Expect Discrepancy
between
how you're dragged up
and how it is.
different sides
of your face,
what you think folk think
And how it is.
what you know
And how it is.
what is known
And how it was then.
How these words mean
and how they were meant.
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler -- Pablo Picasso
Ambroise Vollard -- Pablo Picasso
The only time Pablo Picasso worked closely with another artist was in 1909-1912 when he and George Braque created Cubism, an artistic style that conveyed multiple views of an object on the same canvas to convey more information than could be contained in a single limited illusionistic view. Two of his early Cubist portraits, both from 1910, were of Ambroise Vollard and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 2 Parisian art dealers who took an early interest in his work. Vollard was born and raised in La Réunion, a french colony in the Indian ocean, and in 1893 established his own art gallery at Rue Laffitte, then the center of the Parisian market for contemporary art. There Vollard mounted his first major exhibitions, buying almost the entire output of Paul Cézanne, some 150 canvases, to create his first exhibition in 1895. It was this exhibition that inspired Cubism. This was quickly followed by exhibitions of Édouard Manet, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent Van Gogh (4 – 30 June 1895); he later staged a 2nd Cézanne exhibition (1898) and the 1st ones for Picasso (1901) and Henri Matisse (1904). Kahnweiler was born in Mannheim, Baden, and opened a small art gallery (4 X 4 m) at 28 rue Vignon in Paris in 1907. As he said, he wanted to "defend" great artists, but only those who had no dealers and whose talents he was convinced of, specially those who worked in the Montparnasse-Montmartre neighborhoods of Paris. In 1907, when there were only a 1/2 dozen viable galleries in the city, he contracted to buy all of the work of promising young artists in order to free them from financial worries and permit them to concentrate on their creative work; among them was Picasso, who had just painted "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon." Kahnweiler met with his painters daily to discuss their work, photographed each work they produced in order to maintain a record, held exhibitions of their work, and promoted them internationally. He encouraged the publication of Beaux Livres (beautiful books), in which contemporary artists illustrated contemporary writers. He was among the 1st to promote Cubism, and held Braque's 1st exhibition in 1908. Braque later wrote, "The things that Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them anymore. It was like being roped together on a mountain."
ReplyDelete