Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in October 1998, this splendid volume offers a visual feast consisting of more than 400 masterpieces by the greatest artists of this century -- including Joseph Beuys, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Yves Klein, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and many others. Provocative juxtapositions of works from the two collections allow comparisons between, for example, Vasily Kandinsky's preliminary oil study for Landscape with Tower and the final painting; Jackson Pollock's The Moon Woman and his Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle; and the major movements, such as Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel, occurring simultaneously on either side of the Atlantic.

Scholars and curators from the Guggenheim and the Pompidou offer a revealing portrait of two museums whose collections have dramatically shaped our understanding of 20th-century art. The book also includes curatorial texts on the artworks and artist biographies.