Artists and Their Models: Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou, Paris

Hong Kong Museum of Art Saturday-December 3

Attended by more hype than last year's Impressionism: Treasure from the National Collection of France, Hong Kong's most expensive exhibition will open this weekend at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Organisers won't say how much the collection of 58 masterpieces is worth (for security reasons), but it's said to be more than the HK$4.6 billion Impressionism show.

Artists and Their Models: Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou, Paris, comprises portraits, sculptures and installations by big-name 20th-century artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Francis Bacon and Marc Chagall through to more bizarre artists of the ilk of Niki de Saint Phalle and Gilles Barbier. Divided into five categories - Muses, Distortions, Visions, Friends and Pastiches - the works reveal important movements in 20th-century western art.

Collected from the Centre Pompidou's Musee National d'Art Moderne, the works have been curated exclusively for Hong Kong viewers. The show focuses on the relationships between artists and their models. 'Artists were interested in the human figure, and we thought about how we could combine masterpieces with artists, their models and the relationship they had,' says Angela Lampe, the curator of Musee National d'Art Moderne.

Returning to a classical style, Picasso's melancholy Harlequin (Arlequin, 1923) is part of a three-series painting. In his studio on Rue La Boetie in Paris, Picasso had Catalan painter Jacinto Salvado dressed in a harlequin's costume for 15 days. This version is meticulously finished in the face, but the uncompleted body is seemingly hardened by a classical drawing style.

After living in Paris for more than a year, Chagall painted a portrait of his neighbour, Mazin. In The Poet Mazin (Le Poete Mazin, 1911-1912), Chagall integrated cubism influences, painting a pictorial surface with contrasting chocolates, dark browns and whites. It doesn't fully embrace the cubist style, as the mythical pictorial space shows a strange half human, half animal-like face.