Radev Revisited

Two years ago a post appeared here about The Radev Collection: from Pissarro to Picasso at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath, an exhibition during the Collection’s 2011-13 UK tour. Now on at the same location is The Radev Show 2, and again visitors can be sure to find something they will like. There was some background to the Collection’s formation in the previous post, so I won’t repeat it here.

Some of the works on show last time have come back to Bath, like Modigliani’s Portrait of Soutine and Jawlensky’s Blaue Strasse c1916 (below, left and right):

Others are having a first showing: Vanessa Bell, Vase, Hat and Flowers, 1910 and a couple of Duncan Grant ceramic table-tops c 1950 (below, top and lower):

One of the originators of the Collection was Eardley Knollys, co-partner in the Storan Gallery in the inter-war period. Two pictures now in the Tate Gallery which were purchased from the Storan originally have been leant for this show, Maurice Utrillo’s Eglise de St Hilaire (Church at St Hilaire, c 1911, below left) and Chaïm Soutine’s La Route de la colline (Vence) (The Road up the Hill, c1924, below right):

However, as in 2012, most of the works in the exhibition are by British artists (more Ben Nicholson and Alfred Wallis!) and, as I said then, “Anyone interested in British 20th century art should try to see it” – again, possibly. The Radev Show 2 ends on 31 August. There might be a clue as to why the Radev Collection has returned to Bath towards the end of this post.

The Pearlman Collection at the Ashmolean

Exhibitions based on collections provide a fascination which can’t be found in shows given over to individual artists or to particular periods in art history. I think it lies in the way the collector (or collectors) exercised their taste given the opportunities and resources which were available. Gertrude Stein and her brothers, for example, were wealthy and were collecting contemporary talent in the right place and time, Paris in the 1920s. Sterling and Francine Clark had been in a similar position a decade earlier. The Radev Collection, on the other hand, reflects its creators’ tastes and long-term opportunities to make acquisitions rather than their funds. So what of Henry and Rose Pearlman’s collection, now on an international tour starting at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection?

Henry Pearlman was born in New York in 1895 and set up Eastern Cold Storage in 1919. One can well believe that his company would have done well in the war years and certainly in 1945 he was able to make his first significant purchase of modern art, Chaïm Soutine’s Village Square, Céret (above, top). For nearly 30 years he went on building up his collection, most of which is now at the Ashmolean. The show starts with a large number of late Cézannes, mostly watercolours (not often displayed, no doubt for reasons of conservation), eg Three Pears, (Trois Poires, 1888-90 above lower), from the painter’s later years in Aix en Provence. These lead on to the next room’s Cistern in the Park of Chateau Noir (Citerne au Parc du Château Noir, c 1900, below in Pearlman’s office) and one of the versions of Montagne Sainte-Victoire (c 1902, poster above), much-painted by the artist.

Nearby are Vincent van Gogh’s Tarascon Stage Coach (Tarascon Diligence, 1888, again below in Pearlman’s office) and less satisfactory works by Gauguin, Degas (After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself /Après le bain, femme s'essuyant, 1892, above left) and Toulouse-Lautrec (Messaline, 1901, above right). I found the latter interesting because it was inspired by a visit to the opera in Bordeaux shortly before the painter’s death at Chateau Malromé. Earlier and more pleasing, if undemanding, works are Sisley’s Seine at Verneuil (La Seine à Verneuil, 1889, below, left) and Camille Pissaro’s Still Life: Apples and Pears in a Round Basket (Nature Morte: Pommes et Poires Dans un Panier Rond, 1872, below, right).

Finally, there are more works by Soutine, and two oils and a sculpture by Modigliani. Pearlman discovered after purchase that the small Daumier oil shown nearby, Head of an Old Woman (Tête de Vieille Femme, 1856-60, left), was one of the first purchases made by Leo and Gertrude Stein. It is a pity that Pearlman hadn’t started his collection a decade or two earlier when the opportunities for acquisitions of works by the painters he liked might have been greater (the absence of any cubist work is intriguing when Cézanne is often regarded as their precursor). He displayed what he considered to be his major pieces in his office at Eastern Cold Storage: the van Gogh, its acquisition surely being his apogee as a collector, Modigliani’s Jean Cocteau 1919-17, and Cézanne’s Cistern in the Park of Chateau Noir, (below).

