Modernist artworks from Germany's Museum Berggruen are on show in Australia for the first time, including big names such as Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso.
Cezanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen is the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra's winter blockbuster show.
The museum collection has been touring internationally while its Berlin building is closed for renovation, and the exhibition has already visited half a dozen cities and been viewed by about a million people.
But the Australian version is different - it's no out-of-the-box show, instead integrating art from giants of European modernism with works by Australian artists.
The result is a story of the dynamic exchange of 20th century artistic ideas over decades and across the world, and the development of modernism in Australia.
"I think it is the most accomplished and the most meaningful venue so far in the entire tour in terms of research into art history, because of this dialogue," said the head of Museum Berggruen, Dr Gabriel Montua.
More than 80 works from the museum sit alongside 75 works from the national collection, by artists such as Russell Drysdale, Grace Cossington Smith and Dorrit Black.
The exhibition opens with Cezanne's experiments in form and perspective, on show with works by Australian artists like Drysdale and Ian Fairweather, who were influenced by his innovations.
Rarely seen works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque show the breakthroughs of cubism, hung with Australian artists such as Dorrit Black, Grace Crowley and Roy de Maistre.
There are sections devoted to Paul Klee and the Bauhaus, Dora Maar and Henri Matisse, while a sculpture by Giacometti measuring more than two metres high represents the first time a such large-scale Giacometti has been displayed in Australia.
All of the artists in the exhibition ultimately come back to Cezanne's innovations, according to NGA curator David Greenhalgh.
"He is the figurehead who inspired so much of what came after," said Greenhalgh.
"There's a real sense of a lot of these artists looking at one another and deriving inspiration from one another."
The Berggruen collection is the life's work of art dealer Heinz Berggruen, who fled Germany before World War II and sold his collection to the German state in 2000, ensuring it would be available to the public.
Many of the artists he collected were deliberately removed from German art collections, because they were deemed degenerate during the Nazi reign.
German-born Australian artist Inge King is an example of how artistic ideas spread in defiance of the politics of the time.
In 1938 King saw an exhibition of so-called '"degenerate" art in Berlin, and instead of taking on board Nazi propaganda, she was inspired by the ethos of the Bauhaus.
King's sculpture Red Rings is on display at the exhibition, and many of her monumental modernist sculptures can be found across Australian cities.
The exhibition opens Saturday and runs till September 21.
AAP travelled to Canberra with the assistance of the National Gallery of Australia.
