Shaping Modernity: Property from a Private American Collection

S haping Modernity: Property from a Private American Collection charts the defining moments in the evolution of modern art. Bringing together exceptional works by the artists who transformed painting between the 19th and 20th centuries, the collection highlights a series of breakthroughs that forever altered the trajectory of art history. The collection, beginning with Impressionism, spans the key Post-Impressionist movements such as Pointillism, Fauvism and reaches forward to the post-war figuration of Francis Bacon, each work embodies a willingness to challenge convention and pursue new possibilities of artistic expression.

The earliest work in the collection L’Oncle Dominique is aptly by Cézanne, whom Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque called “the father of us all.” At the foundation of the collection is Camille Pissarro's Hameau aux environs de Pontoise which elevates the countryside to the fitting subject for progressive art. Alfred Sisley's landscape and Eugène Boudin's beach scene attend to the light and atmosphere of nature observed en plein air. Pierre-Auguste Renoir's portrait of his patron Paul Bérard brims with the luminosity of the finest Impressionist portraits. Paul Signac’s celebrated pointillist composition, Collioure. Les Balancelles (Opus 167) marks a pivotal moment in the development of modern painting with its radical exploration of color and optics. His innovative experiments with color gave rise to the riotous palettes of Henri Matisse, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, the defining voices of Fauvism, whose respective views of Collioure, the Thames and the open road show color liberated from description. The collection culminates with Francis Bacon's poignant Self-Portrait, a work that captures both the artist's psychological torment and the refuge that he found in painting. Through a remarkable command of color and gesture, Bacon defines a new self-portraiture, rendering himself with force and fluidity as if caught between states of reality and remembrance. Together, the collection illuminates the artistic innovations through which modern art took shape.