They have put together a dazzler, with outstanding works borrowed from the important museums and collections to which Matisse sold them.
The show would include works borrowed from overseas, and rising insurance costs for trans-Atlantic shipments may prove prohibitive, he said.
Modernism also seems more like surface embellishment than structural change in much Italian Futurism, represented here by several works borrowed from the museum's sister institution, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
This generous retrospective has a few glitches -- too many works borrowed from too few collections and a slightly too empty look in some galleries -- but nothing really detracts from its power.
The swooping metal lines of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in the post-industrial Basque capital, displaying works borrowed from the Guggenheim museums in New York and Venice, have attracted millions of visitors.
The center, right behind the train station, was opened to the public Wednesday with five days of free entry to the large, handsome exhibition of works borrowed mostly from the mother house, and meant, rather cleverly, to trace the meaning of masterpieces from the Middle Ages through a large swath of the 20th century.
About 160 works, borrowed from American and European museums, are on view in "Cloisonné: Chinese Enamels From the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties," at the Bard Graduate Center Decorative Artss, Design History, Material Culture, at 18 West 86th Street in Manhattan.
"We set out to get the best," Mr. Holbrooke said one morning this week as he and his wife, the author Kati Marton, showed off the array of works borrowed over the 14 months since he was confirmed as head of the United States mission.
Organized by Joe Earle, vice president of Japan Society and director of its gallery, the exhibition consists of 54 works from the collection of Catherine and Thomas Edson of San Antonio and almost 20 more works borrowed from private collections in New York and London.
The works, borrowed from 90 museums and private collections, include some paintings rarely displayed to the public, like the erotic "Guitar Lesson," which caused controversy the first time it was shown in 1934 (and hadn't been seen again in public until now).
Many of the techniques found in Vietnam works, borrowed from avant-garde writers or invented on the fly, would become staples of mainstream literary fiction by the turn of the millennium: a fragmented approach to storytelling, a reluctance on the author's part to interpret characters or events, a tendency to see everything in the present tense as though the past and future no longer connected.
