Walter-Guillaume Collection: the itinerary

“Before the infatuation with negro art, Paul Guillaume amassed a collection of fetishes while also taking an interest in as yet little-known artists [...] such as Modigliani and Soutine... I am not talking about his private collection, where you could admire the most revealing canvases by Matisse, Derain, Henri Rousseau, Picasso... He died an early death, passing like a meteor.”

That was how the art dealer Ambroise Vollard remembered Paul Guillaume (1891-1934), a young dealer mentored and advised by Guillaume Apollinaire. The poet, who spotted the young man with a passion for “primitive art” in 1911, introduced him into avant-garde art circles and guided his choices when he opened his first gallery in 1914. Swept along by a paradoxically dynamic context in the field of the arts during the great War, Paul Guillaume implemented the poet’s tastes with gusto. The two great figureheads of French modern art, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, whose works he exhibited in a still famous “face-to-face” in 1918, were at the core of a modern School of Paris
that gave rise to two trends. One the one hand, such isolated figures as Maurice Utrillo, Amedeo Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine embraced the idea of a “modern primitivism” embodied by Douanier Rousseau and African and Oceanian arts. On the other, the works produced in the 1920s by André Derain, Marie Laurencin, Picasso and Matisse brought about a renewal of figuration, dialoguing with the rediscovered later work of the impressionist masters – Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Hence, the Musée de l’Orangerie’s collection reflects a specific moment in modern art in Paris. The days of Les Arts à Paris magazine founded by Paul Guillaume in 1918, and of the “modernist representations” that took place in his gallery, with recitals by the composers Éric Satie, George Auric and Claude Debussy, readings by Blaise Cendrars and Apollinaire, and presentations of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings.
Up until his death, Paul Guillaume continued to invoke the tutelary shade of Apollinaire, who had disappeared all too early, to guide him in creating his collection and his projected first museum of modern art: “His clairvoyant passion, his crusading spirit, expressing itself in lyrical beauty, his ability to combine profound knowledge and gracious charm, made him one of the most brilliant supporters of the work that was beginning.”

Chaïm Soutine was born in Smilovitchi (Russian Empire, present-day Belarus) and moved to Paris in 1913, where he got to know the artists who lived in Montparnasse, representatives of the “School of Paris” including the painters Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani and the sculptors Jacques Lipchitz and Ossip Zadkine.

After spending three years in the South of France, Soutine returned to Paris in 1922 and made Paul Guillaume’s acquaintance. Their meeting ensured Soutine a reputation that would soon cross the Atlantic: through Paul Guillaume, the American collector Alfred Barnes, who planned to create a private museum open to the public in Philadelphia, discovered the painter’s work and purchased numerous canvases from him. The Musée de l’Orangerie conserves twenty-two of the artist’s canvases and, along with the Barnes Foundation, possesses the largest collection of Soutine’s works in the world.

The artist worked on his themes in series, and the corpus is representative of his body of work. In his portraits, still lifes and landscapes, Soutine subjected each motif to violent distortions that combine expressionist power with tortured lyricism. Yet, behind this apparent formal impetuosity, a classical solidity is reflected in his compositions. Fascinated by old paintings, which he studied at the Louvre, Soutine continued to refer to their canons throughout his career as an artist.

“She is lighthearted, she is good, she is spiritual and she has so much talent. She is me as a woman”, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire asserted in 1912 on the subject of Marie Laurencin.

One of the few women painters to have moved in Paris’ avant-garde artistic and literary circles, Laurencin, who trained at the Humbert Academy in Paris, was initially influenced by symbolism. The art dealer Clovis Sagot mounted her first exhibition in 1907, which Pablo Picasso visited. In the Bateau-Lavoir’s studios in Montmartre, she got to know André Derain, Robert Delaunay and Henri Rousseau. Her unique style, characterized by its extensive use of synthetism, earned her the cubist painters’ admiration.

