Jeffrey Scheuer: Henry Pearlman, the Man

“Earthy” is how I would describe my grandfather. Henry Pearlman was genuine and came over that way. There was no pretense about him. He was self-educated, certainly, in the art world—so for me there was an interesting contrast between a very human and in some ways unsophisticated man, whom I related to, and the collector whom I also saw at home, poring over books about art and pictures of artwork. There was even a slight disconnect between those two sides of him, but they only made him more interesting to me. He started collecting during World War II, seemingly out of the blue, although it was before I was born, so I am not precisely sure of the dates. But it seemed a rather extraordinary moment in the trajectory of his life. He saw a painting in a gallery on Madison Avenue, as he described it in the Reminiscences, and something clicked and opened up a whole new dimension in his life.