page_title: Lillie P. Bliss
section_title: The Lillie P. Bliss Bequest
hierarchical_section_title: Lillie P. Bliss / The Lillie P. Bliss Bequest
caption_attribution_description: La noche estrellada
context_page_description: Lizzie Plummer Bliss, known as Lillie P. Bliss, was an American art collector and patron. At the beginning of the 20th century, she was one of the leading collectors of modern art in New York. One of the lenders to the landmark Armory Show in 1913, she also contributed to other exhibitions concerned with raising public awareness of modern art. In 1929, she played an essential role in the founding of the Museum of Modern Art. After her death, 150 works of art from her collection served as a foundation to the museum and formed the basis of the in-house collection. These included works by artists such as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani.
context_section_description: The vaguely defined "secure financial basis" in Bliss's will, a sort of endowment to maintain and expand the collection, led to protracted negotiations between Bliss's brother Cornelius Newton Bliss, the executor of her will, and the board of the Museum of Modern Art. The basis for the endowment sum would be the value of the collection donated to the museum. An expert opinion of the New York gallery Ferargil valued the collection at $1,139,036.00, with Cézanne's three works The Bathers, Still Life with Apples and Pine and Rocks at $150,000 and Degas's Rider before Hills being valued at $40,000. Following this estimate, Bliss and the Museum Board initially agreed to raising a sum of $1,000,000.
  Due to the Great Depression at the beginning of the 1930s, raising that sum proved to be extremely difficult. The Museum of Modern Art managed to negotiate the amount down to $750,000 initially and eventually to $600,000. This amount could be raised by a few large donations. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller contributed $200,000; her son Nelson A. Rockefeller and the Carnegie Foundation each donated $100,000. In March 1934, the amount agreed upon was available and the Bliss collection, which included works by Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Andre Derain, Henri Mattisse, Amedeo Mogdigliani, Pablo Picasso, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, among others, was legally transferred to the museum. It forms the basis of the museum collection, and the money raised has served to expand the collection since then as the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest.
  As allowed by her will, the museum sold off the Bliss art collection pieces one by one. For example, Degas's Jockeys on Horseback before Distant Hills was sold in the late 1930s for $18,000, in order to purchase Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon with the proceeds and an additional $10,000. By the sale of three other works from the Bliss collection, Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night was bought in 1941.
  In 1951, three more works from the Bliss collection were sold to the Metropolitan Museum: Odilon Redon's Etruscan Vase with Flowers, Paul Cézanne's Portrait of Antoine Dominique Sauveur Aubert and Pablo Picasso's Woman in White. Henri Rousseau's Lion in the Jungle and Camille Pissarro's Riverside (both now in private collections) and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's May Belfort (now Cleveland Museum of Art) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Brouillard à Guernsey (now Cincinnati Art Museum) were sold as well.
  In turn, the Museum of Modern Art acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest paintings by Henri Matisse, André Derain, Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani, Alexej von Jawlensky, Alberto Giacometti, Balthus, Alexander Archipenko, Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Theo van Doesburg, Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian, Lyonel Feininger, Arshile Gorky, as well as sculptures by Umberto Boccioni, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Constantin Brâncuși, Joseph Cornell, and numerous other works of art.
  In addition to the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, the Lillie P. Bliss International Study Center commemorates museum's co-founder. This study center of historical research in the field of modern art is located at the Museum of Modern Art.
caption: Vincent van Gogh: The Starry Night, 1889, Museum of Modern Art. Saint Rémy. Oil on canvas, 29 × 36​1⁄4" (73.7 × 92.1 cm). Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest
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