BEIJING.- Beijing's World Art Museum presents the exhibit From Monet to Picasso: Masterworks from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The show brings together approximately one hundred of the museum’s most acclaimed European paintings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The exhibition features works by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí, setting them within the broader framework of the groupings The Impressionist Epoch, Post-Impressionism, Early Modernist Sculpture, and Age of the Avante-Gardes.

Stellar works by lesser known artists, such as Albert Besnard, Eugène Jansson, and Giovanni Segantini, complement works by their more well-known contemporaries. Together the works illuminate the breadth of creativity in one of the most extraordinary epochs in the history of art.

Claude Monet and his friends rejected the neoclassical imagery officially sanctioned by the Second Republic as imperial propaganda, and the academic exercise of drawing plaster casts as fear of reality. They hated working in a dusty atelier and painting in grays and browns that reminded them of mud, or worse. While working outdoors they discovered their real subject: a personal response to the natural world. Realized in distinct brushstokes left separate, not blended together as in academic practice, these paintings responded to how artists believed light and vision actually interact. The paintings' relation to nature was one of analogy, not illusion, and that made it modern and interesting: a reminiscence of the physical world constructed by the same means the artists believed that nature used.