LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents two winter exhibitions celebrating the layered histories of LACMA’s Impressionist and Postimpressionist art holdings: Collecting Impressionism at LACMA and Village Square: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection to the Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, and MoMA.

Opening December 21, Collecting Impressionism looks back at the evolving tastes that have shaped the museum's beloved collection of Impressionist art. The exhibition traces early donations of California and American Impressionist pictures, strategic acquisitions in prints, photographs, fashion, and decorative arts, as well as the most recent gifts including The Artist’s Garden, Vétheuil (1881) by Claude Monet and Tarascon Stagecoach (1888), the museum’s first painting by Vincent van Gogh. The exhibition’s featured works underscore the continued generosity of LACMA’s community of donors.

Taking a closer look at the latest chapter in this history of giving, Village Square introduces recent gifts from the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation. On view February 22–July 5, 2026, Village Square showcases expressive landscapes and striking portraits by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Amedeo Modigliani, Alfred Sisley, Chaïm Soutine, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others.

“Over the past six decades, artists, donors, dealers, and curators have helped LACMA grow its impressive holdings of Impressionist and Postimpressionist art in pace with the growth of the institution itself,” said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. “Their generosity helped shape LACMA’s collection and ultimately transformed Los Angeles into a cultural capital. We are thrilled to celebrate the continuation of this tradition with the debut of significant gifts from A. Jerrold Perenchio and the Pearlman Foundation and family.”

Organized by accession date, Collecting Impressionism tracks the institution’s growth through more than 100 works. The exhibition is curated by Leah Lehmbeck, curator and department head of European Painting and Sculpture, and American Art, with David Bardeen, assistant curator of European Painting and Sculpture.

“I am excited to share a uniquely LACMA story by bringing together a wide range of late 19th-century and early 20th-century art,” said Lehmbeck. “Stretching across time, media, and continents, this expansive exhibition allows us to examine art history more critically, and to think about the museum as a constantly evolving group of objects and histories rather than a single, fixed authority.”

A series of case studies offers a deeper dive into the story of how LACMA's collection was built, examining the provenance, exhibition histories, techniques, and other characteristics of exemplary works. Among others, these include the following stories:

Pioneering American art collector William Preston Harrison helped LACMA establish the first institutional collection of American Impressionism on the West Coast, with his 1929 gift of Point Lobos, Carmel (1914) and nine other paintings by F. Childe Hassam. Hassam was widely recognized as the dean of American Impressionism, and his time spent in California drew attention to the state’s Impressionist art colonies.

Camille Pissarro’s La Place du Théâtre Français (1898) was gifted to LACMA in 1946 by Hollywood songwriter and film producer George Gard (Buddy) de Sylva and his wife, Marie Wallace, who were responsible for some of the earliest gifts of Impressionist and modern art to the museum. Capturing an aerial view of pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages in energetic brushstrokes, the work illustrates both how

Impressionist artists depicted modern urban life and, in its journey from Pissarro’s studio to the museum, the vital importance of French dealers, particularly the Paris- based gallery Durand-Ruel, in bringing Impressionist works to global audiences.

LACMA officially separated from the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art in 1961, and four years later, its new location opened in the heart of what would become Museum Row. Its newfound independence inspired gifts of works by major Impressionist painters, including Cézanne, Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, that bolstered the museum’s regional and national reputation, and reflected the city’s shift to becoming a capital of culture. Perhaps no other series is more associated with Impressionism than Monet’s paintings of water lilies, an example of which— Nymphéas (1897–98)—entered the collection in 1962.

Collecting Impressionism also showcases a large number of photographs and prints, gifted in the early years and more robustly acquired in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Collectors and museums played a crucial role in cultivating appreciation for works that were historically reproduced in multiples and distributed to a wide audience, as well as works that experimented with new technologies. The growth of works-on-paper holdings promotes an expansive notion of Impressionism, recognizing its relationship to broader visual culture. LACMA’s ability to tell this story was significantly enhanced with the 2008 acquisition of The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, a group of more than 3,500 photographs, supported by Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation.

Another aspect of Impressionism that can be examined through LACMA’s permanent collection is the dialogue between Impressionist painters and women’s clothing. This is due to the museum’s significant European costumes and textiles holdings, which have become one of the country’s largest in recent years. Artists of the late 19th century used costume to explore contemporary fashion, engaging with the variety of social identities gleaned from it as well as relishing in the material effects of light and movement from the fabric itself. The show will feature a selection of rotating costumes, including an exceptional 19th-century silk and velvet dress, produced by premier couture house Maison Rouff.

Village Square: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection to the Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, and MoMA Village Square showcases nearly 50 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper of European Postimpressionism and modernism from the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection. The exhibition is curated by Alex Kaczenski, assistant curator of European Painting and Sculpture.

In 1945, Henry Pearlman (1895–1974), a New York–based businessman, bought a painting that changed his life: View of Céret (then called Village Square, Céret) by Chaïm Soutine. Fascinated by Soutine and his artistic circle, Pearlman spent the next

few decades building one of the finest private collections of Postimpressionist and modern art. This group included works by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Jacques Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani, Camille Pissarro, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. One of the exceptional highlights of the collection are 33 paintings and works on paper by Paul Cézanne. Many of these will be on view, including the masterpiece Mont Sainte-Victoire (c. 1904–6) and the artist’s expressive watercolors of the French Provençal countryside.

Pearlman, who had no formal arts education, taught himself art history as he acquired and was captivated by the stories he uncovered as he did so. Village Square highlights exceptional histories hiding behind these works of art. Such stories include the rediscovered provenance of Honoré Daumier’s Head of an Old Woman (c.
1856–60), once owned by modernist titans Gertrude and Leo Stein, and the origin of Modigliani's Portrait of Jean Cocteau (c. 1916), made after Pablo Picasso introduced the poet to his artist friends in Paris. Other works explore how modern artists in Paris borrowed from historic genres to visually explore contemporary topics, such as Toulouse-Lautrec's large-scale satire of mainstream French art, entitled The Sacred Grove (1884), or Lipchitz’s bronze sculpture Theseus and the Minotaur (1942), about the artist’s struggles during World War II.

Many of these bold, dynamic works grew out of close friendships among artists, and on occasion with Henry Pearlman himself. The exhibition explores the relationships Pearlman formed with artists, including the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka, exemplified by his portrait Henry Pearlman (1948).

Village Square honors the Pearlmans’ belief in art’s power to create shared experiences and foster connections. Following LACMA’s presentation, the collection will travel to the Brooklyn Museum in the fall. The Museum of Modern Art will present an exhibition at a later date.