The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation will disperse every artwork under its ownership to three museums: the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. Of the 63 works in the gift, 29 are headed to the Brooklyn Museum, 28 will go to MoMA, and 6 will be directed to LACMA. Across the gift are modernist jewels: paintings by Paul Cézanne, Amedeo Modigliani, Vincent van Gogh, Édouard Manet, and more. Some of those works had been on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey. But they have now found a permanent home in these three institutions, which rank among the top in the country. In a statement, Daniel Edelman, the foundation’s president, said, “Rather than put conditions on the gift that would become limiting in a future that none of us can know, we created a set of guidelines to encourage these three institutions to collaborate on a flexible movement of the art among them. Our aim is to bring these major works to new audiences, allowing them to be seen in different contexts, reuniting our collection’s works with one another on a regular basis, and perhaps even inspiring collectors and museums to consider new models for ownership of art.” An exhibition devoted to the collection will open at LACMA in July 2026 and travel to the Brooklyn Museum afterward. Below, a look at nine works from the gift. Given to: MoMA Cézanne produced around 30 paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, making them exceptionally valuable within his oeuvre. Prior to the gift, MoMA only owned a watercolor sketch depicting the mountain, which Cézanne renders in his famed proto-Cubist way, fracturing its peak and various inclines into mismatched shapes. Given to: MoMA Cézanne is famous for his paintings of his hometown of Aix-en-Provence and its surroundings. This work depicts a cistern that Cézanne spotted on a road near the city on the grounds of the Château Noir, a neo-Gothic castle that the artist repeatedly returned to in his work. Given to: MoMA MoMA’s acclaimed 2021 exhibition “Cézanne Drawing” focused specifically on the artist’s works on paper, which are less well-known than his paintings. This pencil and watercolor drawing of a skull figured in that exhibition. Given to: Brooklyn Museum Though well-known for his lurid images of French bars and nightlife during the late 19th-century, Toulouse-Lautrec also produced such as this one, which is more quaint than it might first appear. It’s intentionally meant to mock the works of Puvis de Chavannes, who produced a similar painting that did not feature the parade of modern men on the righthand side. Given to: LACMA Now the only van Gogh painting in LACMA’s collection, this work is meant to picture a means of transportation that was quickly growing outmoded in modern France. The work was inspired by the 1872 novel Tartarin de Tarascon, by Alphonse Daudet. Given to: Brooklyn Museum Though better known for his paintings of ballet dancers, Degas also made images of nude bathers that did not idealize their subjects, as many painters before him did. Shown from behind, this bather appears unnaturally pitched over her tub. Given to: LACMA Lehmbruck was acclaimed for the ways he took up classical representations of the human body and distorted them, elongating arms, legs, and heads for works that bespoke a sense of alienation unique to his era. This is the first Lehmbruck sculpture to enter LACMA’s collection. Given to: Brooklyn Museum Soutine often left his paint strokes thick and chunky, creating surfaces that felt as rugged as the material he was representing. This painting depicts the small French town of Céret, whose angular streets may have inspired the work’s unusual composition. Given to: Brooklyn Museum Jean Cocteau, a multi-hyphenate modernist whose work was itself the subject of a recent retrospective, gets the typical Modigliani treatment here, with a long face and almond-shaped eyes. “It does not look like me, but it does look like Modigliani, which is better,” Cocteau said of the work.
