On view February 20 to May 29 at the Cleveland Museum of Art, “Masterworks of the Phillips Collection” will exhibit 56 celebrated European paintings from the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, including works by Degas, Van Gogh, Klee, Monet and El Greco.

The centerpiece of the show is Auguste Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party,” a masterpiece that has rarely traveled to venues outside The Phillips Collection. The exhibition also includes works by Paul Cézanne, Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso, among others. Earlier works by El Greco, Chardin, Delacroix and Ingres add to the comprehensive examination of the evolution of modern art.

Duncan Phillips (1886-1966), founder of The Phillips Collection, spent more than 50 years assembling his extraordinary collection of European and American works, said to be among the best in private hands. His goal was to assemble works that would resonate off one another, revealing visual harmonies that tied together historical masterworks with the art of his own time. In 1921 he opened two rooms of his Washington home to the public, becoming the first museum of modern art in the country. This exhibition focuses on the European treasures in the museum’s holdings, although Phillips also collected American masters.

The installation of this exhibition in Cleveland is curated by CMA curator Tom E. Hinson.

Art Beyond Isms: Masterworks from El Greco to Picasso in The Phillips Collection a 106-page catalog (The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; 2002, published by Third Millennium Publishing, London) is $ 22.

The CMA will have a complementary exhibition entitled “Drawn with Light: French Photography from the Cleveland Museum of Art” February 26 to June 8. Admission to this show is free. The desire to represent reality had long been a strong impulse in Western art. With the invention of photography in 1839, this new mechanical means provided for an unprecedented level of exactitude. The show surveys through about 30 works by such pictorially inventive and technically accomplished Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century photographers as Édouard Baldus, Adolphe Braun, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, Nadar (Gaspard-Féliz Tournachon), Charles Marville, Louis Robert and Eugène Atget.

Admission is $10 weekdays and $12 weekends for adults; $9 for seniors and college students; $8 for groups of 15 or more; $7 for students ages 6 to 18; free to CMA members and children 5 and under at all times. The audio tour price is included in the price of the ticket. Advance reservations are recommended; call 216-421-7350 or 888-CMA-0033 or visit .