William Rubin

Matthew Armstrong

William S. Paley, founder of CBS, Inc., and a towering figure in the modern entertainment, communication and news-dissemination industries, was also an enthusiastic collector of twentieth-century art and a committed supporter of The Museum of Modern Art. This volume presents his extraordinary personal collection of eighty-four paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings by some of the most important figures of modern art, including Paul Cézanne, André Derain, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, bequeathed to the Museum in one of the most significant transfers of a private collection to a public institution in recent history. Paley embraced modernism during a period when most collectors sought works by Old Masters, and he built his collection based on personal taste with little regard for art-world prestige. Aside from certain loans made to enhance exhibitions at MoMA, his collection rarely left the walls of his home and office and was seldom seem by the public until it was left to the William S. Paley Foundation for donation to the Museum. This richly illustrated volume, originally published in 1992 to accompany a series of traveling exhibitions organized by MoMA to bring this outstanding collection to venues around North America, presents each work on a full page accompanied by commentary from William Rubin, Director Emeritus of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, and Matthew Armstrong, former Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture.

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