Art Through the Ages: Masterpieces of Painting from Titian to Picasso traces six centuries of painting from Renaissance art in the 15th century to Modern art in the 20th century, drawing on the world-renowned collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Gemäldegalerie of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. This is the first large-scale exhibition resulting from the January 2001 agreement initiating Guggenheim-Hermitage-Kunsthistorisches collaborations. Because the alliance has combined resources representing perhaps the greatest single concentration of cultural artifacts in the world, its programming and collection-sharing inititatives have the potential to present a full spectrum of exhibitions and scholarly research projects from prehistoric times to the present.

Art Through the Ages highlights key moments in the development of Western painting through 40 masterpieces representative of various artistic movements and cultural backgrounds. Each painting allows viewers to explore the qualities that define masterworks from different periods. Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Jan de Leeuw (1436) and Albrecht Dürer's Portrait of Johannes Kleberger (1526) display the fineness of detail that is typical of Northern Renaissance painting. As is evident in the selection of 16th–century paintings by Francesco Bassano, Lorenzo Lotto, Tintoretto, and Titian, sensuous materiality characterizes the works of the Venetian Renaissance. The Virgin with Child, St. Joseph, and St. John the Baptist (ca. 1521–27) by the Florentine Jacopo Pontormo combines Renaissance iconography with Mannerist style, including bright, almost acidic colors. Subject matter of the early periods ranges from religious and genre scenes to such allegorical depictions of mythology as Salvator Rosa's The Return of Astraea (ca. 1644), a work commissioned by one of the Medici.

The exhibition's particularly strong presentation of 17th–century works includes paintings by the French artists Nicolas Poussin, whose The Victory of Joshua over the Amalekites (Battle of Israelites with Amalekites) (1625) combines the figural perfection of classical antiquity with atmospheric, more modern perspective, and Claude Lorrain, whose poetic Morning in the Harbor (late 1630s) delineates gradations of sunlight rising behind a Roman port and fishing boats surrounded by ancient ruins.

From the golden age of Spanish painting, Francisco de Zurbarán's intimate The Childhood of the Virgin (ca. 1660) explores magnificent draperies against a somber background, while Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's monumental St. Michael (1665–66) is a forceful portrayal of the victorious warrior saint, his sword raised above his head. In 1659 Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, famous for renditions of Spain's royal family, painted a touching portrait of a little prince, Philip Prosper, who would die at age four in 1661. It is a richly executed work that exemplifies the artist's gift for painting both psychologically penetrating portraits and sumptuous materials.

Seventeenth-century artists from the Low Countries are noted for their expertise in a variety of subject matter, including portraiture and interiors. The liveliness with which Anthony van Dyck portrays his subjects in Family Portrait (1621) contrasts with the somber, intense gaze with which Peter Paul Rubens presents himself in Self-Portrait (ca. 1638–40). Paulus Potter's The Wolf-Hound (ca. 1650) is especially unusual for the large scale with which its canine subject is portrayed. Flemish genre scenes by David Teniers the Younger and Jan Steen contrast the aristocracy and commoners. Teniers's Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in His Gallery at Brussels (ca. 1651)—an interior displaying in miniature the painting collection of the archduke who commissioned the work and was one of the Hapsburg empire's most important collectors—presents a microcosm of aristocratic wealth that is to be admired. By contrast, Steen's In Luxury Beware (1633) uses black comedy to moralize on the dissolute occupants of a Dutch household.

Landscape in Suffolk (ca. 1749) by Thomas Gainsborough and Cupid Untying the Zone of Venus (1788) by Joshua Reynolds—whose Venus resembles one of his real-life subjects, the famous Emma Lady Hamilton—are indicative of European influences on English artist as well as of the important contributions England made to 18th-century art. Since the Renaissance, many artists studied, practiced, and were collected internationally. Reynolds's painting, for example, was made for Prince G. A. Potemkin of Russia. An artist like Bernardo Bellotto, a Venetian whose uncle was the painter Canaletto, had a career that included periods as a court painter in Dresden and Warsaw. His sophisticated cityscape Lobkowitzplatz in Vienna (1759–60) was commissioned by Austrian Empress Maria Theresa.

The selection of French paintings from the 18th century onward includes Jean-Antoine Watteau's Holy Family (Rest on the Flight to Egypt) (1719), a rare religious painting by the Rococo artist; Ferdinand-Victor-Eugéne Delacroix's exotic Lion Hunting in Morocco (1854), a work of Romanticism painted in jewel-like tones; and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's Pond in the Forest (1865–70), a shimmering landscape that presages Impressionism. The next stages of French artistic development are represented through significant Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early Modernist paintings. Claude Monet's Haystack at Giverny (1886) in an example of the height of Impressionism. Craggy mountains, vibrant colors, and expressive brushstrokes characterize Vincent van Gogh's Mountains at Saint-Rémy (July 1889), an important painting from his penultimate year. The complexity of execution found in works from Paul Cézanne's final decade, in particular such portraits as Man with Crossed Arms (ca. 1899), greatly influenced generations of Modern painters. The first 20th-century painting in the exhibition, Pablo Picasso's Woman Ironing (1904), is a brooding work from the artist's Blue Period.

Vasily Kandinsky's Blue Mountain (1908–09) and Kazimir Malevich's Morning in the Village after Snowstorm (1912) show the progression of such Modernist styles as Expressionism and Cubism toward abstraction. Marc Chagall's Paris Through the Windows (1913) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Artilleryman (1915) explore color and its psychological associations in more figurative compositions, which use Modern idioms in varying degrees. Abstraction is taken further in Fernand Léger's exploration of Cubism in Contrast of Forms (1913) and Joan Miró's elaboration on surrealism in Landscape (The Hare) (autumn 1927), but both continue to reference real forms, whether cubes or a rabbit. Piet Mondrian's Neo-Plastic Composition No. 1 (1930), which refers to nothing outside of itself, is the most purely abstract painting of this group.

During the years following World War II, artists in New York developed what came to be called Abstract Expressionism. This uniquely American movement included a number of innovative strategies, and Art Through the Ages features the Color Field technique of Mark Rothko's Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red) (1949), with its unified, simple blocks of color, and the action or gestural painting of Jackson Pollock's Ocean Greyness (1953) and Willem de Kooning's Composition (1955). In turn, Pop artists in the 1960s broke new ground by blurring distinctions between high art and popular culture. Roy Lichtenstein's Grrrrrrrrrrr!! (1965), which is the chronological conclusion to this exhibition, is typical of Pop art's appropriation of comic-strip imagery and mechanical printing processes.