In or around 1912, Apollinaire, with whom she shared her life, introduced her to Paul Guillaume, who went on to become her dealer in the 1920s. Her painting underwent a change in the interwar period. She almost only ever depicted women, presenting a specific image of femininity using a palette of pastel hues. Her paintings enjoyed great success and made her a prominent socialite portraitist. Her dreamlike, evanescent style lent itself particularly well to the performing arts and, with a modernist determination to decompartmentalize the arts, she designed stage sets and costumes, in particular for the Ballets Russes’ productions directed by Serge Diaghilev.

“If you had to compare Matisse’s work to something, you would have to choose an orange. Like it, Henri Matisse’s work is a fruit of blazing light(1).” In 1918, Paul Guillaume held the Matisse-Picasso exhibition at his gallery, a confrontation between the two champions of modern art that has gone down in art history. Wishing to amass a reference collection of modern art, Paul Guillaume acquired major, truly radical works, such as Les Baigneuses à la rivière (Bathers by a River) – now at the Art Institute in Chicago – and Les Trois sœurs (The Three Sisters), along with numerous canvases painted by Matisse during the 1920s.

[br][i]Les Trois Sœurs (The Three Sisters)[/i][info_1], 1917[br]Musée de l'Orangerie

In 1917 Matisse moved to Nice, where he internalized the lesson learned from Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who he visited: “I worked as an impressionist, directly from nature; I later sought concentration and more intense expression both in line and color”. The Nice period, which lasted almost ten years, was an important stage in the artist’s creation, in the course of which he turned his apartment in Place Charles-Félix into a full-blown studio. Matisse produced a long series of paintings in which he posed his models in intimate oriental surroundings. Tackling the theme of the odalisque from a new angle, he sought to confront their bodies’ volume with the components of decorative settings. During this period, he also painted a great many canvases featuring models in the intimacy of a bedroom, its window opening onto the Mediterranean sky.

(1) Guillaume Apollinaire, preface to the Matisse-Picasso exhibition, 1918, Paul Guillaume gallery.

“Derain’s art is now imbued with such expressive grandeur that one might call it antique. It comes to him from the masters and also from bygone French schools […], but all archaism of form is banished from his work.” In the preface to the first exhibition that Paul Guillaume devoted to the painter in 1916, Guillaume Apollinaire emphasized the new place he occupied in the interwar period.

During that time, Derain changed the way in which he painted. He distanced himself from the Fauve radicalism he had helped initiate in 1905, alongside Maurice de Vlaminck, Albert Marquet and Henri Matisse. Derain quieted his palette down and turned his attention to the old masters. In this respect, historiography has long pointed to an artistic “return to order”, a phenomenon observable in the work of many painters of the time, following the shock of the First World War. However, in Derain’s case, it would be more accurate to speak of a return to classicism. There was nothing reactionary about him: Derain studied Camille Corot’s, Gustave Courbet’s and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s works attentively. His art reached towards a refined, scholarly form of painting in dialogue with the past.

With twenty-eight of his works conserved at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Derain is the most fully represented artist in the collection. All of them belonged to Paul Guillaume or passed through his gallery, as the artist and the dealer had concluded an exclusive contract in 1923 which only ended with the dealer’s sudden death in 1934. Deeply affected by Paul Guillaume’s disappearance, Derain withdrew to his estate in Chambourcy, distancing himself from the Paris art scene.

“Utrillo is worth having”, Apollinaire wrote to Paul Guillaume in September 1915. The dealer, who had known his painting since 1910 thanks to the poet Max Jacob, wasted no time in taking his friend and mentor’s advice and represented him at his gallery.
Maurice Utrillo was born in Paris to the artist’s model and painter Suzanne Valadon, and was legally recognized as his son by the Catalan painter Miguel Utrillo. His native neighborhood of Montmartre, where he spent most of his life, provided him with subjects for hundreds of paintings. Often making use of postcards, he depicted Clignancourt Church and Rue du Mont-Cenis several times, bringing his austere pieces of architecture to life by including little figures of passers-by. The peak of his career, between 1910 and 1914, his so-called “White Period”, is characterized by white impasto, crushed with a knife and sometimes mixed with the plaster that was manufactured on Butte Montmartre at the time, which he combined with subtle shades of grey paint.

