Image: Brooklyn Museum, New York
The Brooklyn Museum will open ‘Cézanne to Modigliani: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection’ on October 2, 2026, bringing together more than 50 modern European masterpieces. The museum describes the presentation as one of the most important gifts of European art in its history.
The exhibition celebrates the transformative gift of the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection to the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Its title names Paul Cézanne and Amedeo Modigliani, while the selection also includes works by Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Chaïm Soutine.
The works span paintings, sculptures and works on paper. The museum’s presentation centers the collectors as well as the artists, describing Henry and Rose Pearlman as the people who brought the collection together. That collecting story gives the Brooklyn showing a clear institutional context: the gift connects the exhibition to three major museums, even as the presentation is staged at the Brooklyn Museum.
One identified work is Amedeo Modigliani’s ‘Jean Cocteau’ (1916), an oil on canvas listed as a gift of the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation and Family. The portrait is included in the exhibition’s accompanying image information, providing a specific example of the works associated with the gift.
‘Cézanne to Modigliani’ is co-organized by the Brooklyn Museum and LACMA. Lisa Small, the Brooklyn Museum’s Senior Curator of European Art, curates the Brooklyn presentation. The exhibition’s opening places the museum’s European-art gift in view through a selection that includes the title artists alongside Degas, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Soutine, with the Pearlman Collection providing the organizing subject.
