The opportunity to become better acquainted with such a superb collection of modern French masters, German Expressionists and well-known contemporary American artists has seldom been offered to gallery viewers. Covering a range of schools and artists too vast to be mounted in a single presentation, this exhibition is planned as a rotating one and points up the Gallery’s pristine reputation as one of the Southland’s most ethical and conservative of art dealerships throughout the years.

Many major works by August Macke are included in this exhibit program—with his oil painting Native Sea Fight, in the first presentation. Three outstanding landscapes by Maurice De Vlaminck, Jean Metzinger’s cubist Girl with Orange Juice, and other major works by Dufy, Derain, Utrillo, Chagall, Matisse, and Max Pechstein’s vivid Nude, Tile and Fruit, are only an antipasto of the rich artistic fare offered to collectors and public alike in this comprehensive survey.

On loan from the Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute is Paul Gauguin’s Self-Portrait with Idol, and Camille Pissarro’s Harvest Time, dated 1891—which marks the end of the artist’s pointillist period. Acquired from the Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, both are extraordinary examples of the best in their fields.

Kathe Kollwitz is represented by her bronze Pieta, and Chia Pi,  a gold bronze by Sir Jacob Epstein is one of the Gallery’s collection of 26 Epsteins.

An unusual Toulouse-Lautrec—a small, oval plaque Young Girl, is one of sixteen originally created to be set in columns of a lavishly decorated room in a “palace of entertainment,” frequented only by Europe’s top flight citizenry.

In the contemporary American section, Mary Bowling’s intarsia, The Rose Tree, done in red glass, gold leaf overset, chartreuse transparent tesserae and chains of minuscule blue beads—is one of her most exquisitely crafted thematic panels, showing a fresh and stronger approach to an original technique she has developed over the past decade.

—Betje Howell