BARCELONA, SPAIN.- The new Caixaforum presents the exhibition "From Renoir to Picasso. Masterpieces from the Musée de l'Orangerie," on view through June 30, 2002. It features a selection of master works from the Musée de l'Orangerie. As this French museum is currently undergoing renovations, a selection of paintings has been sent on a one-time world tour. From Renoir to Picasso presents eighty-one masterpieces from the Walter-Guillaume Collection, which was assembled primarily by an art dealer, patron and collector by the name of Paul Guillaume. When Paul Guillaume died on October 1, 1934, at the age of forty-two, he might well have uttered the last words attributed to Cardinal Mazarin: "What a pity to leave all this!" For art dealer and art lover Guillaume, "this" consisted of an impressive private collection and the choice works he reserved for his clients. Discreet to the point of secretiveness, his personality was discernible only through the objects he collected and the artists that interested him. Guillaume had grown up amid the avant-garde artistic controversies of Fauvism, Cubism, the Ballets Russes and the dawn of abstract art.
It was in a Paris largely emptied of its creators by World War I that Guillaume, whose health had exempted him from military service, embarked upon a career in which the brashness of youth was rivalled only by the shrewdness of connoisseurship. His exhibitions of Derain in 1916 and, two years later, Matisse and Picasso, lent the art scene a semblance of vitality. Next, his interest turned to De Chirico, Vlaminck, Modigliani and Utrillo and he expended a great deal of effort promoting painters like Cézanne and Rousseau, whom the public had not yet come to terms with. Erudite, as well as innovative, he published carefully crafted catalogues to accompany his exhibitions. His magazine Les Arts à Paris, which first appeared in 1918, devoted a prominent place not only to modern art, but also to what was known as art nègre, or African art.
If we are to believe Colette Giraudon, Guillaume was still a teenager when he discovered African art. He only bought his first Picassos to sell so he could acquire African sculpture, which he later sold to - Picasso. In an undated note addressed to "Mr. Picasso, painter, 11 Blvd. De Clichy", he wrote: "Sir, I have learned from Mr. Apollinaire that you are interested in my African statues. I have six at hand that I can bring to your home at a time that is convenient to you."
