Ambroise Vollard

As a “picture dealer” Ambroise Vollard was known for taking risks by championing the work of young, audacious artists. The evolution of Vollard’s Paris gallery—from his first efforts in 1890, selling modern art out of his seventh-floor apartment, to his legendary gallery at 6, rue Laffitte, where he was based from 1896 to 1924—ran parallel to the rapid shifts in both the reception of European modern painting and the art market, as it transitioned from a state-run Salon system to a network of independent dealers.

Born to a bourgeois family in French colonial Île de la Réunion, Vollard arrived in France in November 1885 to study law, and within five years had abandoned his studies (and with them, his parents’ financial support) to become an art dealer. He was a voracious collector, and his strategy as a dealer focused on building a large stock of works by diverse artists, as opposed to securing exclusive contracts with a select few. While he was a canny businessman, Vollard’s approach was also unconventional: he was notoriously reluctant to allow prospective buyers to peruse his gallery’s inventory, unceremoniously stacked works of art or hung them without frames, and published lavish and innovative livres d’artistes that rarely turned a profit.

For many years, Vollard’s gallery was the only place in Paris to see works by Paul Cézanne, with whom Vollard enjoyed a close relationship. While regularly showing the trinity of post-Impressionism (Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh), Vollard remained on the lookout for the next generation of avant-garde artists. He collected the noirs of Odilon Redon and supported the Nabis, including Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Édouard Vuillard. Notably, in June 1901 he gave Pablo Picasso his first exhibition in Paris, which included sixty-four paintings by the then unknown nineteen-year-old Spanish artist.

Perhaps the least-known facet of Vollard’s career was his sustained work as an author. He wrote and published one of the first monographic texts on Cézanne in 1914; composed new stories about Père Ubu, the most notorious of the writer Alfred Jarry’s characters; and spent the last two decades of his life preparing his memoirs.

The Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection includes seven Cubist works that Vollard purchased from Picasso. They complement the three paintings by Picasso that were owned by Vollard already in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent holdings. Vollard’s relationship with Picasso ebbed and flowed. Vollard judged the 1901 exhibition unsuccessful, and he did not make another purchase from Picasso until 1906, when he bought twenty-seven works from the artist for 2,000 French francs. Vollard continued to make regular purchases from Picasso throughout the artist’s Cubist years (although he never collected works by Georges Braque, Juan Gris, or Fernand Léger) and in December 1910, he staged a retrospective of Picasso paintings.