Beard of the Week LXVI: Cubism
This week's beard belongs to art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939), seen here in a portrait painted by Pablo Picasso in 1910. The painting is currently in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow.
When I was much younger I could get quite excited about modern art and the avant garde. Now it seems more like youthful indiscretion and I'm not sure what I saw in it all (although I don't think I ever had positive feelings about serialism in music). It's not so much that I think it was all "ugly" ("beauty", as such, has not that much to do with my personal aesthetic theories) as in a number of cases I'm not sure it was worth the effort of getting excited,* although I still have soft spots and friendly feelings of familiarity with earlier modernists I became acquainted with at the time.
I think now that one of the things that disenchanted me the most was cubism. I remember being thrilled at the idea that cubist painters were trying to look at reality in a new way, that all those apparent facets in their paintings were meant as different planes of the subject so that in a single, flat painting it was as though we were looking at many sides of the subject simultaneously. What a cool idea!
However, the more I looked, the less I saw. And now, in my advancing old age, cubist paintings don't look multi-faceted or multi-sided; they look more like badly designed jigsaw puzzles, bunches of gratuitous, geometric lines slashing across the image plane with the goal of obfuscating more than revealing. They still seem kind of pretty sometimes, kind of silly at other times, but mostly an exploitation of a gimmick instead of a revelation of seeing. Alas.
It turns out that there are interesting facets to M. Bollard's life even if the facets in the Picasso portrait are not so interesting. The photograph is documentation that he did, indeed, have a beard. (Here is an interesting short discussion of the Picasso portrait.)
Vollard was certainly a central figure in the birth of modernism. He opened his art gallery in Paris, Rue Laffitte, in 1893. Among the artists he represented were Cézanne, Gauguin, Maillol, Picasso, Renoir, Rouault, Rousseau, and Van Gogh.
There is also mystery surrounding Vollard's life–or rather, his death! A fascinating article by David D’Arcy, called "The Mysterious Mr. Slomovic" (artnet, undated; accessed 12 January 2009) describes a shady character from Yugoslavia (as it was then)–one Erich Slomovic–who, following Vollard's death in a car crash that some apparently think may well have been murder, somehow ended up with a good part of Vollard's collection.
Once Vollard dies in a car crash in 1939, the dispersal of his art holdings becomes complicated. Vollard’s estate was split between his brother, Lucien Vollard, and Madelaine De Galea, Ambroise Vollard’s longtime mistress and fellow reunionnaise — both were born in the remote Ile de la Réunion, a French colony in the Indian Ocean. But hundreds of works from Vollard’s inventory also ended up in the hands of Erich Slomovic, a young Croatian Jew who had come to Paris in the mid-1930s and befriended the aging dealer.
Complicated! Perhaps there are more interesting facets to the portrait of M. Vollard than I had realized.
———-
* This was more than evident to me last year when I saw the Whitney Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, and laughed in deprecating manner at all the cutting-edge modern art.