Museum partygoers sample ‘Taste for Modernism’ exhibit

BENTONVILLE - The sights and sounds were uniquely Paris - a lithe, curly-headed mime moved with exaggerated gestures outside Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s temporary exhibition space while a dapperly dressed clarinet player performed nearby.

The museum held a preview party the night of March 13 to give sponsors and certain museum members a first look at the “The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism,” which includes works by some of the most recognizable names in European Modernism. The traveling exhibit opened to the public two days later.

“I think you’re really going to like what you see,” Crystal Bridges founder Alice Walton told guests before turning them loose in the gallery.

The once-private collection of broadcast pioneer and CBS network founder Paley boasts eight works by Pablo Picasso and five by Henri Matisse, as well as some by Paul Gauguin, Andre Derain, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Most were created between 1880 and 1940 at the height of French Modernism.

Paley supported and was closely involved with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from its early years and left his collection to the New York institution when he died in 1990. His intent was for Mo-MA to share it with museums in other areas of the country and around the world. Crystal Bridges is the exhibition’s last stop before it goes back to MoMA for good.

In addition to the sneak preview, guests enjoyed a reception in Crystal Bridges’ Great Hall. Ramona Bronkar Bannayan, senior deputy director of exhibitions and collections at MoMA, and several other reps from the New York museum attended.

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 adjacent exhibition called “The European Connection.” The side exhibition includes three works by Alfred Henry Maurer that have never been publicly displayed at the Bentonville museum. Other artists include Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and Max Weber.