May 2, 1986
The Art of Cézanne: From the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, an exhibition of thirty-four of the artist’s works, including oils, watercolors, drawings, and prints, will be on view at The Brooklyn Museum, in the fifth floor galleries, from May 2 through July 14, 1986. The exhibition presents more than a third of the noted collection of Post-Impressionist painting gathered by Henry Pearlman from the mid-1940s through the early 1970s and provides a substantial and illuminating experience of Cézanne’s artistic vision.
While the Pearlman collection concentrates on the period after 1890 and in particular the years from 1900 to the artist’s death in 1906, it also includes a number of works from Cézanne’s early years. Among the oil paintings on exhibition is the monumental Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves of 1902; among the watercolors, several illuminating studies of Cezanne’s favorite landscape motifs and three notable still-life compositions. One of these, the Three Pears of 1888-90, was exhibited in the artist’s first one-man show in 1895 and was so favored by Degas and Renoir that they had to draw straws to see who would get it; Degas won, and Three Pears remained with him.
Some interesting comparisons are afforded the visitor by the fact that other exhibitions of 19th-century French art are also on view at the Museum. A drawing dating from 1870 in the Pearlman collection is a study for the oil Pastorale, which is in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, on view through May 5. A small, exquisite head of the artist’s son, Paul, can be compared to the 1885 full-length drawing of the same subject on view through 1986 among the selections from the Alex Hillman Family Foundation collection. Also in the Hillman collection are a Still Life with Apples and Pears of the same period and a splendid late watercolor, The Cathedral at Aix, which is a view from the studio where in those last years the artist made so many of the works we are privileged to see in the Pearlman collection.
The Brooklyn Museum is grateful to Mrs. Henry Pearlman and to the Foundation for generously agreeing to lend the works in the exhibition.
Black-and-white photographs are available upon request.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1971 - 1988. 1986, 134. View Original
