Cézanne, Modigliani, and Soutine: Parisian Rebels Who Made Art Modern Reunite at Brooklyn Museum

A horde of more than 50 works is now on display at “Cézanne to Modigliani: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection,” at the Brooklyn Museum. The trove brings together art by Paul Cézanne, Amedeo Modigliani, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Chaïm Soutine to provide a kind of omakase menu of Modernism. These are the artists who crossed the bridge into the 20th century, then detonated it behind them.The Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection has been barnstorming, appearing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and then on to the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Pearlman, the son of Jewish immigrants to America from Russia, prospered in the cork insulation business, forming his own company, Eastern Cold Storage Insulation Corporation. He hung paintings by Manet and Modigliani in his office.Pearlman was prosperous but was hardly a Rothschild or a Rockefeller. He bought his first painting, by Soutine, for $825 in 1945. The Economist reckons that he “was both lucky and clever” and “applied his skills as a successful businessman to obtaining the objects of his passion.” Pearlman himself writes that “If I wanted a painting, I simply had to have it, and quickly.” He acknowledges that luck “played a big part in the development of my collection.”‘Léon Indenbaum’ by Amedeo Modigliani, 1916. Bruce M. White for the Brooklyn MuseumThe exhibition’s showstoppers are its bookends. Cézanne can be seen as the godfather — sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not — of Cubism and its descendants. He is represented here most memorably by “Study of a Skull,” a memento mori rather than the geometrically stark still lifes for which Cezanne is known. The bone is long and low, almost Neandrealithic. The mandible is gone, making the eye sockets appear as wide and deep as swimming pools.A different vision of the body is on display in Degas’s “After the Bath: Woman Drying Herself.” The subject, seen from behind — a portrait in reverse — is all right angles and full skin, the landscape of back and muscle bearing a deep debt to the long-ago sculptures of Michelangelo. A rare limestone “Head,” by Amedeo Modigliani, looks toward an even more distant horizon — the pitiless and far-seeing eyes of the pharaohs.Modigliani, an Italian Sephardic Jew who died at 35, was steeped in the art of antiquity and the Renaissance but discovered at Paris his signature style of elongated faces and figures. The cervix takes center stage in his “Jean Cocteau,” a depiction of the impresario who was introduced to Modigliani by Pablo Picasso. There is something cruel and mocking about the painting. Cocteau quipped “It does not look like me, but it does look like Modigliani, which is better.” ‘Self-Portrait’ by Chaim Soutine, ca. 1918. Bruce M. White for the Brooklyn MuseumA more arresting portrait is Modigliani’s “Léon Indenbaum,” a Jewish sculptor who made his way to Paris from what is now Belarus. Pearlman reports that “One night, Modigliani, while rather drunk, saw Indenbaum, at a cafe and said he would like to paint his portrait, if Indenbaum would furnish a canvas and an easel to work on.” While Cocteau is seen at a distance, Indenbaum is portrayed up close, almost zoomed in. This is one artist looking at another.A third Jewish artist at the center of Paris’s avant-garde was Soutine. The 10th of 11 children born to a Yiddish-speaking family at a shtetl near Minsk, he made his way first to Vilnius and then to Montparnasse. He would say of his hometown that “in a filthy hole like Smilovitchi, one cannot imagine that there are cities like Paris, or music like that of Bach.” He once exclaimed in front of a Rembrandt at the Louvre “It’s so beautiful that it drives me mad!”The Pearlman Collection notes that Soutine, “despite protests from those in his community who believed in Talmudic proscriptions against images, was determined to become an artist.” Soutine was friends with Modigliani, and the two painted each other. This show at the Brooklyn Museum features Soutine’s “Self-Portrait,” which delivers a startling full face perspective. He looks almost prosperous, possibly wishful thinking from the frequently penniless artist.‘After the Bath: Woman Drying Herself,’ by Edgar Degas, ca. 1890s. Bruce M. White for the Brooklyn MuseumSoutine is after wilder game in “Hanging Turkey.” His bird bears little of the stately taxonomic texture of still lifes of dead animals, a venerable artistic tradition — one by Goya hangs at the Prado. Soutine’s turkey is poised between life and death, swinging from the rafters at a poultry mart. It is hard not to think of Soutine, dying from a shredded ulcer in 1943 while hiding from the Nazis.A view of art from an earlier avant-garde is preserved in Manet’s “Young Woman in a Round Hat.” Manet, himself from a well-to-do family, paints a woman of his class, the dark smudge of a black veil making it difficult to read her expression. Compared to the flayed and exposed visions of the painters who came a generation after Manet, this woman is enigmatic. The Belle Époque was still new, the horrors to come still firmly out of view.

Cézanne, Modigliani, and Soutine: Parisian Rebels Who Made Art Modern Reunite at Brooklyn Museum

Cézanne, Modigliani, and Soutine: Parisian Rebels Who Made Art Modern Reunite at Brooklyn Museum

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