Pearl Perlmuter; inside/outside

As the wife of Dutch artist Wessel Couzijn, whose work is well represented in the collection, the now 89-year-old Perlmuter has long had to struggle for recognition. She was a student of Ossip Zadkine and participated in Sonsbeek ’58 with a plaster version of the sculpture Resistance. The bronze version was shown in the same year at the Venice Biennale, which was curated by Hammacher. Nevertheless, according to Van Straaten, the museum ‘has not been at the forefront of defending Perlmuter’s work’. It was not until 1989, after the first major retrospective of her work at the Gemeentemuseum in Arnhem, that a work of hers was acquired, the terracotta sculpture Political prisoner from 1951.

In 2000, Van Straaten acquires two bronze sculptures by Perlmuter: Wave and Funeral Pyre, in which she has incorporated the experiences of survivors from Auschwitz. ‘By choosing this artist, I hope that we have brought her work in from the margin to the centre.’