page_title: Henry Pearlman
section_title: Art collector
hierarchical_section_title: Henry Pearlman / Art collector
caption_attribution_description: English: Chaïm Soutine, Russian, active in France, 1893–1943 View of Céret, ca. 1921–22 Oil on canvas 74 x 85.7 cm. (29 1/8 x 33 3/4 in.) frame: 100 x 104.7 cm (39 3/8 x 41 1/4 in.) The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum L.1988.62.26
context_page_description: Henry Pearlman was a Brooklyn-born, self-made businessman, and collector of impressionist and post-impressionist art. Over three postwar decades, he assembled a "deeply personal" and much revered collection centered on thirty-three works by Paul Cézanne and more than forty by Vincent van Gogh, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaïm Soutine, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and a dozen other European modernists.
context_section_description: While Pearlman initially decorated his Croton home with Old Master and American Realist paintings,  including those found at local flea markets, he later turned to expressionist paintings. In 1945, he purchased an expressionist painting by Chaïm Soutine – View of Céret (formerly Village Square, Céret). Pearlman quickly made connections in the New York art world and traded his decorative collection for carefully selected examples of modern works by impressionist, post-impressionist and expressionist European artists. 
  In the years after World War II, Pearlman began traveling to Europe. During an early trip to London he met Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. This would result in a lifelong friendship for Pearlman with one of the few living artists whose work he collected. On this same trip he also visited the places where Soutine had painted. Ultimately, Pearlman's collection would include seven paintings by Soutine, and four works by Modigliani, including a rare limestone head and two oil portraits (Léon Indenbaum and Jean Cocteau).
  Although successful in business, Pearlman was never able to match the resources of his contemporaries. Instead, "he was both lucky and clever: lucky in that, when he first started, the art he was interested in…could be secured for thousands rather than millions of dollars…and clever in that he continuously honed his eye and then applied his skills… to obtain the objects of his passion." In 1950, Pearlman learned from a dealer that Van Gogh’s Tarascon Diligence was available from the heirs of the artist Milo Beretta. He offered a combination of paintings and cash to acquire the long lost painting, the last time. Also in 1950, with the advice of noted Cézanne specialist John Rewald, Pearlman made his first purchase of a Cézanne watercolor, Cistern in the Park of Château Noir. Over the following two decades, he acquired more than thirty works by Cézanne and assemble a distinguished collection of watercolors by the artist. 
  In addition to Modigliani, he added works by Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Degas, Renoir and Gauguin as well as several significant oil paintings by Cézanne, including the only known vertical-format of the artist’s favorite subject, Mont Sainte-Victoire. Pearlman continued to build his collection for the three remaining decades of his life. His last two purchases were Cézanne watercolors: a late masterpiece (Still Life with Carafe, Bottle, and Fruit) and Rocks at Bibémus.
caption: Chaïm Soutine, View of Céret, ca. 1921-22
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