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Talking to ArtInfo’s sister publication, Museums New York, guest curator Michael FitzGerald of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. told us to look out for a few surprises.

“We’ve done a great deal of research,” he told us, “and [what we discovered about] Roy Lichtenstein was most interesting. There’s so much in his relationship with Picasso when he was first establishing himself as an artist. In fact, he started becoming fascinated with Picasso’s work back in the 1940s, and he first saw Picasso in depth at the same time that Pollock first saw Picasso in depth, at the 1939-40 retrospective at MoMA, which places him in an art context that is quite different to the one that people think of—commercial culture and comic books and all that.”

We asked FitzGerald how many of the American artists on view in the exhibition actually met Picasso, who, after all, never set foot in this country.

“Very few did,” he told us. “As far as artists knowing Picasso, the story starts with Max Weber. He got to know Picasso through the Steins, and he brought the first Picasso painting to America, as far as we can tell.

“It’s never been shown, but it’ll be in the show,” FitzGerald continued. “It's a tiny still-life painting of a covered bowl and a couple of pieces of fruit that is right at the beginning of what became Cubism—very simplified masses and rather dark coloring. It’s very austere and simple. Weber bought it from Picasso in 1908 before he came back to New York, and he brought it with him and showed it to Stieglitz and all those guys, and basically he started Picasso’s career in America.”

What about other artists meeting Picasso? “Well, Lichtenstein actually went and stood in front of Picasso’s studio when he was a soldier stationed in Paris in 1945 and tried to screw up enough courage to go up and introduce himself, but he couldn’t do it. He wanted to, but just didn’t quite get there.”

Any other surprises? “One of the most fascinating things is that we’ve found a set of Gorky’s drawings from the early 1930s that are copies of Picasso’s Neo-Classical paintings,” Mr. FitzGerald told us. “I was actually able to trace them to specific illustrations in the catalog that was published after the sale of John Quinn’s collection in the mid-1920s. Gorky got a hold of the catalog in the 1930s and made his copies. When you see them in relation to Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother and other paintings of the mid-’30s, they will transform your sense of those pictures’ relationship to Picasso and Neo-Classicism.”

This is clearly a hugely influential show, focusing not just upon superficial similarities between pictures, but upon real engagements between artists.

“Yes,” Mr. FitzGerald concluded, “both between the Americans and Picasso, but also among groups of Americans. If you think of Gorky and de Kooning and David Smith all responding at the same time to certain Picassos, it really becomes about the development of the avant garde in America.”