Cézanne and the Modern provides a welcome opportunity in the UK to see works by Soutine and Modigliani as well as some fine Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works. The Pearlman website contains some interesting background information including Henry’s reminiscences, eg:

I found art dealers at first quite difficult to understand with regard to pricing works of art. Being accustomed to a business where selling price is based on cost plus small overhead and ten percent profit, I found that art dealers' prices in most cases bore little relationship to their costs, but were based on what the traffic could bear. I know of a pair of Douanier Rousseau portraits, for example, that were purchased at an auction in the Midi of France for about twenty dollars, repurchased by my French dealer friend for under $600, then sold to one of the New York galleries for $12,000; when I saw them exhibited here and asked the price I was advised that they could be bought for $30,000. Not being interested in owning these Rousseaus, I was amused by the gyrations of the prices. The last price I saw them offered for was $150,000 for the pair.

The show continues at the Ashmolean until 22 June and will be at Le Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence from 12 July to 5 October. After showings in Atlanta and Vancouver it will return to the Princeton University Art Museum, where the Pearlman collection is on long-term loan, in 2015.

The Radev Collection reaches Bath

The Radev Collection is described as being “The private picture collections of: Eardley Knollys (1902 - 1991), Eddy Sackville-West (1901 – 1965) and Mattei Radev (1927 - 2009). Bequeathed in friendship, begun in 1938, and preserved in the 21st Century.” Some of the history of the Collection, and of the “male salon” which formed it, can be found on its website. Each of the three men added to the Collection of 800 works which mirror their differing interests: Knollys in French artists acquired through his gallery which in turn Sackville-West patronised for Modernist pieces. Knollys inherited from Sackville-West in 1965 and later left their combined collections to Radev.

A selection of works from the Radev Collection is currently on a UK tour which began in 2011 and will end in 2013. Curiously, on the first two stops, in Chichester and Lincoln, its title was The Radev Collection – Bloomsbury and Beyond, but at Bath’s Victoria Art Gallery it has become The Radev Collection: from Pissarro to Picasso (at the time of writing, on their website as “Pisarro – Piccasso”). The current title has the virtue of accuracy, Radev’s connection with the Bloomsbury Group being a little tenuous despite the Pallant House Gallery’s description of him as “a feature of artistic and literary Bloomsbury society”. For example, one of the leading Bloomsberries, Vanessa Bell, three of whose works are in the Collection, was born in 1879 and was in her seventies when Radev arrived in the UK from Bulgaria. Eddy, on the other hand, was Vita Sackville-West’s nephew and in the 1920s mixed with the Bloomsbury set at Charleston and elsewhere, though perhaps not on such intimate terms as his aunt.

Visitors to the exhibition will see unfamiliar works of an agreeably domestic scale by British and international artists including Keith Vaughan, Duncan Grant, Ivon Hitchens, Maurice Denis, Jean Metzinger, Jean Millet, Amedeo Modigliani (on the website, “Modigliano”). and Lucien Pissarro. Artists shown who have featured in previous posts here include Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Ben Nicholson (Carbis Bay 1942, left), Alfred Wallis and Christopher Wood.

There is also an opportunity to see works by Winifred Nicholson, Henry Lamb and Matthew Smith (Cornish flowers c1920, right), British artists who are perhaps less well-known than they were. As well as the Vanessa Bell, Bloomsbury fans can enjoy several works by Duncan Grant (Brighton pier and boats 1938, below)

Two notable pieces are the bronze by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Bronze Dancer 1913 (left) and Blaue strasse c 1916, (below) by Alexei Jawlensky, the Russian Expressionist who painted in Germany with Der Blau Reiter.

The Radev Collection: from Pissarro to Picasso continues in Bath until 18 November. It re-appears in Falmouth Art Gallery, Cornwall in February 2013 retitled again, this time as A Framer's Collection. Radev’s abilities in this regard are clear from the exhibits like the Smith above. Next summer the tour will return to London at the Redfern Gallery and end the year at the Abbott Hall Art Gallery in Kendal. Anyone interested in British 20th century art should try to see it. The exhibition catalogue provides more details of the Collection's founders and history as well as  responses from the curators of its tour, but is a little expensive at £5-70. However admission in Bath is free.