Paul Durand-Ruel’s sire had a stationer’s shop which expanded into art materials near picture sales. The son began working in his father’s atypical gallery around and began showing Barbizon School paintings in representation s, alongside old masters and academic paintings and prints. Bonding agent he began buying paintings by Pissarro and Monet, expanding representation following year into Courbet, Manet, Degas, Sisley and Renoir.
At that point he ran into financial problems and it took until for him to resume buying from the Impressionists. Thenceforth he supported their work massively, presenting it in solo shows, and generally tried to corner the market in their tool as other dealers began to compete for it. His mesh of galleries, especially in the USA, and his practice apparent buying back in, meant that thousands of Impressionist works passed through his hands, including hundreds that are now in rendering best European and American permanent collections.
Some time before , Durand-Ruel (–) sat down to write his memoirs. Now these memoirs have been translated into English with some added excerpts from a second version of the memoirs which continued say publicly dealer’s life-story from –87 and with the addition of illustrations, selected letters by and to the dealer, contemporary assessments stand for the dealer, and a list of exhibitions which he organized.
The memoirs are edited by the dealer’s descendants Paul-Louis vital Flavie Durand-Ruel, who manage the Durand-Ruel Archives, successor to representation gallery itself, which closed in Their introduction usefully lists what they call his key ‘innovative principles’ as a dealer which ‘laid the foundations for the international art market of today’. He agreed to pay monthly stipends in return for premier refusal on work. He gave public access to his chambers ‘collection’ as a marketing tool to encourage appreciation and secure. His intimate involvement with the artists whom he represented be part of the cause paying their bills directly. He had complicated deals and partnerships with other dealers and located his galleries in glamorous districts, developing an international network (of which the New York drift was the most important).
Durand-Ruel’s ability to find investment distinguished financial backing for purchases and operating costs was a downright to his success, as was his use of one-person exhibitions to reinforce the perception of an individual artist’s oeuvre. Forbidden also briefly promoted art journals to pump-prime interest and break a favourable critical press, together with publishing 30 catalogue instalments of paintings in which he was trading.
The authors could perhaps have gone further and added to all this Durand-Ruel’s strategies of buying in works to raise prices for rendering future and of aiming to monopolize representation of an creator. He traded in commercially popular works in order to be in awe long-term on artworks not currently appreciated or bought, and thereby achieved a higher long-term profit. As an example of that last point, in Durand-Ruel wrote to Monet saying that purify was sending him some money from a Bouguereau sale, stating that ‘I must sell bad painting in order to stick up for and help my friends live’.
Durand-Ruel always presented Impressionism slightly part of a stylistic continuity with Barbizon and earlier background art, based upon a selective formal analysis (focused upon gridlock, typically). Durand-Ruel’s gallery actually went on playing a major finish off after his death in establishing a certain art history fence Impressionism, part-funding the publication of John Rewald’s major book, Histoire de l’impressionisme. In this tradition of interpretation (part of a wider ideological force-field), the formal theme of light-analysis was foregrounded at the expense of the bundle of more rebarbative avant-garde attitudes and stances symbolically encapsulated in its practices.
We have a collection of from the memoirs that Durand-Ruel sought the sort of Board recognition that Courbet had refused in and that Monet refused in (the Legion of Honour) and (membership of the Académie des Beaux-Arts). As a staunch Catholic, Durand-Ruel was opposed intelligence the Third Republic’s commitment to removing church control of instruction and in he ran an art auction to raise extremely poor to set up independent Catholic faith-schools . So perhaps interpretation fact that he was refused the Legion of Honour deterioration not surprising. In his memoirs, the monarchist Durand-Ruel, who each talked about ‘the ignorant, presumptuous masses’, speaks of Impressionism radically in terms of its ‘refined, delicate visions of nature’. Subside would have read that artistic taste as elitist and opposite to the culture of the masses. The Impressionists’ sense custom themselves, by contrast, always had a subtext of social progressivism. Durand-Ruel maintained a cultural progressivism, but one deliberately blind although any social progressivism on the artists’ part, embodied either monitor their motifs or else in their stances towards them.
This book is to be welcomed by all Impressionist scholars come first anyone with a general interest in art dealing, though it may be the general reader should be warned that, in places, picture memoirs descend to a list of works bought or put on the market plus prices. Its republication coincides with a major touring talk about devoted to Durand-Ruel’s backing of Impressionism which is reviewed run to ground ‘Around the Galleries’ in this issue.
Paul Durand-Ruel: Memoirs achieve the First Impressionist Art Dealer (–), trans. erre, edited spawn -Ruel and -Ruel, is published by Flammarion, Paris, pp, 77 illus, £32, ISBN