This distinguished group of works reflects the intelligence and sophistication of a couple whose dedication to their art collection has resulted in a remarkable survey of the twentieth-century cannon. In both their public and private lives, the couple are highly adept at convening gifted people to spark dialogue and advance progress, a philosophy which continues in this museum-quality collection. With the guidance of their advisor Pablo Schugurensky, they have assembled a group of paintings, works on paper, and sculpture that engage in a remarkable series of conversations. Across genres and media, each of the works in the collection possess its own unique voice, but when viewed in tandem with other works they tell the remarkable story of the seismic shifts that took place in the art that came to define the twentieth century. Philip Guston exemplifies this radical pace of change as he stands among the few twentieth-century artists who, during the course of their life, navigated from figuration, to abstraction, and back to figuration again. His 1952 Painting marks the moment that his abstract style begins to coalesce. Examples by Odilon Redon, Paul Klee, Jacob Lawrence (a particular favorite of the couple), Jackson Pollock, and Barbara Hepworth, along with countless others, trace the dissolution of artistic conventions and the ushering in of radical ideas.

Paramount among these were the notion of openness and free expression. During the course of the twentieth century, art was released from its representational duties and artists co-opted the individuality of their own marks into a tool of supreme emotion. In the final years of the nineteenth century, the substantial charcoal outline in Edgar Degas’s Aprés le bain (Femme nue) (circa 1892) traces the silhouette of a nude figure in a tender and intimate moment. One hundred years later, that representational function has dissolved, as witnessed in Willem de Kooning’s supple line in his large-scale untitled work on paper that merely hints at the last vestiges of a female figure before the artist transforms it into one of the flowing ribbons that became his final artistic triumph. The truly radical nature of de Kooning’s line is clearly on display in the couple’s home, where this impressive drawing served as one of the centerpieces of the collection, placed alongside other transformative works by Philip Guston, Jean Dubufett, and Franz Kline.    

In Kline’s Painting (1950) and Lower Half (circa 1950), the artist’s muscular line forms the architecture of the composition, the structure around which the rest of it is built. His influences were the industrial landscapes of his native Pennsylvania, and the rusting, hulking forms of the blast furnaces manifested themselves in the powerful and rapidly executed black marks set against a white ground. Yet, his paintings were not landscapes in the literal sense. Rather, he intended them to evoke the known or recognizable while avoiding any direct reference. 

Of all the twentieth-century artists, however, the master of the choreographed line was Jackson Pollock. In Untitled, a lyrical work on paper from 1951, his varied drips, pours, and splatters coalesce into a unified composition. A transformative year, 1951 would prove to be “Pollock’s most important and productive year as a draughtsman,” in which his drawings reached an unprecedented level of virtuosity and sophistication (E.V. Thaw, “1950 Introductory Text,” in F.V. O'Connor and E.V. Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works, vol. 3, New Haven, 1978, p. 283). In the present example, Pollock’s sweeping, gestural line moves across the page with a quick, confident handling, yet the pent-up energy often transmitted through Pollock’s hand doesn’t devolve into turmoil, but rather suspends itself in delicate balance against the austerity of the paper support. Lively and lyrical, this work displays extraordinary assuredness that Pollock’s approach had developed by time this work was executed.

In 1953, the Swiss artist Paul Klee wrote in his seminal text Pedagogical Sketchbook that a line was purely “a dot [that] goes for a walk… freely and without a goal” (quoted in S. Moholy-Nagy (trans.), Paul Klee: Pedagogical Sketchbook, New York, 1953, p. 16). Imbuing his lines, and their subsequent forms, with this sense of movement had been central to Klee’s practice ever since the 1920s. Works from this exciting period are well represented in the collection, particularly his 1925 painting Perspektive Figuration. Here, the artist articulates a playful landscape-like tapestry of color and form bustling with an innate and surprising sense of life. The magical pictorial realm that Klee describes is one where the rectangles of the background seem to become a carpet of fields, and the white lines crossing them appear simultaneously as building structures, house roofs, trees, stars and even, as the title of the picture suggests, figures.