Now comes the museum’s astounding new show, “The Rose at Brandeis: Works From the Collection’’ - providing, finally, a true look at the scope, coherence, and sheer distinction of the Rose’s permanent collection.
This show makes it indisputable: Nowhere in the Boston area is it possible to get, in one gulp, a comparable sense of the excitement engendered by European and especially American modernism.
Nowhere can you so fully appreciate just what it was that established American preeminence in postwar art. And nowhere else do you get a substantial and contextualized sense of how photography and developments in contemporary art have extended and transformed this tradition.
These revelations bring in their wake various aftershocks. The first arrives as a question: Why, oh why, was a collection of such tremendous quality not placed on permanent display?
The Rose did use its collection as fodder for a steady succession of themed temporary exhibitions. But if people had been given the chance to appreciate the full extent of what the Rose has to offer, rather than being offered fragments of it, might it not have become better known, more frequented? And might this not have prevented the threatened shutdown and sale?
We’ll never find out. But it’s sobering to know that Rush did indeed have plans - well advanced, he told me - to build a new wing that would allow a good portion of the collection to be put on permanent display.
For now, the entire museum is given over to this show, which runs until May 23 and is accompanied by a glossy new catalog. The exhibit is divided into themed categories. First, on the museum’s elegant entrance level, come modernism, surrealism, and social realism. Among the highlights are a small “Reclining Nude’’ by Picasso, showing his young lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, in ecstatic slumber; an elongated still life by Georges Braque in tremblingly autumnal colors; and a young male bather by Cézanne.
