Museum Notes: Art Institute Vollard

Before it ended, I made it to the Art Institute exhibit, Ambrose Vollard: Patron of the Avant-Garde. This art gallery owner and dealer and patron of nineteenth turn-of-the-century and early twentieth-century artists, and later a publisher of illustrated books, had an impressive collection of works by Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gaugin, and others. What impressed me most were several paintings that I had not seen before, like Picasso's blue period, "The Old Guitarist", Gaugin's massive, mural sized "Where Do We Come From...", and a Van Gogh Starry Night. The book published about the exhibit by the Art Institute, a collection of essays, seems a worthwhile investment to learn more about Vollard's relations to the artists he knew.
http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/picasso/works.html