Gifts of Light, Cézanne to Modigliani Lands in Prospect Heights

Jean Cocteau sat for Amedeo Modigliani in 1916. A hundred and ten years later, the portrait has a Brooklyn address.

The Brooklyn Museum opened *Cézanne to Modigliani: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection* on October 2. According to My Modern Met's preview, it gathers more than fifty modern European works. It runs on Eastern Parkway through April 18, 2027.

This is not a loan show with a gift shop attached. It is a housewarming.

A Gift Cut Three Ways

On August 4, 2025, the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation announced that it was giving its entire collection away, split among three museums. According to the foundation and museums' joint announcement, 29 works go to Brooklyn, 28 to the Museum of Modern Art and six to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Brooklyn's share leans on Soutine, Gauguin, Degas and Modigliani. MoMA's leans hard on Cézanne, including a Mont Sainte-Victoire and fifteen of his watercolors. LACMA gets its first paintings by Manet and Van Gogh.

In the announcement, Anne Pasternak, the Brooklyn Museum's director, called the gift "the most significant addition to our European art holdings in nearly a century."

Before the pictures split up, they travel together one last time. The announcement billed the tour as the collection's final run as a single exhibition. The announcement scheduled LACMA's showing for February to July of this year. Brooklyn is the last stop.

Lisa Small, Brooklyn's senior curator of European art, says in comments quoted by My Modern Met that the show gives visitors "a final opportunity to see them all together."

A final opportunity to see them all together.

What Hangs on the Walls

The headline names two artists, and the collection runs well past them. Van Gogh, Manet, Degas, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Sisley and Soutine all appear in the Pearlman holdings, per the announcement.

The Modigliani is the poster. Cocteau, the poet, playwright and filmmaker, comes out long in the face and long in the neck, the way Modigliani saw almost everyone. The portrait is now Brooklyn's. So is a rare limestone *Head* by Modigliani from around 1910 to 1911.

Cézanne is the collector's long obsession. My Modern Met notes how central his landscapes, figure studies and especially his watercolors were to the collection, pointing to sheets like *Study of a Skull* and *Trees Forming an Arch*.

The Couple Behind the Pictures

Henry Pearlman founded a cold storage installation company that rose to prominence in the 1940s, Hyperallergic reports. His first avant-garde purchase, in 1945, was a Soutine landscape. He kept buying until his death in 1974, and he and his wife, Rose, wanted the work seen as widely as possible.

The show tells their story too. My Modern Met says it traces the couple through photographs, letters and archival documents, along with portraits of Henry by Oskar Kokoschka and Jacques Lipchitz.

Brooklyn is not a stranger to these pictures. Since 1976 the collection has been on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum. Between 1960 and 1986, Pasternak said in the announcement, the Brooklyn Museum mounted six exhibitions from it. This one comes nearly forty years after the last, and it ends with the art staying in the borough where the Pearlman family grew up.

Across the East River, MoMA takes its Cézannes home later. On West 53rd Street it is showing a very different kind of book show in the meantime.

What to Know Before You Go

*Cézanne to Modigliani: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection* is on view through April 18, 2027 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway in Prospect Heights. Take the 2 or 3 to Eastern Parkway–Brooklyn Museum. Check the museum's site for hours and tickets before you go.

After April 18 the collection stops hanging together. The pictures keep their light.