In a portrait of writer Jean Cocteau, soon to be exhibited at the High Museum, the surrealist looks surreal.
Painted by his friend Amedeo Modigliani, Cocteau sits with his hands primly folded in his lap, his suit and pocket square impeccable.
Yet the image is otherworldly. His body is attenuated, his neck giraffelike. His face is carved into planes, like an African mask or an Easter Island statue, the pointed chin giving his head the aspect of an inverted isosceles triangle.
The picture is part of a remarkable collection assembled by New York entrepreneur Henry Pearlman, a world traveler and a self-taught aesthete who seemingly hobnobbed with everyone, from collectors to dealers to artists to the subjects themselves.
Cocteau later wrote to Pearlman about the portrait, saying, “It does not look like me, but it does look like Modigliani, which is better.”
“Cezanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art from the Pearlman Collection” opens at the High Museum on Oct. 25, and it will remain there through Jan. 11. It is the first time in 40 years that Pearlman’s collection has been shown outside of Princeton University, where it remains on loan from the Pearlman Foundation to the school’s art museum.
While the Modigliani is one of the highlights of the show, the center of attention will be the 24 works by Modigliani’s predecessor, Paul Cezanne, who, in many senses, introduced modern painting to the world.
The collection of 50 paintings and sculptures also includes work by Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Of the 24 works by Cezanne, 16 are watercolors, which are fragile and rarely exhibited.
Pearlman’s reminiscences about his life, reprinted at www.pearlmancollection.org, show that he relished tracking down great canvases, chatting with dealers, artists and other collectors, attending auctions, and wheeling and dealing. He was adept at bargaining and at sniffing out fakes, and he had a particular fondness for Cezanne.
During the last 20 years of his life Cezanne (1839-1906) frequently painted the looming Mont Sainte-Victoir, one of the dominant features in the landscape of his native Aix-en-Provence. Pearlman acquired one of those canvases and writes of visiting Aix to stand in the same spot where Cezanne did his work so he could look at the same mountain from Cezanne’s vantage.
Pearlman was relentless when he was pursuing a Cezanne that he coveted, assiduously courting a certain dealer and waiting 17 years for one particular watercolor to be offered for sale. That tenacity “is the story of a committed and true collector,” said David Brenneman, the High’s director of collections and exhibitions and the Frances B. Bunzl Family Curator of European Art.
“I’ve actually met some collectors who similarly have stalked their prey over a period of years,” Brenneman said, “and it’s the mark of a really dedicated and obsessed person.”
Bringing this work — and particularly the works by Cezanne— to the High is an important milestone, Brenneman said.
“He’s an incredibly important artist, and we haven’t shown him in the way that he needs to be seen and understood.”
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