In 1764 the Russian empress Catherine the Great (1729–1796) purchased a major collection of western European paintings, laying the foundation for today's State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Now one of the largest museums in the world, the Hermitage boasts a collection of over three million objects from virtually every culture ever known, from neolithic sculptures and Greek and Roman antiquities; old master paintings by Leonardo, Raphael, Rembrandt, and Rubens; to milestones of modernism by Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

The Guggenheim Museum began with the vision of Solomon R. Guggenheim (1861–1949), heir to an American mining fortune and an enthusiastic patron of the arts. By enlisting the guidance of German baroness Hilla Rebay in 1929, Guggenheim was able to amass a major collection of contemporary European painting. This collection has since grown to encompass myriad movements of Modern and contemporary art in virtually every medium. The institution itself has also expanded into a network of international museums with locations in New York, Venice, Bilbao, Berlin, and now Las Vegas, making it possible to bring the institution's extraordinary collection to a worldwide audience.

The Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, Las Vegas, is the most recent addition to this constellation of sites, and the first joint venture of the two newly allied institutions. Within the elaborated structure of Las Vegas's Venetian Resort, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rem Koolhaas has designed a state-of-the-art gallery for the new museum. The museum's exterior and interior walls are constructed with panels of Cor-ten steel, which has never before been used to create the structure of a museum gallery. The rust-colored, lightly textured industrial metal is intended to evoke the traditional velvet walls of the Hermitage Museum while providing a stark modern contrast to the ornate architecture of the Venetian.

The inaugural exhibition at the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum—Masterpieces and Master Collectors: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings from the Hermitage and Guggenheim Museums—presents masterworks drawn from both institutions' holdings, building on the distinct, but highly complementary, strengths of their collections. For the Hermitage, the classic early Modernist works by Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Paul Gaughin, Matisse, and Picasso serve as a finale to their encyclopedic collection tracing western European art back to ancient times. In contrast, the Guggenheim collection begins with these Modern masters, the early avant-garde touchstones from which later Modern and contemporary art has progressed through the present day.

This exhibition highlights the way these two collections, world-renowned for different reasons, complement and reinforce each other, focusing on the point at which they overlap: the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This period marks the time when Paris's radical avant-garde was rejecting the finished surfaces, naturalistic colors, realistically rendered forms, and stock compositions long favored by the Salon, the official exhibition arm of the French Academy of painters and sculptors. What resulted were bold new ways of painting, exemplified by broken brushstrokes, high-key color, subject matter from modern life, and a frank formal investigation of the visual tensions created by painting three-dimensional forms on flat canvas.

Chronologically tracing Modernism's beginnings in late-19th-century France, the exhibition begins with Claude Monet's Lady in the Garden of 1867, one of the early monuments of Impressionist painting. A sunlit scene of urban leisure by Pissarro and a portrait and domestic genre scene by Pierre Auguste Renoir show the range of subjects depicted by this innovative French avant-garde. Post-Impressionism is highlighted by a rural landscape by Vincent van Gogh, Gaughin's paintings of Tahiti's exotic "primitives," and a succinct survey of Cézanne's influential work in landscape, portraiture, and still life seen through a selection of paintings still striking for their daring flatness, compression, and use of dabs of color to facet form. Modernism's continuation in the hands of the early 20th-century School of Paris can be seen in the work of the great colorists Matisse and Pierre Bonnard, and in the fine examples of Picasso's painting prior to and during the development of Cubism, as well as Cubist works by Picasso's more color-based contemporaries Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, and František Kupka. The Hermitage is particularly celebrated for its scores of masterpieces by Matisse, and this exhibition displays four of the 35 major Matisse canvases in the Hermitage collection, originally purchased by the artist's great Moscow partons Sergei Shchukin (1854–1936) and Ivan Morozov (1871–1921).

Also featuring works by Marc Chagall, André Derain, Franz Marc, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Rousseau, Louis Valtat, and Kess van Dongen, the exhibition ends with the abstraction of Wasily Kandinsky, including his great Paris-period work Dominant Curve of 1936. The bright palette and biomorphic forms in this painting are characteristic of the work of Kandinsky produced in France, where he was inspired by the amorphous shapes being employed by the Surrealists as well as by his study of microscopic organisms. This late masterpiece crowns the Guggenheim's world-renowned collection of approximately 150 paintings and works on paper by the Russian-born artist.

Several of the Guggenheim's contributions to the exhibition are part of the Thannhauser Collection, an extensive suite of late 19th- early 20th-century masterpieces donated to the museum by the German-born dealer and collector Justin K. Thannhauser (1892–1976) and his wife Hilde (1919–1991). Many other works are gifts from Solomon R. Guggenheim's private collection or museum purchases made under his auspices. Another painting, Picasso's Studio of 1928, comes from the collection of Solomon's niece Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979), who transferred her collection and palazzo in Venice to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1976. In addition, important exchanges and outside donations have rounded out these core contributions to build the current Guggenheim collection. Most of the Hermitage paintings in the exhibition originally belonged in the private holdings of Shchukin and Morozov, two prominent Russian businessmen who developed world-class collections of French paintings.

Combining the unique expertise, histories, and holdings of these two museums makes possible a brand-new range of exhibitions at an extraordinary western venue, bringing the treasures of both the Hermitage and the Guggenheim into new cultural territory.