William C. “Bill” Paley, son of CBS network founder and noted modern art collector William S. Paley, said he grew up unaware of the 20th century masterpieces that surrounded him in the family’s home on Long Island.
Among the artwork was Pablo Picasso’s painting Boy Leading a Horse (1905-06), which hung with other masterpieces in a staircase in the middle of the house. Later, the elder Paley moved the painting to the entry of his Fifth Avenueapartment in New York City.
“I took it for granted,” the son said of his father’s longheld collection. “I didn’t really understand the significance of it.” While visiting a museum many years later, he heard someone point out the distinctive features and colors of a painting by French artist Georges Rouault.
“What went through my mind … ‘Gee, there’s a nicer one hanging over our fireplace,’” Paley said. “I didn’t understand until I got out in the world what an incredible collection it was.”
Boy Leading a Horse is among 62 paintings, sculptures and drawings that will be on public view beginning Saturday at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Works in the temporary exhibition, titled “The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism,” are part of a larger collection that Paley left to the Museum of Modern Art in New York when he died in 1990.
The first Modernist artists were Europeans who broke away from the conventions of representational art. They inspired a generation of American Modernist artists many of whose works are in Crystal Bridges’ permanent collection and are being displayed in an exhibition called “The European Connection” in a gallery adjacent to the Paley collection.
The side exhibition includes three works by Alfred Henry Maurer that have never been publicly displayed at the Bentonville museum. Others include Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and Max Weber.
Besides eight Picassos and five works by Henri Matisse, the Paley exhibition highlights works by Paul Gauguin, Andre Derain, Matisse, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, mostly created between 1880 and 1940 at the height of French Modernism. The works run the gamut of Modernism, from European impressionism to post-impressionism, as well as Fauvism and Cubism.
Members of the media got a peek at the Paley collection and its accompanying exhibition Thursday. Sponsors and donors viewed it during a private reception Thursday night. It opens to the public Saturday and will be up through July 7. Crystal Bridges is the only institution inthe central United States to host the exhibition. Its stop in Bentonville will be the last before the works return to the Museum of Modern Art. The collection has been onexhibit in 20 venues, including stops in Europe, Japan and Australia.
Paley began collecting art in the mid-1930s, when he was about 27 and already a senior executive at CBS. The exhibition on display at Crystal Bridges includes two of the first pieces Paley acquired: Cezanne’s Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (1875-76), which Paley bought from the artist’s son, and Cezanne’s L’Estaque (1879-83), which Paley bought from a son of Claude Monet.
Crystal Bridges Assistant Curator Manuela Well-Off-Man said Picasso’s rather large Boy Leading a Horse was the artist’s first commercial success and marked the period in which his color preferences changed from a melancholic blue to a warm pink and orange. The painting is a close-up of a naked boy leading a horse without any reins.
“One can interpret this in a way that [the boy] magically leads the horse the same way as an artist magically creates art with his hand on the canvas,” Well-Off-Man said.
In addition to establishing the CBS radio and television networks, Paley was an unusually active trustee at the Museum of Modern Art. He joined the museum’s board in 1937, eight years after its inception. He was president, chairman and finally chairman emeritus at the time of his death.
Even before he died, Paley would loan pieces to the New York museum for special occasions and exhibitions. Ramona Bronkar Bannayan, senior deputy director of exhibitions and collections at the museum, said the staff is looking forward to the collection’s return.
“As wonderful as it is to share the exhibition, we are delighted to have these works come back,” Bannayan said. “Many of these were taken directly from our walls.”
She described Paley’s acquisitions as “a personal collection.”
“These are very intimate in scale,” Bannayan said. “He lived with these works, in his home and at his office. He moved them around regularly within the apartment while building his collection.”
The younger Paley greatly admired his father’s eye for art and his approach toward collecting it.
“He collected to keep,” said William C. Paley, who owns and operates a cigar business. “He wasn’t like collectors nowadays who are playing in a marketplace of rising values and trading art back and forth. If he bought a piece, it was his for the rest of his life, and he just loved living with it.”
And when Paley had enjoyed all that life let him, he wanted to share his art with the rest of the world.
“Being a broadcaster and being always interested in the public as a whole, I think he wanted to make this collection available to everybody,” his son said. “I think it gave him great pleasure to know the museum would look after his collection and travel it around the world.”
Admission to the Paley collection is $8 for adults. Admission to all temporary exhibitions is free for museum members and for anyone 18 and under.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 03/14/2014