Pace yourself at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s astounding exhibition “Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde.” By the time I reached the last gallery (devoted to Picasso) where — along with a cache of the artist’s early canvases, drawings, prints, illustrated books, and sculptures — two walls are hung salon style with the complete 100 prints from Picasso’s “Vollard Suite” (1939), I was too exhausted and exhilarated to take in fully this monumental series. I was too overwhelmed to make it to the show’s curatorial peak.

The “Vollard Suite,” commissioned by Picasso’s first dealer, Ambroise Vollard (the immeasurably important Frenchman around whom the exhibition revolves), is a sweeping tour de force. Epic in scope, the series of black-and-white prints is probably the greatest and most complete single exploration and meditation on the relationship between artist and model; between artist and art. Erotic, visceral, and heroic, filled with artists, nudes, gods, and monsters, the “Vollard Suite” is a vivisection of the creative process in the studio. The series summons and grapples with the history of Western art and mythology through the mind and eyes of Picasso. The influence of Ingres, Greek vases, Rubens, El Greco, Goya, and Delacroix are all right there with Picasso in the studio, as he takes us on a journey that, as fast as a flip book and as vast as a novel, gets at the essence of pictorial creation.

The “Vollard Suite” alone rewards hours of viewing in “Cézanne to Picasso,” which, organized at the Met by Gary Tinterow and Rebecca Rabinow, will move on to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musée d’Orsay. After you have been greeted at the entrance to the show by two life-size bronze Venuses, one by Renoir and one by Maillol, the exhibition proceeds with a wall of 30 color lithographs by Bonnard, Denis, Vuillard, and Roussel and a wall of charcoal and pastel drawings by Redon. Add to this a room of Cézanne and a room of van Gogh; as well as artists’ books, hand-painted ceramics, sculptures, drawings, and groupings of paintings by Bernard, Bonnard, Degas, Derain, Gauguin, Matisse, Renoir, Rouault, Vlaminck, and Vuillard, and you have approximately eight or 10 individual exhibitions that, like major rivers, all flow into the sea that is Modern art.

A number of these works will be familiar to viewers who frequent museums around America and Europe; and not everything is first-rate, although the gallery of 20 Cézanne paintings is breathtaking. The show draws heavily on the permanent collections of the Met and of other major American and European museums; but there are also numerous surprises — many of which are rarely seen — from private and public collections.

The show — highlighting provenance when, for once, provenance really matters — also brings together masterpieces owned by masters: Cézanne, Matisse, Renoir, and Henri Rousseau paintings owned by Picasso; Cézannes owned by Renoir, Degas, and Matisse (the small, magnificent “Three Bathers” [c. 1879-82]); Gauguins and van Goghs owned by Degas; a Maillol owned by Rodin. And seeing these works — all of which were either commissioned, exhibited, sold, or owned by the French dealer Vollard — together for the first time, provides us with yet a deeper understanding not only of Modern art and artists but also of a particular man and a particular time and place: Ambroise Vollard and fin de siècle Paris.

Henri-Louis-Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939), the most important art dealer and fine-art publisher in Paris at the turn of the 20th century, had a keen eye and a shrewd business sense. His groundbreaking survey of paintings by Cézanne, in 1895, the first major show of the artist’s work in 20 years, introduced Cézanne to Picasso, Renoir, and Matisse. Vollard’s shows of Cézanne put the artist on the map. For Vollard, Cézanne secured fortune and fame (680 of Cézanne’s paintings, two-thirds of his total output, passed through Vollard’s hands). For Picasso and Matisse, Cézanne was the chief influence — leading Picasso to Cubism, and Matisse to Fauvism, which enabled the birth of 20th-century abstraction.

Vollard, in turn, brought his artists, especially Matisse, van Gogh, and Picasso, to the attention of dealers and the greater public. In 1901, he mounted the first show of Picasso; in 1904, that of Matisse. Cézanne held Vollard in the highest regard. Picasso learned how to do business from the dealer. Referring to how he himself dealt in the art world, Picasso said that he “based his own maneuvers on Vollard’s tactics.” Vollard’s “tactics” seemed to involve extreme patience and seriousness; evasion of customers; hoarding works that were in demand until they increased in value; feigning sleep; stonewalling customers; and increasing, instead of lowering, prices whenever a collector haggled. Matisse, who was less reverent of the dealer, referred to Vollard behind his back as “Fifi the Thief.”

Regardless of his astute business sense and his perceived ruthlessness, Vollard most certainly loved art, and he was serious and devoted. In the early 1890s, when he was at his most destitute — without food, money, or a winter coat — he refused to sell the paintings that he had starved himself to buy. Putting his love of art before that of money, Vollard, a rare individual then, is, with a few exceptions, practically nonexistent among dealers today. If I have a reservation about “Cézanne to Picasso,” which puts its art historical emphasis on the “dealer” instead of the art, it is that dealers may come away from the exhibition with delusions and fantasies of grandeur. The only reason the show works is because Vollard, a visionary, had a great eye.

One of the pinnacles of “Cézanne to Picasso,” midway through the exhibition, is the grouping of portraits of Vollard — all of them masterpieces. They not only take us from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism to Cubism, they give us a full sense of the dealer: the philosophy of the man who, when he saw his first Cézanne and, later, Matisse recalled that, coveting the pictures, he was struck by the paintings “like a kick in the stomach.”

A portrait by Bonnard has Vollard at the center of the canvas. Weighted and dark, he is orbited by pictures and sculpture. Vollard’s outstretched hand (clearly, the oversized hand of a dealer) is bigger than his head, and he acts as ballast to the room and to the painting. In one of Renoir’s portraits, Vollard, glistening with brushwork — his folded hands like some strange creature in his lap; his stare resolute — is dressed like a Toreador ready for battle. Cézanne’s portrait is more somber. Vollard’s head, as if the dealer is drifting off to sleep, pivots precariously on his shoulders; yet, again, the dealer’s hand is huge — solid as a rock. In Picasso’s Cubist portrait from 1910, Vollard, eyes closed and held tight, is entombed within the canvas. Built out of faceted forms, the dealer is the subject, bedrock, and architecture of the picture; yet, also dissolving in the painting, Vollard is somewhere beyond. Possibly he is contemplating his next purchase.

Until January 7 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).