The Highs and Lows of the Nahmad Collection

It's widely referred to as the world's most valuable private art collection: the one assembled over decades by the Nahmad brothers, dealers Ezra and David. Worth an estimated $3 billion or more, it's said to include hundreds of Picassos. Some 60 works from it are now on display at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny as The Nahmad Collection: From Monet to Picasso.

Intended, apparently, to demonstrate how art developed from the early 19th century through Impressionism and on to the start of the modern era, towards the liberation of colour and form, this is an exhibition that ends up coming across as somewhat incoherent. We're not really told much about the Nahmads or their collecting choices -- and as you search the Internet, things become slightly mysterious: Is Ezra alive or dead? The art, presumably, is supposed to speak for itself, but it's a rather eclectic, if not confusing, selection; some of the works are fantastic, some are distinctly ho-hum. 

Let's start with some of the crowd-pleasers, and as we're in Giverny, we really have to begin with Claude Monet. This beautiful scene with its reflections on the water dates back to Monet's years in Argenteuil on the Seine west of Paris in the early 1870s.  

Dominated by that huge triangle of white sails, this is the poster image for the exhibition. A sunny day on the river: one of those classic Impressionist motifs. There's a fair sprinkling of Monets in this show, including an unexpected view of a Norwegian fjord and a dramatic landscape of the Normandy coast, though we felt slightly (if unjustifiably) short-changed, having also seen the latter painting the last time we went to Giverny, only a year ago.

But the most striking Monet here is an early picture of the waterlilies in the garden of his house, just a couple of hundred metres away from the museum. These are not the waterlilies you know, given to the French state after World War I and installed in the Orangerie in Paris shortly after his death in 1927. No, this painting with its fronds of grass and weed flopping over the circles of leaves and flowers was created some 30 years before that. But it's already showing a marked move towards abstraction, particularly in the bottom right-hand corner, where Monet's application of paint is very splodgy indeed.

The show doesn't actually begin with Monet, despite the title, but with Camille Corot and Eugène Delacroix, who were influential on later generations of French artists. You can see how Delacroix's Jewish Woman of Tangiers in Ceremonial Costume and her vibrant red skirt might have struck a chord a century later. 

 

But then it's back to the Impressionists, and a handful of works by Alfred Sisley, focusing on muted wintry views of the River Loing. 

These Sisleys are restful, calming pictures, quite a contrast with the nearby chocolate-box selection of works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, centred on portraits of children that struck us as being particularly sickly-sweet, including The Lesson, featuring his youngest son, Claude, and Seated Child Wearing a Blue Dress, which somewhat incongruously to modern eyes is a portrait of his nephew Edmond. We obviously don't share the Nahmads' tastes in Renoirs....

We were more impressed by their selection of Toulouse-Lautrecs: In Batignolles presents an unnamed sitter against a hastily sketched verdant background, creating a sharp contrast with her red hair and dark dress. It's actually a rather Impressionist work for Toulouse-Lautrec. 

This isn't just a selection of French painters; there are Italians too. Giovanni Boldini worked in Paris from the 1870s and his portraits of society women are very showy indeed, along the lines of John Singer Sargent. 

Look at me, Signora Diaz Albertini seems to be saying. She was the wife of a Cuban tobacco magnate, and she clearly had it and was going to flaunt it. It's amazingly vibrant, despite the predominance of grey tones. This is a painting with oomph, but the Nahmads' other choice of 19th-century Italian art left us cold, particularly some rather dull paintings of groups of soldiers by Giovanni Fattori. 

There's also rather too much by the Symbolist Gustave Moreau in this show for our liking: nine works in all, more than by anyone else apart from Degas. Still, you do get the chance to appreciate Moreau's eccentric treatment of the Biblical tale of Susanna and the Elders; in two separate paintings, not only do you have to strain really hard to discover the leering old men in the shadows, you also get the sense that Susanna isn't that bothered, even if she's aware of their presence. Odilon Redon is represented not by any of his colourful flower paintings, but by a curious pastel: Figure Carrying a Winged Head (The Fall of Icarus). 

We were quite surprised, in a show with a large number of Impressionists in a museum devoted to Impressionism, to find that the picture we liked most was a Modigliani, though it's not the most typical of Modiglianis; for one thing, the eyes have pupils. The features and hairstyle are those of Renée Kisling, wife of the painter Moïse Kisling, whom Modigliani made two other portraits of. 

Along with Modigliani, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso are the artists each represented with a single picture to mark the onset of modern art, an area that, you get the feeling, seems to represent the Nahmads' main collecting interest. The Picasso is an attractive one, a portrait of his first son Paulo wearing a Harlequin costume, the Harlequin being a character that recurs through Picasso's output.   

There's a touching story attached. Several years later, Picasso gave the work, which had been hanging in Paulo's bedroom, as a token of gratitude to the doctor who'd treated the little boy. But he must have missed having the picture around, because he almost immediately painted a very similar one, this time with Paulo in a Pierrot costume. We have to say, we much preferred Picasso's child portrait to the Renoirs. 

This museum is one of our favourite exhibition spaces; it's calm and spacious, quite the contrast with the tourist crush round Monet's lily pond. But this show is by no means the best we've seen there; it's rather too uneven and disjointed. 

Practicalities

The Nahmad Collection: From Monet to Picasso is on at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny until June 29. It's open daily from 1000 to 1800. Full-price tickets are 13 euros, though it's free on the first Sunday of the month. Combined tickets are also available with Monet's Garden. Give yourself 75 minutes or so to go around the show. 

Vernon-Giverny is the nearest rail station, on the line between Paris Saint-Lazare and Rouen; fast trains from Paris take about 50 minutes. If the weather's fine, it's an easy, almost flat walk of about 5 1/2 kilometres from the station to the museum, some of it along the River Seine; or there's a shuttle bus between the station and Giverny, costing 5 euros each way. There's plenty of free parking in the village if you're travelling by car. 

Images

Claude Monet (1840-1926), Boaters at Argenteuil, 1874
Claude Monet, Water Lilies with Reflections of Tall Grasses, 1897
Alfred Sisley (1839-1899), Banks of the Loing, Morning Effect, 1896
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), In Batignolles, 1888
Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931), Signora Diaz Albertini, 1909
Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), Young Girl in Striped Shirt, 1917
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Le Petit Pierrot aux fleurs (Portrait of the Artist's Son, Paulo, as Harlequin), 1923