Thanks to the generosity of the Kirkland family of Los Angeles, visitors to the Portland Art Museum will be able to enjoy fourteen art treasures from the family’s collection, many of which have not been publicly displayed for decades. The works span nearly a century, from the monumental 1887 canvas of Jamaica by Martin Johnson Heade, to Marc Chagall’s 1975 The Betrothed, these works follow the revolutionary changes in art in Europe and the United States. Two still lifes by Pablo Picasso trace the shift from the astonishing 1912 debut of cubism with La Glace (bowl of ice cream) to its mature form in 1938.
The landscape form transmutes from Heade’s highly detailed canvas to Claude Monet’s light-filled Impressionist masterpiece Banks of the Seine River near Vétheuil, to Chaim Soutine’s blood-red expressionist 1918 Southern Landscape. Also included are rare landscapes by Henri Matisse and Georgia O’Keeffe, and a stunning scene of lovers floating in the night sky by Chagall based on stories in Thousand and One Nights. The Portland Art Museum is grateful to be able to exhibit these artworks during the Monet to Matisse: French Moderns exhibition, providing a number of provocative parallels to the treasures on loan this summer from the Brooklyn Museum.