The Horvitz collection of Old Master French drawings and paintings, the best in America, heads to Chicago as a gift.
In February, Jeffrey and Carol Horvitz, very serious collectors outside Boston, announced that their collection of French art from the 16th into the early 19th centuries, the finest in America, would come to the Art Institute of Chicago as a gift. This is big news. The art is superb — 2,000 drawings, hundreds of paintings, and a group of sculptures, all exquisite in their own way. The Art Institute is one of our great big-city museums, to be sure, but it’s got a quality I don’t often see: Groups of galleries are so beautifully and coherently arranged, and with such good art, that they feel like intimate, freestanding museums. The place is never overwhelming. And I like Chicago, whose welcoming, entrepreneurial, boisterous spirit makes it the characteristic big American city.
It’s good, too, to see that truly magnificent art philanthropy is in the air. Last year, I covered the Clark Art Institute’s new stash of Old Master portraits — and $45 million — from the estate of tech titan and Clark trustee Aso Tavitian. Both the Tavitian and the Horvitz gifts will transform their new homes. The Clark will build an addition to display the portraits. The Horvitzes will give art and substantial money in phases. With the Art Institute’s long-established and dazzling Impressionist collection, the museum will become the country’s hot spot for the best French art outside France.
Who are the Horvitzes? Jeffrey was an art dealer in Los Angeles in the 1970s into the ’80s and then a real estate mogul in Florida and an investor. His wife, Carol, a trustee at the Art Institute, collects contemporary Japanese ceramics and Chinese cinnabar lacquer. Last fall, the Art Institute displayed a trove from the Horvitz collection: about 90 drawings and 25 paintings from the 1770s to 1848, a period bookending more Sturm und Drang, or tempête et rupture, than the French had ever seen.
The style of the two shows is Neoclassicism, which deploys the architecture, legends, and characters of ancient Greece and Rome to illuminate current events. Out are Rococo fluff and frolic. In are a stately look and lessons learned, lessons about morals and patriotism. The paintings and drawings were shown in separate galleries, but, together, many of the themes overlap and were, in their day, political, social, and economic. Art and politics were unusually tight-knit. Given the election then unfolding in America, the two exhibitions in 2024 were timely and smart. The Horvitz gift hadn’t been announced yet. Visitors to the Art Institute got a good taste of the splendors to come.
Sometimes the politics are straightforward. Stoicism — virtue trumps wealth and pleasure — was part of the temper of the 1780s and ’90s, so Death of Seneca, by Jean Charles-Niçaise Perrin, is easy to decipher, as is Georges Rouget’s Death of Demosthenes, the Greek orator much admired by revolutionary jabberers. Subjects are sometimes esoteric. Ubaldo and the Danish Knights, Hecuba Discovering the Body of Her Son, Polydorus, and Alexander the Great Attacking the Oxydrakai — three paintings — don’t ring bells. But their themes — a mother’s devastation, aid to those in need, and a rollicking good battle — are timeless. Napoleon is an explicit, in-your-face figure, but references are often allusive. In a drawing by Jean-Michel Moreau, Tullia, the last queen of Rome, drives her chariot over the corpse of her freshly murdered father just to make sure he’s dead. She’s a stand-in for Marie Antoinette, ruthless enough to do that kind of thing.
Sometimes the themes seem off-the-wall. The Oxydrakai, for instance, were a tribe of naked philosophers from the Punjab. Who knew that Neoclassicism had so much energy and heat? The paintings are cinematic and exotic. There’s nothing in the collection I’d call banal or trite.
In the drawings show, we have a portrait by Moreau from 1785 of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin — yes, the physician and politician after whom the guillotine was named — looking pleased with himself. Until the guillotine, a death sentence could lead to hanging, boiling, breaking on the wheel, en flambé at the stake, or slow dismemberment. Guillotin opposed the death penalty, a losing cause, but he opposed torture, too, and that stand had a following. As a member of the revolutionary National Assembly, he argued, “With my machine, I cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it.” Of course, it was invented by, among one or two others, a German engineer.
Antoine-François Callet’s Allegory of the Concordat, from around 1802, is an electrifying pastel packed with saturated red, blue, rust, and gray. It shows Napoleon entering Notre Dame on Easter 1801 for a service celebrating the Concordat, which established Catholicism as France’s anchor — though not official — religion. The church didn’t get back the money, monasteries, and land the revolutionaries had seized, and the Jacobin class wasn’t ecstatic, but a good time was still had by most. Exiled clerics were allowed to return. Rank-and-file Catholics swallowed a chunk of revolutionary dogma. Napoleon called more ecclesiastical shots than the pope.
Callet’s pastel, a serious political drama, has a counterpoint in Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Cabaret in Paris, from 1815. It’s big, too, with lots of watercolor, but it’s a menagerie of tavern dwellers. No one wears a mitre. Boilly is a Horvitz favorite for sparkling detail. His figures, though often small, have spirit and verve. Six works by Boilly — portraits, a brilliant drapery study, his tavern scene, conversation pieces, paintings, and drawings — become a mini survey.
