Cody Clark

In the f/Stop Café at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, the clear glass tabletops are emblazoned with gold-lettered quotations from the wit and wisdom of fine arts luminaries. One such artistic tidbit declares that, "Bad artists copy. Good artists steal."

"Monet to Picasso," a collection of works by European master painters and sculptors from the 19th and 20th centuries, is neither copied nor stolen, but on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The more than 70 rare and valuable pieces will be in Salt Lake City until sometime this fall.

The exhibition closes Sept. 21, but you can't just shut the doors one day and load up a truck to Cleveland the next. William H. Robinson, curator of modern European art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, said that great care must be taken to transport the exhibition from one city to the next.

"The details are extraordinarily complex," Robinson said. "We are extremely careful about how these works are packed and shipped."

While the pieces are on display, Robinson said, a team of conservation experts inspects them daily to report even minute changes in the condition of each work.

"It's really an extraordinary opportunity for us in the state of Utah" to host the collection, said Jill Dawsey, the UMFA's curator of modern and contemporary art.

Ongoing renovations to the Cleveland Museum of Art created a unique window for Utah and several other cities. "This is the first time this exhibit has traveled," Dawsey said, "and probably the last time it will travel."

"Monet to Picasso" has already been displayed in Beijing, Tokyo and Vancouver, but Salt Lake City is the only city in the western United States where its paintings and sculpture will be shown. Robinson said that Utah got the call because of the UMFA's top-notch exhibition program, and also because the Beehive State is "a part of the country that's growing, that has new audiences."

One distinguishing factor about "Monet to Picasso" is the quality of its pieces.

When the exhibition was in Beijing, Zhan Jianjun, director of the Chinese Oil Painters Society, told the English-language newspaper China Daily that museums rarely lend their masterpieces, preferring to exhibit only secondary works outside their own walls.

Paul Anderson, curator of the Brigham Young University Museum of Art, said that's because museums typically want to exhibit their best pieces to their own patrons. "Big museums with wonderful collections want people to see those collections when they visit," Anderson said.

One of the signature works in "Monet to Picasso" is French painter Claude Monet's "The Red Kerchief: Portrait of Mrs. Monet." The perspective of the viewer, Dawsey said, is that "you're standing in a room looking out the window as she passes by."

Dawsey said that Monet did the painting shortly before his wife, Camille, died of tuberculosis, and that he kept it in his personal possession and never exhibited it during his lifetime.

Another important piece is French painter Paul Gauguin's "In the Waves," which depicts a naked woman plunging into the surf. Dawsey said the painting is often noted for its "striking, intense colors that are not at all observed from reality."

And among the sculptures is a rare cast of Auguste Rodin's famous "The Thinker," possibly the single-most widely recognized piece of sculpture ever made. (Rodin made multiple casts of "The Thinker" from his own plaster models during his lifetime. The original cast is at the Musée Rodin in Paris.)

Robinson said that many of the pieces in "Monet to Picasso" are from private collections and have been donated to the Cleveland Museum of Art over the years. Some were acquired when the artists who made them were still living and, in some cases, still controversial.

Several of the pieces are from the collection of Leonard C. Hanna Jr., including "The Harem," which features several nude women and was painted by Picasso in 1906. Robinson said Hanna, a philanthropist and heir to a large mining fortune, purchased the Harem in 1928 at an exhibition of Picasso's work at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

"That was a very daring purchase, at the time," Robinson said.

Because many of the works exhibited in "Monet to Picasso" are well known, you can look at pictures of them in books or online. There's a compelling argument to be made, however, for seeing them in person.

Anderson said that the difference between looking at a picture of a famous painting and actually seeing the painting is the same as the difference between looking at pictures of Zion National Park and actually visiting the park itself.

"The picture is wonderful," said Anderson, "but seeing the original makes all the difference in the world."

In his own experience, Anderson said, he's often become familiar with a certain work of art from pictures in books and not been overly impressed. Then, after seeing those same pieces in museums, he said, "they blew me away. It makes a huge difference to see the real thing."

Robinson said that photos don't adequately reproduce color and texture. And seeing it in a book or on a Web site often doesn't give you any sense of the scale of a painting or sculpture.

Picasso's "La Vie," he said, "is nearly 6 feet tall."

And Dawsey said that standing in the same room with an original work is almost like being in the presence of the artist: "You can say, 'That's a brush stroke that was put on this canvas by Van Gogh, or Picasso.' "

The Van Gogh paintings in the exhibit, Dawsey said, are from the end of the famous painter's life. "They have that familiar agitated surface," she said. "You can really see what he was feeling. It's this very emotional experience."

(The best-known Van Gogh in the exhibit is probably "The Poplars at Saint-Rémy," a landscape with two tall trees in its foreground, painted in 1889.)

And there's no reason to stay away from Salt Lake City if modern art intimidates you. Partly because not all of the exhibit, which stretches back to the mid-19th century, is "modern" in the way that most people think of that term. Also, however, because you might learn something about the non-representational styles that make many people itch just at the thought of "modern" art.

Anderson said that an exhibit like "Monet to Picasso," because it captures a progression from realism to surrealism over several decades, helps people not familiar with art history to see how artistic styles grow and change. You may not like cubism -- a surrealist style championed by Picasso -- he said, but you start to understand what caused it to develop.

"I think people should go soon," Anderson said, "because they'll want to go back."

• Cody Clark can be reached at 344-2542 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it