Claude Monet - Auguste Rodin - Lot 32

Lot 32
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Estimation :
6000 - 8000 EUR
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Result : 12 638EUR
Claude Monet - Auguste Rodin - Lot 32
Claude Monet - Auguste Rodin Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 1889. Prefaces by Octave Mirbeau & Gustave Geffroy in first edition (25 x 16.5 cm). Green half-percaline round-back folder, slipcase. A first-edition copy on japon from Paul Gallimard, the only known copy of this famous exhibition catalog - a real book with two prefaces - with a letter from Claude Monet. One of 20 numbered copies on japon, the only deluxe edition of this important catalog of a historic exhibition, with an exceptional dispatch from Monet to one of his first admirers: "à Monsieur Gallimard Claude Monet". Two long, admirable presentations: Geffroy for Rodin, Mirbeau for Monet. Since 1886, the two artists and writers had already formed a close-knit group, in ideals and friendship, a friendship that would last until their deaths. Mirbeau's admiration for Monet was particularly fervent - indeed, he signed most of the prefaces to his forthcoming exhibitions. Since 1882, Georges Petit, an ambitious gallery owner, had been organizing international exhibitions in his vast, sumptuous gallery built in the neoclassical style, where large-scale, nocturnal vernissages coincided with exits from the nearby Opéra Garnier. Petit didn't want to leave the new trends to his competitors (the Durand-Ruels and Goupils), those that were fashionable or those that were about to become so. He seduced and attracted the Impressionists, effectively exhibiting them among the contingent glories of the world, sometimes without dreading contradictions, exhibiting Redon and Monet, Raffaëlli and Sisley, Renoir and Whistler side by side... Monet and Rodin had already taken part in Petit's international exhibitions in 1885, 1886 and 1887. For the 1888 exhibition, when most of the Impressionists had left him to join Durand-Ruel, Monet, Rodin, Renoir and Whistler, who aspired to greater cohesion, proposed a four-person exhibition to Petit. Petit refused at first, then agreed to the 1889 exhibition, but then "for two", and proposed that Monet exhibit with Rodin in June, at the start of the Universal Exhibition. The exhibition was as impressive as the Eiffel Tower... The critics hailed it as an exceptional event. At Petit, Rodin exhibited 36 sculptures, most of them new, including the complete Les Bourgeois de Calais, and Monet 145 paintings covering his output from 1864 to 1889. More than an exhibition, it was a veritable retrospective for Monet, twenty-five years of relentless painting, plagued by incomprehension, sarcasm and financial difficulties. A former student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and owner of the Variétés and Ambigu-comique theaters, Paul Gallimard (1850-1929) was one of the great collectors and bibliophiles of the late 19th century - the father of publisher Gaston Gallimard. Familiar with Huysmans, Zola, Daudet, Mirbeau and Edmond de Goncourt, and a friend of painters whose works he acquired early on, Gallimard was one of the first to collect Impressionism: "when the inexplicable amateur was still sulking over Impressionist painting .. he bought and bought Manets, Pissarros, Degas, Cézannes; he has some admirable ones that didn't cost him much", commented Octave Mirbeau. In 1919, after Rodin's death (1917), Paul Gallimard was charged with handling stolen goods in the resounding affair of the Rodin forgeries, but this affair was settled in 1923 with the donation of a painting by Eugène Carrière to the French state. Provenance: Paul Gallimard.
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