Why, for the Horvitzes, French art? Jeffrey is a Francophile for starters. From there, his taste in art developed. He’s drawn to art that’s both cerebral and sensual, refined and elegant but conveying the joie de vivre that’s distinctly French. German art is too controlled and brooding. Italian art is too religious. For years he focused on drawings, especially highly finished ones, for their immediacy as well as their appeal to the imagination. Studio paintings lose immediacy. Drawings are usually in variations of black and white, so the absence of color pushes the viewer to think and to speculate, much as a black-and-white film does. They’re dreamier and more otherworldly. Even color drawings are more evocative and less illustrative. Over time, Jeffrey started to collect the best paintings by mostly unrecognized Neoclassical artists who are technically excellent and need a place in the sun.
I know and like the Horvitzes. Jeffrey approaches collecting with impressive discernment and discipline, even tenacity. He asks questions. He wants to get to the bottom of things in business and as a trustee but, in art, loves enigma and nuance. Both he and Carol have acquired the very best art. Condition is important to them, and with drawings, condition is often a concern. They’re small, delicate, and light-sensitive, and they don’t like man-handling. Their French drawings and paintings look to be in great shape.
The Horvitz drawings feature lots of big names. David, Boucher, Fragonard, Watteau, Greuze, Ingres, and Girodet are there but not for their names. David’s Head of a Plague Victim, from 1780, studies misery and endurance. Pierre Paul Prud’hon is well known for sexy but distant nudes. Two, on blue paper, with black-and-white chalk and pink pastel, are perfect.
Big names aside, there are lots of artists I didn’t know. Anacreon Warming Armor, from the mid-1790s, glows. It’s meticulous. It’s by Alexandre Évariste Fragonard, the son of Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Who knew that the master of frothy romance, he of the exuberant paint brush and Rococo, had a son? And Jean Jacques François Le Barbier? His Man Lunging Forward is a human catapult.
Why Chicago, since the Horvitzes have lived near Boston for more than 30 years? Jeffrey was a trustee of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and active at the Fogg, Harvard’s art museum. Collectors this discerning, this intense, and this passionate want a home for their art where it’ll be valued, treated well, displayed, and developed through research. I like the Fogg and the MFA. The Fogg is an academic institution and part of a sprawling university. Its focus can be very narrow and its engagement with the public limited, as is its space. It just had a $400 million overhaul and expansion. It won’t be having another one anytime soon.
Boston’s MFA is another story. I can only speculate. With a new director on the horizon — and we don’t know who it will be — it’s in flux. Over the past few years, the MFA has focused mostly on contemporary art, when it’s not been in turmoil. Attention to Old Masters is haphazard. My suspicion is that the Horvitzes’ art — specialized, Old World, refined, deep, and personal — veers toward inscrutability at today’s MFA. Sad to say, and I can only surmise, I don’t think that the vision, temperament, or understanding is there.
I know it is at the Art Institute. Its works-on-paper curators are exceptional. Its director, James Rondeau, is a contemporary-art specialist but worldly in taste. French art is a pillar of the museum from its early days. The Horvitzes know there’s plenty of scholarly work to be done on the artists in the French art collection. They also know that the Art Institute is a place where that will actually happen.
Last fall, I gave two lectures at the Art Institute to National Review Institute supporters when NRI’s annual gala was in Chicago. My talks were in the museum’s Impressionist galleries, where I used its spectacular collection to talk about Impressionism, on the movement’s 150th anniversary. The art is so good that I could have taught a semester-long class on Impressionism. Every work was so aptly placed that I was able to move through 20 years of art with clarity and, here and there, a delicious surprise. That’s talented curating. And rich Chicagoans were buying the best Impressionist pictures while the paint was still wet and while French collectors scorned all forms of renegade art. That’s a big reason why French museums doing Impressionist exhibitions have to borrow from America.
The Art Institute is planning a new wing that’ll accommodate the Horvitz gift as well as modern and contemporary art. It’s already gotten an anchor gift — $75 million, announced last fall — and fundraising is probably well under way. Barozzi Veiga, a Barcelona-based architect, is designing it. They’ve done lots of cultural work, but aren’t there enough American architects to deliver something wonderful? Of course, the answer is yes. There’s plenty of talent in Chicago. The museum’s last new wing went to Renzo Piano, an Italian, and that must have been his umpteenth American-museum expansion. A boutique architect, especially a foreigner, will drive the cost up, up, and up. The starting rate for a new, big-city museum wing is about $200 million these days.
We don’t know specifics yet on what the Art Institute is planning, but the Piano wing opened in 2009, which isn’t that long ago. Even in a big city like Chicago, money’s not falling from the heavens. A nine-figure capital campaign for a culture institution will ding fundraising for all the smaller cultural nonprofits, which is one reason that big museums should look at expansions as a once-in-a-generation proposition. Sad to say, the biggest museums approach capital campaigns as perpetual, as do colleges and universities. Trustees and directors believe that there’s something wrong if the place isn’t raising millions for construction.
That said, I’ll be happy to see a splendid home for the Horvitz collection. What a glorious gift. Our museums in America are built on philanthropy. In Europe, great collections tend to go to auction when their owners die. Americans, the world’s most generous people, are inclined to give them to museums for the public’s edification and enjoyment, now and for generations to come.
"https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/03/french-coup-for-art-institute-of-chicago/">Brian T. Allen