Houston Museum of Fine Art provides fresh take on French art scene

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Visitors look at works by artists Chaim Soutine, Amadeo Modigliani and Jacques Lipchitz in "The Beehive" section of "Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Pearlman Foundation," on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through Sept. 17. Paintings by Chaim Soutine are also in that section of the exhibition. Photo by Andy Coughlan

This portait of artists Marsden Hartley by Jacques Lipchitz and paintings by Chaim Soutine are part of "Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Pearlman Foundation," on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through Sept. 17. Paintings by Chaim Soutine are also in that section of the exhibition. Photo by Andy Coughlan

This watercolor by Paul Cezanne is part of "Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Pearlman Foundation," on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through Sept. 17,. Photo by Andy Coughlan

"Henry Pearlman" "by POskar Kokoschka is part of "Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Pearlman Foundation," on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through Sept. 17,. Photo by Andy Coughlan

"Mont Sainte-Victoire" by Paul Cezanne is part of "Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Pearlman Foundation," on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through Sept. 17,. Photo by Andy Coughlan

A portrait of Léon Indenbaum and a limestone sculpted head, both by Amadeo Modigliani are part of "Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Pearlman Foundation," on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through Sept. 17,. Photo by Andy Coughlan

"View of Céret" by Chaim Soutine is part of "Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Pearlman Foundation," on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through Sept. 17,. Photo by Andy Coughlan

Do you ever get the ‘Impression" that there is a new show every year about the fin-de-siècle French art scene? What more can be learned? Well, in the hands of a skilled curator the answer is a lot.

"Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Pearlman Foundation," on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through Sept. 17, is a very tidy exhibition featuring 38 works from the Pearlman and MFAH collections. Curator Ann Dumas has cleverly separated the works into a series of small rooms, each themed around a specific idea, rather than an unwieldy overview of the whole scene.

Pearlman was born in New York in 1895, and his is a classic American rage-to-riches story. As a young man he founded the Eastern Cold Storage Insulation Corporation which manufactured marine insulation.

"The interesting thing about Henry Pearlman is he, as an art collector and connoisseur, is completely self-taught," Dumas said. "He had very little formal education. He came from a Russian Jewish immigrant background, his grandparents had emigrated to New York, and he was born on the Lower East Side, and then brought up in Brooklyn. And he left school at 17 and set his own business up — he was in cold storage refrigeration."

Pearlman did not have any formal art training, and did not buy his first piece of art, by the Belarusian-French artist Chaim Soutine, until he was 50.

"(It was) ‘View of Céret,’ which he saw in a window of a dealers in Manhattan at the end of 1945 in the winter on a rather dreary day," she said. "And it just, kind of, leapt out at him with its power and its color."

Pearlman loved Soutine, Dumas said, and there are seven in the show. They are linked in a room with works by Amadeo Modigliani and Jacques Lipchitz. All three were Jewish immigrants living in the Montparnasse area of Paris known as "The Beehive." The artists were poor and struggled together.

It is always a delight to see Soutine's work. Rough almost violent brushstrokes make his landscapes border on abstraction. His portraits border on the grotesque, yet they are also beautiful. His self-portrait is not designed to flatter.

"View of Ceret" is expressive and turbulent. The landscape is tilted at an angle and painted with thick brushstrokes. It is not abstract, but the details are barely discernible. Soutine is underrated perhaps because he stands as a bridge between Post-Impressionism and the Expressionist artists that would follow later in the century. It could be argued he was painter ahead of his time.

Soutine is often known more for his friendship with Modigliani, whose story is more romantically tragic — he died at the age of 36 from tubercular meningitis. The Italian's elongated figures draw on ethnic or indigenous works. Pearlman's collection supplies a brilliant portrait of Jean Cocteau (although the poet himself was not a fan of the work). Despite being painted in 1916, the portrait has a timeless modernism. Indeed, Modigliani's work is far more popular today than it was in his lifetime. As well as the paintings, one of Modigliani's carved limestone heads, from the Pearlman collection, is also on display next to his painting of sculptor Léon Indenbaum. This pairing shows the relationship between Modigliani's painting and sculpture.

Pearlman's other favorite painter was Paul Cezanne, who is considered the father of modern art. Slightly older than the Impressionists, his work was nevertheless a great influence on them. The Cezanne room offers the highlight of the exhibition — a series of the artist's watercolors. It is rare to see them as they are delicate and rarely travel. We get to see the dynamic brushstrokes of landscapes such as "Mont Sainte-Victoire" from 1904-06 that inspired younger artists such as Pablo Picasso and George Braque to develop Cubism. But the landscapes show that Cezanne also used his watercolor brushstrokes in the same way. We clearly see the slab-style brushstrokes for which he is famous.

Dumas said Pearlman bought art based on a purely emotional and visceral response but would then take it upon himself to learn everything about the artist.

"In his lunchtimes, he'd go to the great museums and the libraries like the Frick Library in New York Public Library, and really studied them," she said. "He got very interested in their lives and their friendships. He went to Paris a lot. He went several times down to Aix-en-Provence in the south of France, and he tried to work out the exact viewpoints that Cezanne painted his landscapes."

Pearlman even became friendly with some of the artists. He was sculpted by Lipchitz and the closing piece in the exhibition is a portrait of the collector by the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka.

Works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and others are also in the exhibition.

"Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Pearlman Foundation" is a lovely exhibition. It is not so large that one gets overwhelmed, but there is still much to enjoy. The smaller scale allows one to really get to know the works. It also is a testament to the sharp eye of Henry Pearlman. The advice for any art collector is to buy what one likes. Pearlman may have been "uneducated" but what he chose to collect shows a bold and intelligent vision.

MFAH is located at 1001 Bissonnet St. in Houston. For more, visit mfah.org.