In 1922, Paul Guillaume devoted a monographic exhibition to him, comprising a series of thirty-five paintings. The event heralded the beginnings of the artist’s success, although he then started to paint more colorful works. The Musée de l’Orangerie conserves one of the finest collections of Utrillo’s paintings in Europe.

Together, Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Guillaume helped promote African art objects and get their aesthetic value recognized. Regarded is many different ways as historical contexts changed, these rare, “exotic” objects had been conserved in cabinets of curiosities since the Renaissance. With the development of ethnology in the 19th century, they became material witnesses to cultures that scientists sought to understand and analyze. As members of the avant-garde, Paul Guillaume and Apollinaire regarded them as works of art in their own right. The artists in their circle, Henri Matisse, André Derain and Pablo Picasso, collected them and drew inspiration from them. Apollinaire campaigned for their inclusion in the Louvre Museum’s collections.

In 1910, as a young employee in an automobile garage, Paul Guillaume put sculptures from Gabon in the window of his workplace and attracted the attention of Apollinaire, who introduced him to the antiquary Joseph Brummer as well as to Picasso. Once he had become an art dealer, Guillaume set about innovating by presenting African sculptures in his gallery alongside modern paintings.

In 1917, together with Apollinaire, he published an album of photographs of “Negro Sculptures”. In it, and in the articles he wrote for various magazines, the gallerist promoted the African art he collected. The same year, Guillaume lent a number of works to the first Dada exhibition, held at the Corray gallery in Zürich. His activity as a dealer also led him to act as advisor and buyer for American collectors and galleries, including Alfred Stieglitz, who held the first exhibition of African art, titled “African Savage Art” in December 1914, at his 291 gallery in New York. Likewise, Guillaume supplied the American collector Albert C. Barnes with works for his foundation. He also organized the first exhibition exclusively devoted to “Negro and Oceanian Art”, at the Devambez gallery, and the great “Negro Festival” of 1919, which drew international attention and paved the way to the infatuation with black cultures that marked the 1920s.

Although he was not the only one to be interested in non-Western arts, Paul Guillaume made an undeniable contribution to their dissemination, opening the way to a radical change of paradigm as to how they were perceived.

African arts were long viewed through the prism of ethnocentrism. The terms “Art Nègre” (Negro art) and “Art des Noirs” (Black Art) come from a terminology in common use in the early 20th century, including by Apollinaire and Paul Guillaume. Designations (primitive arts, tribal arts, non-Western arts, etc.) evolved over the course of the 20th century. These days, we refer to our collections as “African arts” or “non-Western arts”.

Misunderstood for much of his life, Henri Rousseau, aka Le Douanier, finally came to be celebrated by the avant-garde as one of the fathers of modernity in painting.

A municipal employee working as a toll collector in Paris, a job that earned him the nickname “Douanier” (Customs Officer), Henri Rousseau was a self-taught painter. He drew his subjects from books, newspapers and postcards, nourishing them with his fertile imagination and regular visits to the Louvre Museum.

His naïve style was referred to as “primitivist”. He had a profound influence on Pablo Picasso, who was busy developing cubism at the time. The latter held a banquet in Rousseau’s honor in the Bateau-Lavoir’s studios in November 1908, with guests including Guillaume Apollinaire, Marie Laurencin, Georges Braque, Max Jacob, André Salmon and Gertrude and Leo Stein.

Paul Guillaume probably discovered Henri Rousseau’s paintings through Apollinaire, who frequented cubist circles. The dealer acquired some fifty of the artist’s paintings, including such masterpieces as La Noce (The Wedding Party – circa 1905) and La Carriole du père Junier (Father Junier’s Carriole) (1908).