Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art from the Pearlman Collection

Henry and Rose Pearlman built an exceptional collection of modernist works during the 1940s and 50s. Central to the Pearlman’s collecting interests were two artists, the great expressionist painter Chaïm Soutine, of whose work Henry Pearlman was one of the earliest American collectors, and, most importantly, Paul Cézanne.

The jewel of the Pearlman Collection is an astonishing group of twenty-four works by Cézanne, including six oils — such as the major Mont Sainte- Victoire (1904–06) — and a singular collection of eighteen watercolours that covers his entire career as an artist. The watercolours — which clearly show Cézanne’s radical technical innovation, where he disconnects line from colour — have a subtle beauty and richness that reward repeated visits to the exhibition. Due to the light sensitivity of the works on paper, half of them will be exhibited during the first portion of the exhibition and the remainder will be on view during the second half.

This exhibition comprises some fifty works and includes major paintings by Edgar Degas, Amedeo Modigliani, Camille Pissarro and Vincent van Gogh among others, as well as sculpture by Paul Gauguin, Wilhelm Lembruck and Jacques Lipchitz.

The works by Degas and van Gogh can truly be called masterpieces. Degas’ After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself, from the 1890s, is a magnificent example of how the artist’s radical vision transformed the depiction of the female body in the late nineteenth century. Far from a conventionally pretty image, this glimpse of day-to-day life during this period owes much to the new art of photography and the sharp cropping of Japanese prints. Van Gogh’s La diligence de Tarascon (Tarascon Stagecoach) (1888) reveals not only the artist’s great gifts as a colourist, but also his willingness to paint unconventional views and find beauty in the quotidian. Also included is Modigliani’s monumental portrait Jean Cocteau (1916), which is one of the artist’s most important paintings.

This is the first time in over fifty years that the Pearlman Collection has travelled as a collection and the Vancouver Art Gallery presentation will be the only one in Canada.

Explore the exhibition further with the mobile-ready website developed by the Princeton University Art Museum.