BENTONVILLE - When Victor Simmons first saw the Stieglitz Collection on display Thursday at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, he said he felt like he was watching a child go off to college.

Simmons, director and curator of Fisk University Galleries, is intimately familiar with the collection by famed New York photographer, gallery owner and art collector Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz’s wife, the well-known artist Georgia O’Keeffe, donated the 101-piece collection to Fisk in Nashville in 1949, after Stieglitz died.

Crystal Bridges paid $30 million for a half share in Fisk’s collection after a seven-year court battle in Tennessee. The museum’s founder, Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, pledged an additional $1 million to improve the university’s display facilities.

The exhibition, titled The Artists’ Eye: Georgia O’Keeffe and the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, opens to the public Saturday at the museum. A preview Thursday offered the media and others a peek at the works by Stieglitz, O’Keeffe and several of the European and American Modernist painters he patronized and befriended.

Simmons called the exhibition “one of the foundational collections of modern art” and “the DNA of modern art.” With the exception of some of the more fragile paper works, the collection will be on display alternating every two years between Crystal Bridges and Fisk so that Fisk students can view the works during their college careers.

The cash-strapped university - a small, historically black college - offered the collection for sale in 2005 because the university could not afford the annual display costs and needed to shore up its endowment.

Parting with the collection after decades at Fisk was bittersweet, Simmons said.

“I do miss it,” he said, “but when I stand here today it’s like seeing your child go to college - when you let them out the door and you want to grab them but you see and you hope they can become something that they can be proud of and that you can be proud of.

“This was the right thing to do,” Simmons added.

Stieglitz is considered a force in introducing Modernism to the United States through his close circle of artist friends, such as Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and John Marin, alongside some of the early European Modernists who inspired them, including Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Some of the works are recognizable to those only vaguely familiar with modern art; most are not. Even for the modern art aficionado, the collection holds a great many surprises, Simmons said.

One example is a cubist painting by Diego Rivera, Le sucier et les bougies (Sugar Bowl and Candles), completed in 1915. Rivera was one of the most prominent Mexican artists of the 20th century and was husband to another Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo. Cubism is an early 20th-century avant-garde art movement.

Other gems in the collection are two color lithographs by Cezanne. The pieces, Les baigneurs (The Bathers), were the first two Cezanne prints shown in the country.

Stieglitz had them in one of his galleries - called 291 - and bought them back from the buyer at the legendary in New York City’s Armory Show, the first large exhibition of modern art in America.

Hartley’s 11 works in Stieglitz’ collection are rare, Simmons said. The only other piece by Hartley available to the public - the only one Simmons knows about - is at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

The exhibition also includes a series of African masks, one of which should be familiar to Crystal Bridges patrons. O’Keeffe replicated Portrait Face Mask (Mblo) with Bird in her painting Mask with Golden Apple (1923), which is in Crystal Bridges’ permanent collection.

After Stieglitz’s death in1949, O’Keeffe divided his collection and donated it to Fisk and five other institutions: The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Chicago Art Institute, the National Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress in Washington.

“O’Keeffe claimed to not take any kind of special measures in selecting the works, but that’s not O’Keeffe,” Simmons said. “O’Keeffe was very deliberate about everything. She took very special care in selecting these works.”

O’Keeffe had been a teacher before becoming an artist, so the exhibition is something of a “teaching collection” about the history of modern art. The earliest works are photographs by Stieglitz, and the most recent is O’Keeffe’s Flying Backbone (1944). The only other painting by O’Keeffe is a recognizable piece, Radiator Building - Night, New York (1927).

“It’s this early heroic period in modern art when her husband and a group of individuals around him were doing all the legwork, all the back work to build the foundation for its acceptance in this culture,” Simmons said.

Mark Winter, a former associate for Sotherbys.com and an authentication expert for Art Experts, declared in a previous interview that the collection is narrow in terms of the artists’ compositions.

“While there are a couple of landscapes by Marsden Hartley, which open up the visual field, the overwhelming majority of compositions is remarkably, curiously and somewhat sadly, narrow,” Winter said.

“We get one detail per composition. We are rationed. These artists were compositional misers,” he said. “So we get one house, one boat, one vase, one bridge, one head, one flower,” he said.

Laura Jacobs, the museum’s director of communications, said the collection is a significant acquisition because of its importance to American Modernism.

“The Stieglitz Collection augments Crystal Bridges’ ability to tell the story of this movement. Interesting also is the significance and the parallels of our partnership with Fisk University,” Jacobs said. “When Georgia O’Keeffe gave the works to Fisk, she wanted to do so to expand access to art to those living outside the major metropolitan areas of that day, which is not unlike the gift of Crystal Bridges to the community.”

The court-approved agreement between the museum and the university also gives Crystal Bridges an opportunity to someday own the Fisk collection outright.

The Artists’ Eye is on exhibit through Feb. 3. Admission to the museum is free, but the cost to view the Stieglitz collection is $5 for non-museum members age 19 and older.

Arkansas, Pages 9 on 11/08/2013