One of the finest collections of works to be held by a single family, the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection has not toured in its entirety since 1974, when it was placed on long-term loan at the Princeton University Art Museum and where it has remained ever since.  This major exhibition presents Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces from the Pearlman Collection and features paintings and sculptures by artists who were transformative members of the avant-garde of their day. 

A rare opportunity for audiences to discover lesser-known masterworks from beloved artists including Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Vincent Van Gogh, and Amedeo Modigliani, as well as an extraordinary collection of magisterial watercolors, oil paintings, and drawings by Paul Cézanne, this exhibition offers insights not only into the development of Impressionism and Post Impressionism, but into the history of collecting avant-garde art in the United States.  A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art from the Pearlman Collection, at Princeton from Sept. 19 ,2015 to Jan. 3, 2016, has been organized by the Princeton University Art Museum in cooperation with the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation. The exhibition debuted at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford in England on March 13, 2014, with subsequent stops in France, Canada and the U.S. before culminating in Princeton, its final venue this fall.

Cézanne. Van Gogh. Modigliani. How did a relatively modest American entrepreneur named Henry Pearlman (1895–1974) amass such an astonishing collection of modern art—including perhaps the greatest collection of watercolors by Cézanne outside of France—while competing against the high rollers of his day? Through ingenuity, tenacity and sheer luck. The result of Pearlman’s extraordinary vision—the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection—in the exhibition that showcases 50 modern masterworks from the late 19th through early 20th centuries.

The relationship between Princeton University and the Pearlman collection is a special one: through an agreement with the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, since 1976 the collection has been on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum, where highlights are regularly on display and the collection is a critical research and teaching tool.

Over three decades, Henry Pearlman assembled one of the finest collections of European art remaining in private hands. A lifelong New Yorker, Pearlman in 1919 founded the Eastern Cold Storage Company, which made important contributions to marine shipbuilding during World War II. He began seriously collecting avant-garde art in the 1940s with the purchase of a canvas by Chaïm Soutine, a Russian-born artist known for his bold use of color and the intensity of his brushwork. Pearlman quickly became interested in Amedeo Modigliani, another artist of the so-called School of Paris, and eventually began to collect works by some of the artists who influenced them, including Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne.

Pearlman may have lacked the resources of an H. O. Havemeyer or a Sterling Clark, but by assiduous dealing, building close relationships with a number of dealers in the U.S. and abroad, and befriending artists directly he was able to secure numerous paintings that today are deemed masterpieces. He relished the hunt for secreted masterworks and was fascinated by the networks of aesthetic influence and personal relationships among artists. Cézanne and the Modern pivots around Cézanne, whose works compose half of the exhibition, and offers insights into the development of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism as well as the history of collecting avant-garde art in the United States.