It is the 20 years of friendship between the painter Jean Puy and Ambroise Vollard – one of the greatest Parisian art dealers of the early 20th century – that are traced at the Musée de Pont-Aven until January 2022, through some sixty works that once belonged to the latter.
Jean PUY (1876-1960), Self-portrait – circa 1908 © Musée Joseph Déchelette, Roanne
Half a century after Jean Puy’s death, the exhibition presented from June 2021 to January 2022 at the Musée de Pont-Aven—after the Musée Joseph-Déchelette in Roanne—highlights a key period in his career: the twenty-year relationship (1905–1926) with one of the major figures of modern painting, the dealer Ambroise Vollard.
His role in relation to Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse and the young Picasso is well known. The relationship with Puy, often mentioned but poorly understood, receives particular attention in this exhibition.
Between them, exchanges were numerous, even before the “tacit contract” that bound them after the 1905 Salon d’Automne, where the Fauves were revealed. It was in 1900, at the Vollard gallery, that Puy, accompanied by Matisse, discovered Cézanne and the lessons he could draw from him. Ubu à la guerre—illustrated by Puy between 1919 and 1921, written and published by Vollard—was nourished by the accounts the painter gave the dealer in their correspondence during the Great War. Vollard thus opened up new horizons for the painter by associating him with one of his passions: art publishing. He did the same by putting him in contact—just as he did for Derain, Vlaminck, Matisse, Rouault…—with the ceramist Metthey.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the work of re-examining, analysing and putting Jean Puy’s oeuvre into perspective has accelerated. Following the publication of a substantial monograph (2000), the Catalogue raisonné of the painted works (2001) and the creation of a dedicated website, and after the retrospective at the Musée Marmottan Monet (2004–2005), major exhibitions such as “Les Fauves et la critique” (Turin, Lodève, 1999), “Jean Puy, une amitié artistique : Matisse, Marquet, Manguin, Camoin” (Villefranche-sur-Saône, 2007), “Jean Puy et la Méditerranée” (Saint-Tropez, Roanne, 2009–2010), “Jean Puy, plénitude d’un Fauve” (Montbéliard, 2016), “Jean Puy / Ambroise Vollard. Un Fauve et son marchand” marks a new step forward.
The vision of an oeuvre made up of constants and, to the very end, of ongoing exploration, broadens. Guiding lines—whose conjunction can sometimes be surprising—emerge. Themes, settings and recurring figures punctuate this journey: the mysterious woman painter and her female model, the silent theatre of the studio, the pensive doll, the erotica, by turns sensual and bawdy…
There is no doubt that the exhibition “Un Fauve et son marchand” will deepen our understanding of an oeuvre of which Apollinaire said: « Puy’s painting is without sadness and wholly imbued with a spiritual and voluptuous grace. »
« There is mixed into it, wrote his brother, the art critic Michel Puy, in 1920, a touch of almost delirious fantasy, which Jean Puy strives to master but which is very much part of his temperament. »
Hervé Labrid, Jean Puy expert.
Jean Puy/Ambroise Vollard, a Fauvist and his dealer – curatorship: Claude Allemand, Honorary General Curator of Heritage, and Eric Moinet, General Curator of Heritage, from 26 June 2021 to 2 January 2022, at the Musée de Pont-Aven, Place Julia. Tel. 02 98 06 14 43.