Masterpieces by Cézanne, Manet, Degas and More Will Be Divided Among Three Museums in New York and Los Angeles

The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation is donating 63 artworks to the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Elizabeth Djinis | History Correspondent

August 8, 2025

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A collection of dozens of paintings by some of the most renowned artists of the 19th and 20th centuries will be donated to three museums in New York and Los Angeles.

The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation announced that it will be donating its entire collection of 63 works to the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, per a statement.

“We inherited a responsibility, not a collection,” Daniel Edelman, president of the foundation and grandson of the Pearlmans, tells the Los Angeles Times’ Jessica Gelt. “This doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to the public—we’re caretakers of it.”

Twenty-nine works will go to the Brooklyn Museum, including Amedeo Modigliani’s 1916 portrait of the author Jean Cocteau. Meanwhile, LACMA will get six pieces, including its first works by Édouard Manet and Vincent van Gogh. MoMA is receiving 28 artworks, many of them by Paul Cézanne.

Each institution was given artworks focusing on a specific theme: The Brooklyn Museum was selected for “the works that tell Henry [Pearlman]’s story of discovery and for its commitment to engaging a diverse community,” while LACMA was given “works that specifically enhance their ability to innovate around bringing art to where people are,” says Edelman in the statement. MoMA’s gifts will include 15 of Cézanne’s watercolors because it has “one of the finest departments of drawings and prints that we know.”

Before the collection is divided up, it will be displayed in a traveling exhibition—“Village Square: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection to the Brooklyn Museum, LACMA and MoMA”—at each of the three museums.

“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,” adds Edelman.

Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak calls the 29 pieces “the most significant addition to our European art holdings in nearly a century.” She adds that between 1960 and 1986, the Brooklyn Museum hosted six exhibitions dedicated to the Pearlman collection’s holdings, in part because of Henry Pearlman’s Brooklyn roots.

A lifelong resident of New York City, Henry was the founder of a cold storage company. While he never attended college, he “started collecting through this kind of self-taught journey,” Edelman tells the L.A. Times. “Falling in love first with the image or being provoked by it, and then learning what the context was and who the artists were.”

He and his wife, Rose Pearlman, began building their art collection in 1945, when Henry purchased a landscape by the French painter Chaïm Soutine, “triggering a passion for collecting that endured for the rest of his life,” according to the foundation.

“The painting was hung over the mantelpiece, some 30 feet from the entrance hall, and when I came home in the evenings and saw it I would get a lift, similar to the experience of listening to a symphony orchestration of a piece well-known and liked,” Henry once said, per the collection’s website. “I haven’t spent a boring evening since that first purchase.”

After that initial acquisition, Henry purchased works by the likes of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. But he considered the Cézanne watercolors he began collecting in the 1950s as the “cornerstone of his collection,” according to the foundation. Henry and Rose established the foundation in 1955.

After Henry’s death in 1974, Rose managed the collection for 20 years. The Art Newspaper’s Benjamin Sutton reports that the foundation has previously donated and sold other works that once belonged to the Pearlmans, and the 63 pieces in the recent donation are the final artworks from the collection.

“Village Square: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection to the Brooklyn Museum, LACMA and MoMA” will be on view at LACMA from February to July 2026. The exhibition will travel to the Brooklyn Museum in the fall of 2026 and to MoMA at a future date.

Elizabeth Djinis | | Read More

Elizabeth Djinis is a writer and journalist based in Rome, Italy. Her work has been published in the New York Times, National Geographic, Glamour and Teen Vogue, among others.