Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Carafe, Bottle, and Fruit, 1906
Henry Pearlman liked to say that every time he saw his art collection, it gave him a lift. We should all be so lucky. His highly selective collection is far from the grand holdings of Alfred Barr, Isabella Stewart Gardner, or Samuel Kress, but no less remarkable. In fact, it is an enviable group of paintings and sculpture that describes the uniquely acquisitive personality of a cold-storage magnate from Brooklyn.
The son of Russian immigrants, Pearlman (1895–1974) started out as a cork salesman and went on to make a fortune in marine refrigeration and as a distributor of a new product called Styrofoam. After World War II boosted demand for Pearlman’s product, he and his wife began collecting art, at first strictly for decorative purposes. Pearlman’s early purchases were aesthetically wide-ranging, to say the least: Fernand Léger, Gustave Courbet, Eugene Speicher, and Ernest Lawson, among others. The purchase in 1945 of Chaim Soutine’s View of Céret (c.1921–22) for $825 completely changed his approach to art even as it “provided a revelation about prices,” as Pearlman notes in his collection of essays, Reminiscences of a Collector.
Soutine’s expressionistic view of the town of Céret, hardly a picturesque French village, is a dynamic, heavily-impastoed exploration of what happens when the picture plane is anchored by neither horizontals nor verticals. Pearlman also collected several Soutine portraits, works tinged with melancholy and ambiguity. The artist’s characteristic psychological acuity even comes through in Hanging Turkey (c.1925), a brutal still life against a shallow background that suggests everything from Dutch still lifes to the symbolism of James Ensor and the flayed style of Francis Bacon.
Chaim Soutine, Hanging Turkey (c.1925)
Overall, Pearlman’s collection of portraits offers a concise lesson in how modern artists have reinterpreted and amplified an academic motif. Courbet’s head study from c.1845 is exquisitely modeled and richly shadowed, with the sitter’s lower lip pushed out in resignation or perhaps frustration. It is easy to see why John Ashbery described this work in 1974 as “shot through with spiritual electricity.” Honoré Daumier’s Head of an Old Woman (c.1856–60) is a quietly devastating example of the master’s skill at la peinture des moeurs, a portrait of such simplicity that it seems to tell the woman’s full life story in three colors.
With Modigliani’s 1916 portrait of Léon Indenbaum, Pearlman had the good fortune to hear from the sitter himself how the painting came about. Modigliani had seen Indenbaum at a café and was eager to paint him, but Indenbaum would have to provide canvas and paint. Modigliani came to Indenbaum’s atelier the next day, hungover but eager to work, and Indenbaum began showing him some unsold paintings by other artists, assuming that they could be painted over. Modigliani rejected several of these, saying they were too good to spoil, but at last settled on a still life and scraped off the existing paint. After three sittings, the portrait was finished. “Several weeks later,” Pearlman relates, “Indenbaum, being short of money, sold his portrait for forty francs (eight dollars). When he finally explained to Modigliani that he was forced to sell it, Modigliani said, ‘That’s all right, I’ll do it again.’ However, this never happened.” On close examination, one can still detect the original still life behind Modigliani’s incisive portrait.
Amedeo Modigliani, Léon Indenbaum, 1916
Pearlman’s Reminiscences (selections of which appear in the exhibition catalogue) reveal not only how much the collector relished the hunt for a coveted piece of art, but also how important it was to have business acumen and a well-trained eye. At one point, Pearlman avoids purchasing a fake Cézanne drawing of a house in Aix-en-Provence because he measures the paper and notices that it is an American standard size rather than one that would have been used by a French artist. He also makes an educated guess that the drawing is by Marsden Hartley, who had stayed in the same house where Cézanne once lived. In another anecdote, Pearlman tracks the fortunes of a forged Modigliani portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne, the artist’s tragic mistress. For years, he watched this fake appear at auctions at higher and higher prices. Finally, he saw it displayed in a Modigliani exhibition in Los Angeles, but hung behind a column, making it almost impossible to see. The curator, with considerable chagrin, told Pearlman that he had been forced to hang the work even though he knew it to be fake.
In Manet’s Young Woman in a Round Hat (c.1877–79), a bourgeoise in a jaunty round hat and veil peers sidelong with a knowing gaze. She wears a deep blue walking costume and black gloves—her identity may be unknown, but she is familiar in Manet’s oeuvre as an example of a modern woman shaping her identity through her sense of dress.
Van Gogh’s lively Tarascon Stagecoach captured Pearlman’s attention in the 1940s, and he tracked the painting down in Uruguay, purchasing it in 1950. Van Gogh had sketched the scene in an 1888 letter to his brother, but the whereabouts of the finished product remained a mystery for years, until an Impressionism exhibition in Montevideo in 1935. As Pearlman notes in his Reminiscences, the discovery of this painting, as with so many of his acquisitions, came about through luck and a reluctance to deal with high-profile dealers.
Vincent Van Gogh, Tarascon Stagecoach, 1888
The same year that he purchased the Van Gogh, Pearlman embarked on what would become the core of his collection: more than thirty paintings and works on paper by Cézanne. This includes sixteen watercolors, works toward which Cézanne was famously dismissive. But observing Pearlman’s extraordinary holdings, it becomes clear that Cézanne painted in watercolor not because he was bored, but because it offered a way to work out composition and color challenges in a medium particularly conducive to this kind of aesthetic rumination. Delicate and iridescent, these works duplicate many of the motifs he later rendered in oils, but in watercolor they show more directly the correspondence between natural and plastic forms. Cézanne meets watercolor’s particular demands by beginning with an underdrawing, a practice not unusual among French watercolorists. As catalogue essayist Matthew Simms notes, this results in a division of labor that belies the idea that Cézanne was tossing off these works because he had nothing better to do. The facility with modeling, the mosaic-like patches of pure color, and the deliberately considered surfaces indicate that Cézanne was engaged in a singular intellectual exercise, exploring representation through the peculiar economy of water and pigment.
The exhibition’s catalogue gives full-dress treatment to Pearlman’s collection, with fascinating excerpts from his Reminiscences, a chronology, and essays that treat the artists individually and thematically. Pearlman himself comes across as congenial and candid—the photographs of him in his office surrounded by his artworks present a uniquely American concept of the collector as autodidact and inspired capitalist. How refreshing this is in today’s climate of anti-intellectualism and anti-commerce.
Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art From the Pearlman Collection opened at the Vancouver Art Gallery on February 7th, and will be on view through May 18, 2015. It next travels to the Princeton University Art Museum, where it will be on view from September 12, 2015 through January 3, 2016.