It's a gift

Paris streets and byways are rich with secrets -- those out-of-the-way cafes that foodies rave about, parks where daffodils bloom absurdly early, ateliers that still hand-carve chairs. Savvy visitors know where to find such things, or are blessed by good fortune.

So it was last summer when Minneapolis art collectors Yvonne and Gabriel Weisberg spotted a beautiful pastel drawing hanging in a secondhand-furniture shop on the city's outskirts. For the past 30 years the couple have collected 19th-century French and Belgian realist art. It's a field that Gabe, an art historian, knows better than pretty much anyone, having written 24 books on the subject.

"Is that what I think it is?" Gabe whispered to his wife after a casual glance at the sketch. With a quiet nod, Yvonne confirmed his appraisal. The drawing was a lively study, about 3 feet wide, of a blue-eyed, blond boy using a pocket knife to sharpen a colored pencil. A sensitive portrait of an artist in training, it was signed "Louise Breslau" and dated 1901. Now forgotten by all but the cognoscenti, Breslau was as famous in her day as American impressionist Mary Cassatt and the French "horse painter" Rosa Bonheur, the first woman granted France's Legion of Honor.

A Breslau pastel had recently sold for $80,000 in New York, a figure unimaginably beyond anything they could afford. And yet there, amid a dusty jumble of furniture, the lovely drawing fairly begged for rescue. Noticing their interest, the dealer explained that he'd bought the piece at a country estate sale. The price was modest. After a bit of negotiation the picture was theirs -- for less than $5,000.

The Weisbergs have promised to give their collection to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where about 45 of their drawings -- though not the Breslau -- will be on loan from Saturday through April 5.

"We have never bought anything beyond $10,000," Gabe Weisberg said recently as a visitor admired the portrait in their apartment near the University of Minnesota, where he has taught since 1985. "But we're not looking for bargains -- we're looking for quality."

Champagne collection on a beer budget

That eye for quality has enabled the Weisbergs to acquire more than 100 museum-worthy drawings. The institute show includes their first acquisition, an 1853 image by François Bonvin of an old beggar with a knapsack and walking stick, that they bought in London in 1970 when they were newlyweds. Ranging from quick sketches to images with painterly finish, the exhibit includes bucolic landscapes, studies of peasant men and women, vagabond children, Parisian street scenes and vistas of the Seine.

"When we got into this, a Bonvin drawing was $350, but as we researched and published, the prices have dramatically increased," to the point that the Weisbergs can no longer afford some of the artists they helped rediscover, Gabe said.

Although their collection focuses on the Impressionist era, it doesn't include work by Monet, Renoir or other famous names of the time. Price and the Weisbergs' scholarly interests and philosophy explain those omissions. As academics -- Yvonne was trained as a social worker before segueing into art research -- they can't afford the top dollars charged for Impressionist art, even though drawings are considerably less expensive than paintings. A bit of a contrarian, Gabe also prefers influential artists who have fallen from favor rather than household names. And as scholars, they delight in finding overlooked, sometimes anonymous art and then puzzling out its history.

"He's showing that there is a wide range, scope and diversity to 19th-century art," said Lisa Michaux, the museum's associate curator of prints and drawings. "When you look at the Weisberg collection, you see their urban scenes are focused on people living on the margins of society. They're not the demimonde of Toulouse-Lautrec or the dance-hall girls of Degas. It's farmers, vagabonds, rag pickers who are not the most picturesque of subjects. But by taking on those topics, the artists were calling people's attention to the rural poor, which was very important at that time."

Reputations revived

Realist art was unfashionable when Weisberg began his career after earning a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 1967. He taught at universities in Albuquerque and Cincinnati before landing at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he worked from 1973 to '81. Cleveland's legendary director Sherman Lee, an Asian-art scholar, also collected French realism and encouraged the Weisbergs' interest. In Cleveland, Gabe organized a show on the realist tradition that helped resurrect interest in the field. Expertly trained and stars in their time, the artists had won prestigious commissions for art in schools, city halls, train stations and other public buildings. But after they died, they were forgotten.

Their oblivion "has nothing to do with quality; it has to do with fate, history and changing taste," said Weisberg. "The history of modernism wrote these people out of it."

Reasons for their obscurity are complex but curiously intimate. Many of the artists had no families or dealers to perpetuate their careers, Weisberg said. Meanwhile, the families of Renoir, Van Gogh and Monet, for example, kept touting their work. Many of the realists were also better draftsmen than painters, "and there's a hierarchy in art that values paintings more than drawings," Weisberg said. "I believe that's wrong, but it's the case." And finally, traditional artists were left in the dust in the early 20th century when experimentation -- cubism, expressionism, abstraction -- became the rage.

Promising their collection to the Minneapolis museum seemed natural to the couple, who have no children to claim it. Weisberg often takes his students to study the museum's collection, and many of his former students work there, including Michaux, who earned a doctorate under Weisberg's tutelage. Former institute director Evan Maurer was keen to add the collection because it fills gaps in the museum's 19th-century holdings, and his successors agreed.

The Weisbergs and the museum hope the show will encourage other collectors of modest means to follow their instincts and trust their eyes. "It shows people that you can find wonderful things by 19th-century artists if you're willing to step out and not worry about having to buy only a Degas," Michaux said.

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431