Image: San Antonio Museum of Art
The San Antonio Museum of Art has opened 'Renoir to Picasso: The Robertson Family Collection', a loan exhibition built around 17 works by artists associated with European modern art from roughly the 1870s through the 1940s. The show, now on view at SAMA, brings together paintings and related works that trace some of the major movements of the period, including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism and Cubism.
According to the museum, the exhibition presents a sequence of artistic innovations that changed how audiences encountered painting, especially in France, where a period of intense creative activity helped spark what the museum describes as a revolution in art. The works in the Robertson Family Collection emphasize shifts in color, brushwork and perspective, from outdoor painting and loose handling to more subjective color and the breakdown of conventional pictorial space into increasingly abstract forms.
The exhibition includes works by Pierre Renoir, Armand Guillaumin, Vassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso and Samuel John Peploe, among others. One featured Picasso work is 'Bust of a Woman', summer 1953, and the SAMA listing also identifies a 1908 study by Kandinsky and a 1928 still life by Léger. The selection ranges from earlier pictures such as Guillaumin’s 'The Suspension Bridge', circa 1873, to mid-20th-century modernism.
SAMA notes that the exhibition also includes two works from its permanent collection. In addition, other works from the Robertson Family Collection by Alexander Calder, George Rickey and Franz Kline may be viewed in the museum’s second-floor Modern and Contemporary galleries, extending the presentation beyond the main exhibition space. The museum’s exhibition page also shows the display on view from June 12, 2026, to June 10, 2029.
The Robertson Collection presentation sits alongside the museum’s broader collecting context, which includes modern and contemporary art as well as historical material from other periods and regions. In this case, the loaned works are paired with SAMA holdings to frame a survey of European modern art through a small but wide-ranging group of objects rather than a single school or decade. The installation draws on the museum’s permanent collection to place the Robertson loans in conversation with SAMA’s own holdings.
The exhibition is funded by the Amy Shelton McNutt Exhibition Endowment and the Helen and Everett H. Jones Exhibition Endowment. SAMA’s exhibition page identifies the venue as the museum at 200 West Jones Avenue in San Antonio, and the listing for the gallery show remains under the heading 'On View Now'.
