de Cézanne a Picasso, by Ambroise Vollard

Translation and selection: Paul Châtenois

Year of publication: Complete book: 1936 Excerpt: 2014

Valoración: Read

As the blog readers will surely know, we use that Zoom When it comes to a very brief book, or that is somehow an extract of a more extensive one, something unfinished, a loose or things like that. In this case we could almost call it mini-Zoombecause it comes just at sixty pages, including a (obviously) small prologue and a dozen illustrations. But, in addition to concise, it seems insufficient.

Ambroise Vollard was an art march that acquired great relevance in the last years of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His success took off with the acquisition, a little by chance and the same for his good eye, of one hundred and fifty works by Cézanne when he was still an almost unknown painter, rejected by the official halls. Vollard was largely responsible for his projection, and maintained a close relationship with the other artists of the time, especially with the impressionists, although also with Derain, Vlaminck or Picasso, among many others.

Vollard writes a voluminous autobiography called Memory of a picture seller, That it was my planned reading, but I let myself be seduced by this booklet, perhaps as an appetizer, and has turned out to be a kind of selection of that major work, a small extract that puts the focus on the portraits. I do not know if in a deliberate or casual way, the idea of ​​portrait has in this case, or I want to see it, a double perspective: on the one hand, as a pictorial reproduction that some of these great artists made of the vollar itself (perhaps somewhat egocentric the man), and on the other, as a very rapid semblance of those painters.

Indeed, the author almost always describes how the commission was sometimes the occurrence of being portrayed. There are nevertheless many explanations, with the only exception of Cézanne, which has the honor of occupying a good part of the few pages of the book. Vollard defines him, generally with grace and good hand, as a rather obsessive guy, capable of destroying a few works in an outburst of anger, saying goodbye to their models, or tyrannizing them (including their own march) forcing them to pose for hours in complete silence and without moving a muscle if the artist considered that the light of the moment was adequate. The concrete passage is entertaining and interesting, clearly above the others, which barely contribute a few brushstrokes, never better, in relation to the rest of the painters of the time.

So that this kind of abstract It may have some interest for fans of the subject, it gives the impression that Vollard can be a good narrator, but these pages give so little of themselves that personally he does not take me out of doubt about whether it is worth dispatching the complete autobiography. And in addition, it is that the selections (of broader texts, I mean) I do not like, perhaps because in my tender youth I swallowed a few specimens of the Reader´s Digest And that has surely left some mark.