portrait, Cézanne continued his habit of studying every morning in the Louvre. If his work there went well, the following day, he told Vollard, he might discover the right tone to complete the hand. However, it was not simply a question of adding a couple of details, since, if he introduced a tone that jarred at this stage, the whole portrait would be destroyed and he would have to start again. Vollard was forced to concede that this would indeed be a daunting prospect.
The portrait, despite Vollard’s disappointment, not only depicted the sitter’s commanding presence but also expressed his interior life. Somehow, by the position of the knees and the set of the head, Cézanne had conveyed the dealer’s shyness and reserve. The artist had for a long time been thinking about the heads of his figures, developing a way of remodelling them which was partly the result of his study of Egyptian statues in the Louvre. If he asked his sitter to pose like an apple, he once explained, it was so that he could paint ‘a head like a door’. Though Vollard had little time for talk of this sort, he remained heartened by the knowledge that, since he had shown Cézanne’s work for the second time, it was finally ‘beginning to catch on with the public’. At the start of 1901, he again moved to larger premises, again in the rue Laffitte, this time to number 6. To celebrate the opening of his new gallery he was planning a second show of van Gogh’s work – for which he had acquired more than sixty paintings from the artist’s studio in Amsterdam, together with a large number of watercolours and drawings – to be held in February.
If his ultimate goal was to make sales, Vollard’s primary passion was collecting; on his own admission, he was always reluctant to sell his precious acquisitions, hence his reputation for hiding things away in cupboards and bringing out works reluctantly one by one (though that was partly, too, a strategic sales technique). As a sensitive child brought up on the island of La Réunion, he had gazed at the family parrot on its perch in the garden and longed to possess one of its feathers. He loved flowers, noting that white ones were all different shades of white. His first collection had been a heap of pebbles, which he had been forced to part with when the grown-ups retrieved them to repair a wall; then his precious hoard of bits of old blue china disappeared (confiscated for being too sharp for him to play with). He had thus learned early in life that treasured collections could easily disappear. Initially, his parents had wanted him to be a doctor, an ambition they soon relinquished when they took him to the local hospital to witness an operation and saw his horrified reaction. Their second choice was a career in the law, and Vollard had originally arrived in Paris to study it. He had hated law, but he loved Paris.
On his arrival in Paris, he had found lodgings in the rue Apennins and discovered the Chat Noir. He was seduced by the beauty of the light, the vibrant streets, the bouquinistes (second-hand-book dealers) by the Seine, the whole sensuous atmosphere of Paris. When he happened upon some books of fine etchings in the booksellers’ green boxes at the side of the river, he soon became, and remained, a serious bibliophile. He knew he had arrived at the right moment to collect works of art, since, in those days in Paris, there were ‘masterpieces everywhere, and going, so to speak, for a song’. And he kept an open mind. You never knew: perhaps one of these young Spaniards might turn out to be worth backing.
By 1900, despite his reputation as a grumpy old man who glared at prospective customers from the depths of his fusty gallery, he lived surrounded by artists. In the basement of his gallery he had a dining room, familiarly known as ‘la cave’ (the cellar), where he entertained the artistic and literary elite of his day, and others, including collectors, politicians and a nun who joined them regularly, until it emerged that the ‘sister’, despite her convincing attire, was not actually of the faith. In the early days, Renoir was a regular guest, as were Bonnard, Vuillard and Misia Natanson, the sparkling socialite and wife of the editor of La Revue blanche (she would later marry Spanish painter José-Maria Sert and become Sergei Diaghilev’s most loyal friend). Vollard cooked for his guests himself, preparing dishes from La Réunion, spiced in the Caribbean style. He was an enthusiastic, if not very talkative, host. First and foremost, however, he was a shrewd and talented businessman. Van Gogh, he still believed in. Cézanne, despite his increasing years, might turn out to be a major winner yet; and he was always on the lookout for younger newcomers.