Despite the weekend's downpours, the Beijing World Art Museum greeted crowds of art lovers eager to see works from masters such as Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Czanne, Rodin and Picasso with their own eyes.

"From Monet to Picasso: Masterworks from the Cleveland Museum of Art" opened on Friday and will run until August 27.

"It is a rare occasion for art aficionados in Beijing to have an intimate encounter with so many quality pieces of modern European art at one time," said Zhan Jianjun, director of the Chinese Oil Painters Society and one of the first people to get a glimpse of this outstanding exhibition.

Zhan believes that exposure to such masterpieces of Western art is a vital experience for China's art lovers.

The world's major art galleries normally prefer to hang on to the masterpieces in their collections, only lending their less important works, Zhan explained.

This limited number of high-quality works had disappointed visitors to some of Beijing's recent and highly publicized exhibitions of Western art.

But this time it's really different, said Zhan, standing in front of Renoir's 1864 oil painting entitled "Romaine Lacaux," before moving to Van Gogh's 1889 work, "The Large Plane Trees," on the second floor of the Beijing World Art Museum, also known as the China Millennium Monument.

Divided into five sections, the art show encompasses 46 paintings and 14 sculptures ranging from French Impressionism to Post-Impressionism, Fauves, Cubism, early modernist sculptures, and the avant-garde, created by 43 Western masters from the late 19th century to the early 20th century.

Featured artists include Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, along with less famous ones, such as Albert Besnard, and Giovanni Segantini.

"Together, the works illuminate the breadth of creativity in one of the most extraordinary epochs in the history of art," commented Chu Yangming, a veteran art researcher and deputy director of Beijing World Art Museum.

Highlights of the show include Matisse's "Festival of Flowers," Amedeo Modigliani's "Portrait of a Woman," Picasso's "Fan, Salt Box, Melon," Cezanne's "The Brook," Gauguin's "In the Waves," Van Gogh's "The Poplars at Saint-Remy" and "The Large Plane Trees," Auguste Rodin's "Heroic Head of Pierre de Wiessant, One of the Burghers of Calais," Berthe Morisot's "Reading," Monet's "The Red Kerchief: Portrait of Mme. Monet," and Renoir's "Romaine Lacaux."

"The works of European art in the exhibition are treasures of a visual culture much enriched over its history by infusions of aesthetic energy from Asia," said Timothy Rub, the newly appointed director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, on Friday's opening ceremony.

These include the beautiful objects brought to Europe over the Silk Road, which had an influence on Renaissance and Baroque paintings, and the ceramic masterworks of China that inspired the exquisite porcelain of Meissen and Svres.

"In the 19th century, at the beginning of the period covered by this exhibition, the reaction of European artists to the aesthetic challenge of Asian art they saw in Paris became part of the foundation of modern Western art," he said.

"So, we are delighted that our museum, which planned an ambitious collection of Asian art from its inception, can reciprocate by presenting to China a priceless portion of our own legacy, and foster the enlightenment inherent in a mutual examination of our cultures."

However, the exhibition is only made possible because the Cleveland Museum of Art is temporarily closed for a massive expansion and renovation project. It will fully reopen in 2011, according to Rub.

For the next five years, the Cleveland Museum of Art will stage six touring exhibitions in North America, Europe and Asia, beginning with the show of "From Monet to Picasso," displaying at least 500 paintings, sculptures and other items from its rich collection of more than 40,000 exhibits covering 6,000 years of art history.

After its Beijing debut, the exhibition is scheduled to visit the Mori Arts Centre in Tokyo, and the National Museum of Tokyo, and then move on to South Korea's Seoul Arts Centre, and finally go to the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia in the summer of next year.

In addition to "From Monet to Picasso," other shows will explore the museum's collections of Medieval, Japanese and Chinese art.

As many of the precious works are shown to Chinese public for the first time, the Beijing World Art Museum has prepared audio guides, educational programs, well-designed souvenirs and catalogues, art books, and high-quality duplications of some of the masterpieces for visitors, said Wang Limei, director of the Beijing World Art Museum.

Apart from Mondays, the exhibition is open daily from 9 am-6 pm. Admission to "From Monet to Picasso" costs 50 yuan (US$7), with discounts for students and senior citizens.

(China Daily May 30, 2006)