PARIS.- The Musée Maillol is exhibiting masterpieces from the Emil Bührle Collection, one of the most prestigious private collections in the world. Exhibited for the first time in France, this ensemble, which was assembled between 1936 and 1956 in Zurich, provides a panorama of French art from the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.

The manufacturer Emil Georg Bührle (1890–1956), who was born in Germany, settled in Switzerland in 1924 and collected—mainly between 1951 and 1956—more than 600 artworks. For the first time in Paris, some of these masterpieces are presented and brought together within the same exhibition.

Featuring around fifty works from the Emil Bührle Collection, the exhibition includes several modern art movements: works by the major Impressionists (Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Renoir, and Sisley) and Post-Impressionist artists (Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and ToulouseLautrec), works from the beginning of the twentieth century by the Nabis (Bonnard and Vuillard), the Fauves (Braque, Derain, and Vlaminck), and the École de Paris (Modigliani), and, lastly, the art of Picasso.

In anticipation of its permanent home in the new extension of the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Emil Bührle Collection is currently on a national and international tour. After the Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne in 2017 and three major museums in Japan in 2018, the Musée Maillol has the privilege of displaying masterpieces such as La petite danseuse de quatorze ans by Degas (Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, circa 1880), Monet’s Les coquelicots près de Vétheuil (Poppies Near Vétheuil, circa 1879), Cézanne’s Le garçon au gilet rouge (Boy in a Red Waistcoat, circa 1888), and Le semeur au soleil couchant by Van Gogh (Sower at Sunset, 1888).

This comparative approach highlights the links and filiations between the artistic movements that existed during various eras, while illustrating each painter’s personal contribution to the history of art. Emil Bührle, for whom past works had an influence on those of the present, remarked that ‘Ultimately, Daumier led to Rembrandt, and Manet to Frans Hals’.

The exhibition also sheds light on the history of this collection itself of a Swiss manufacturer during World War II and the decade that followed. Two rooms devoted to archive documents and Bührle’s relations with the art dealers reveal the history of the masterpieces.

Curatorship : Lukas Gloor, director of the Emil Bührle Collection, Zurich.