BERLIN, GERMANY.- Berlin's New National Gallery museum has announced that it will put on a major new show next year of 19th and 20th century masterpieces on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, organizers said to AFP. The show will be held from May 30 to October 7, 2007 and will follow the spectacular success of a show of works loaned from New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2004 that drew more than 1.5 million art lovers from across Europe.

The exhibit will be funded by sponsors and ticket buyers and include 130 paintings by 19th century masters including Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Delacroix and Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as sculptures by Rodin including "The Burghers of Calais". AFP reported that,"We are of course again hoping for many, many visitors and will do everything to ensure that the lines are as short as possible," said the chairman of the Friends of the New National Gallery association, Peter Raue, referring to the hours-long waits to see the MoMA show."

Neue Nationalgalerie is a museum for classical modern art in Berlin, with a main focus on early the early 20th century. The museum building was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and opened in 1968. Nearly all of the museum's display space is located underground. The ground floor, which is the only floor above the surface, serves principally as a lobby and ticket sales area. Nevertheless, the lobby contains the most dramatic interior design in the museum: the walls of the museum are almost entirely glass, interrupted only with slim metal structural supports, and the white natural light transmitted through these walls reflects off the dark, highly polished floor. The ceiling, constructed as a grid of dark metal beams, is decorated with long lines of LCD displays, which continuously scroll abstract patterns down their length.

The unusual natural illumination, coming from around and below the viewer rather than above, and the continuous suggestion of motion in the ceiling, combine to shock the viewer out of his or her usual way of seeing, perhaps preparing the audience to bring a fresh eye to the art housed below. Yet, at the same time, the simplicity and rigorously pure geometry of the space's rectangular forms makes the design seem tranquil, rather than obtrusive. This careful balance is typical of Mies van der Rohe's mature style.