Res Gestae in Autobiography: From Anecdote to Worlding

Abstract

In this paper I analyze Ambroise Vollard’s (1866-1939), Recollections of an Art Dealer (1936 in English) who championed Cézanne, Van Gogh and other avantgarde artists. I examine the anecdote’s interruption of autobiographical narrative allowing Vollard to recreate and critique an array of artworld figures and demonstrate the importance of dealers when a global art market was emerging and dealers were becoming dominant forces in the artworld. The anecdote in autobiography has been understudied; considered lightweight, merely entertaining, it was also a counterhistory for New Historicists and a widespread disruptive device in artists’ and dealers’ autobiographies from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, unlike autobiographical narratives of scientists and philosophers who did not deploy anecdotes. Among anecdotal devices are recreated conversations, making autobiographers into characters in their own stories. Anecdotes, the intrusion of the real, contributed to worlding, the creation of the intersubjectivity of the author’s past world. Finally, dealers’ autobiographies have unique temporalities: writing in the present about the past like all autobiographers, in their past they anticipated the future, supporting avantgarde artists at great financial risks. These intertwined temporalities are underscored by anecdotage’s free associations, interruptions, and citations of names of celebrities and social circles.