A 1916 portrait of the French poet, artist, and intellectual Jean Cocteau painted by Amedeo Modigliani is among a trove of works headed to the Brooklyn Museum as part of a major gift from the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation. Along with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the institution is set to receive dozens of modern, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist artworks.
The foundation’s entire collection of 63 pieces, which includes paintings by Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Edgar Degas, will be distributed among the three institutions, the organization announced today, August 4.
The collection was amassed by the late Henry Pearlman, the founder of a cold storage installation company that rose to prominence in the 1940s, and his wife Rose. In a press statement, the foundation said the gift was made in the spirit of the couple’s “populist values” of sharing their collection for the enjoyment of the public. The collection has been on loan to the Princeton University Art Museum since 1976.
The Pearlman Foundation said it allocated its gift according to the capabilities and priorities of each institution. The Brooklyn Museum will receive 29 collection items, including sculptures and paintings by French Expressionist Chaïm Soutine and works by Paul Gauguin. A total of 28 pieces will head to the MoMA, primarily by Cézanne, including works from the series Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902–6). The foundation’s president, Daniel Edelman, said the organization entrusted Cézanne’s works to the MoMA because it has “one of the finest departments of drawings and prints that we know.”
LACMA will receive a smaller gift of six artworks, including van Gogh’s 1888 painting “Tarascon Stagecoach” (1888), the first piece by the Dutch artist to enter the musuem’s collection.
Before heading to the permanent collections of the three major museums, the Pearlman works will travel to both coasts in an exhibition titled Village Square: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection. From February to July 2026, the show will be on view at LACMA before traveling to the Brooklyn Museum in the fall and to MoMA at a later date, which has not yet been announced.
The foundation said in a news release that it has established guidelines with the institutions to encourage “flexible movement of 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,” the foundation’s president Daniel Edelman said in the statement.
