Pablo Picasso, Pitcher and Bowl of Fruit, 1931. Oil on canvas, 130.8 x 162.6 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 53.1358. © 2007 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York   July 27, 2007–May 11, 2008 The French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, established in 1648 to train professional artists, decreed five categories of acceptable subject matter known as genres and assigned them a given rank within a strict hierarchy. History painting was regarded as the “grand genre,” with the four other subjects assigned the following order: genre painting (pictures of daily life), portraiture, still life, and landscape. Within roughly the next century, numerous countries around Europe formed art academies based on the French model, and consequently artists throughout Europe explored the same themes and similar formal approaches to art and exhibited their work within the context of official salons. In 1863, the Paris Salon famously rejected French artist Edouard Manet’s submission Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass), a landscape painting dominated by a naked female seated next to two clothed contemporary men, which departed from the standard practice of presenting nudes in a mythological or biblical context. The Salon’s refusal to show such a picture underscored the limited options available to a young generation of artists seeking to portray up-to-date subjects and use a variety of new formal means counter to realist academic paintings meticulously painted in the studio. Manet and the Impressionists initiated a revolution in art that would lead to the radical expansion of the range of formal approaches for artists even as they continued to paint traditional subjects, in particular portraiture, genre, landscape, and still life. This exhibition presents 37 treasured masterpieces from the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, that chart modern artists’ experimental interpretations of the academic themes of portraiture, landscape, still life, and genre. The juxtaposition of works on the same theme by artists associated with Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, and Surrealism invites consideration of the evolution of style during this dynamic period in art history as well as the timelessness of these subjects