Self-Portrait by Voliard
Tax careers of publishers, theatrical impresarios, and picture dealers often provide excellent material for autobiography, but though they all tend to write the stories of their lives very few of them produce books which it is any pleasure to read. This is less true of publishers than of the others both because, despite the plaints of misunderstood genius, only a minority of them are illiterate and because they start with the advantage of being in some degree associated in advance in the minds of their readers with subject-matter that is already of fairly general interest : the publisher acquires at least a reflection of the admiration won by the successful authors whose books he has published. Theatrical managers and picture dealers are less fortunate : the illiteracy figures are higher, and few of them, except within the limits of their professional communi- ties, derive more than ephemeral repute from the successful works which they have sponsored. Picture dealers in particu- lar are prevented from giving an appearance of substance or continuity to their narratives by the fact that the careers which they are describing are necessarily made up of series of swiftly changing, unrelated, and easily forgotten incidents. Conse- quently however interesting their lives may have been, their books rarely appear more than repositories of disjointed anec- dotes. M. Vollard, the dealer who did more than any other man to create the European and American vogues for the Post Impressionists, is therefore following respectable precedents in producing a dull and almost unreadable book.
Yet the material for an excellent autobiography was obviously there. M. Vollard has lived in Paris through one of the most important and most exciting periods of European painting. He has been brought in touch by his profession with every painter of note who has worked in Paris during the last forty-five years, and he has been the friend of many of them. He has a knowledge of the purposes and methods of collectors which a novelist would envy. Despite thir he has produced a book that is as a whole as difficult to read as the most type-ridden account of an expedition after big game. There are amusing and illuminating anecdotes of Renoir, Fantin-Latour, Rodin, Picasso, Cezanne, to name only five artists out of fifty, and there is one chapter of particular -interest to students of painting dealing with Mallet's Venetian period, based on information supplied by Charles Toehe who was in Venice at the same time as Manet. But the good anecdotes and the occasional important facts are quite submerged in the flood of tedious common- places about people and places and the prolonged descrip- tions of unimportant and uninteresting events which occupy the greater part of these pages. M. Vollard seems throughout to be more reflecting aloud than intent on writing a book, and garrulity takes the place of any attempt at systematic arrangement. The absence of a striet chronological sequence is no defect in an autobiography, but a narrative method Which meanders from the point into long asides and doubles back on itself into repetitions puts an unnecessary burden upon the attention and patience of the reader.
The reader's effort is not lessened by Miss Macdonald's translation. It is not possible to eompare thi; version with a French edition because mine- has so far been published, but from its peppering of phrases unfamiliar in general English usage one concludes that it is severely literal through. out. The thirty-two collotype plates, the majority of little- known paintings, are not a sufficient compensation for the
Previous page
