Paris Journal: Paul Durand-Ruel

Courbet's “Femme a la vague” (1868)

The Musee du Luxembourg has devoted a show to Paul Durand-Ruel ("Paul Durand-Ruel, The Gamble of the Impresssionists"), the Impressionist impresario who also conformed to Flaubert’s dictum about being “regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” In this case the work was selling and promoting the likes of Monet, Manet, Renoir, Sisley, Cassatt, Morisot, Delacroix, Millet, Courbet, Degas, Cezanne. Ruel conformed to the bourgeois part by being a monarchist and Catholic, having five kids and selling art right out of his house. Cezanne painted Vollard who was also a dealer of his work and the current exhibition begins with portraits of Durand Ruel and his children by Renoir. If a picture speaks a thousand words, then the French have a way of saying things that are suggestive of a thousand pictures. Here is a particularly evocative quote that introduces the exhibition: “Elle invite a s’interroger sur le role d’une figure, celle du marchand, longtemps lassise, dans l’ombre, dans la formation d’un gout et de hierarchies artistiques encore perciptibles aujourd’hui.” The crux is that the exhibition highlights a role, of the merchant, which has been often kept in shadows. It’s a dubious premise since dealers (like Vollard) and collectors (like Leo and Gertrude Stein) have long been a subject of inquiry by critics and art historians. Of course in the contemporary art world the likes of Leo Castelli, Mary Boone and Larry Gagosian have achieved a super star status. While Durand-Ruel is described as a family man there was a little Hugh Hefner in him. His interest in topless beauties is manifest in both Courbet’s “Femme a la vague,” (1865) and Renoir’s “Etude Torse Effet de Soleil” (1875-6) Either that or his business acumen trumped his morality, in his opting for what would plainly sell. Monet’s “Le Jardin de l’artiste" (1877) is an impressionist masterpiece that merits the trip to the exhibition in and of itself. Durand-Ruel eventually started a gallery on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan where he positioned himself to deal with wealthy American collectors like the Havemeyers. Baudelaire makes a cameo appearance in Manet’s “La Musique aux Tuileries" (1862) which is another one of the jewels of the exhibit.

Paris Journal: Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso...the Stein Family

The Steins, Leo, Gertrude, Sarah and Michael were patrons not investors and in that regard, like their counterparts the lesser known Cone sisters from Baltimore, played an enormous role in the lives of the artists whose careers they cultivated. Cezanne was not a household name when Leo Stein purchased his first Cezanne from Vollard, Cezanne’s famed dealer (whose portrait hangs in the Cezanne and Paris show at the Musee du Luxembourg). Everyone always points to the tremendous connection between Picasso and Gertrude Stein epitomized in Picasso’s iconic portrait of Stein from l906 now hanging in the Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso…the Steins Family at the Grand Palais, but from a cultural point of view it’s significant that an eccentric family of Americans, assimilated Jews of means, fostered the development of the early twentieth century modernism which became the calling card of French culture. The bust of Stein by Jacques Lipchitz from l920 and the portrait by Picabia from l937, which also appear in the show, exemplify Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence as it applies to the plastic arts. The little audio widget given at the Stein show also pointed out the debt the Picasso painting has to Ingres’ Portrait of Monsieur Bertin (1832) on exhibit in the Morgan Library in New York—which is another way of underlining the fact that this monumentally extensive show devoted to the Stein collection is really also a focal point for numerous historical and esthetic connections past and present. Gertrude had studied with William James at Radcliffe. Leo, who was himself the author of a book called The A-B-C of Aesthetics, had also been part of the circle that included Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry. Fry had offered the notion  of  “pure form,” as a way of understanding Cezanne’s revolutionary esthetic. Whether you go backwards in time towards Renoir who Leo would champion after Alice B. Toklas came to live with Gertrude at the Rue de Fleurus or forward to Gertrude turning her attention to Juan Gris and Picabia, two artists represented by another renowned dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, all roads seem to lead to the Stein family and the central role they played in the history of art, esthetics and thought.

Paris Journal: Cezanne and Paris

The Cezanne and Paris show at the Musee du Luxembourg is dramatic and simple in many ways. Cezanne was a good friend of Zola’s and was urged to come to Paris by the writer. The show documents the potent influence of Zola’s realism on the nascent imagination of a great master whose work would eventually go beyond realism and even impressionism. When we speak of post-impressionism we can't but think of Cezanne so it’s dramatic to see paintings like  “Les Toits de Paris” (1881-2) with a classic and almost iconic view of the Paris skyline counterposed to a painting  like “L’Eternel Feminin ou Le Veau d’or” (1877) with its break from classic perspective. Hitchcock made cameo appearances in his films and here you can see Cezanne’s bald pate amongst the gallery gazing on the lusty ideal of femininity that the artist portrays. Naturally since it’s a Cezanne show there are plenty of apples and portraits too-- those of  his wife and his famed dealer Vollard, for example. The antimonies of figuration and abstraction are also juxtaposed with those of urbanism and nature. The artistic world of Paris obviously had its allure for Cezanne, but the conclusion one must make on viewing a show explicitly centered on Cezanne’s relation to Paris was that the artist found his real home artistically and spiritually in the rural world of the provinces, in particular Provence.