Andy Warhol Pablo Picasso Willem de Kooning Max Weber Roy Lichtenstein Louise Bourgeois David Smith Arshile Gorky

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"That guy missed nothing!" exclaimed American artist Jackson Pollock once in referring to Pablo Picasso.

His admiring comment opens a groundbreaking exhibition at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, which examines the fundamental role Picasso played in the development of American art during the last century.

Though Picasso, who was born in Spain and lived in France, never set foot in the United States, his works began arriving in the country at the beginning of the 20th century and made a major impact.

The "Picasso and American Art" exhibition occupies an entire floor of the Whitney Museum and features a diverse group of American artists, whose works are juxtaposed with Picasso's, including Max Weber, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, John Graham, Willem de Kooning, Pollock and Andy Warhol.

Among the masterpieces on display is Still Life, the first Picasso painting to arrive in the United States.

The exhibition involved intense efforts to track down some of the paintings and was 10 years in the making, with half of that period spent on convincing museums and art collectors in Europe, Asia and the United States to lend their precious artworks.

"It was not easy to convince them to lend what was often a central piece," said museum director Adam Weinberg, adding that the exhibition was the most important ever organized by the Whitney Museum.

Through the 170 pieces on display, 40 of them by Picasso, the exhibition delves into the creative work of several American artists and focuses on nine of them, exploring the Spanish artist's influence on their art.

Picasso's stamp on American art was felt early in the 1900s, with the American painter Weber bringing the artist's Still Life back to the U.S. in 1908 after a trip to Paris and using it as an inspiration.

The renowned art dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz was also influenced by Picasso's "cubist" style, apparent in many of his photographs of New York's skyline.

A slew of other American artists—Davis, Gorky and Pollock—were also smitten by Picasso, whose influence is evident in their paintings.

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born artist and sculptor who lived in New York, commented in 1930 after attending an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art dedicated to Picasso: "It was so beautiful and it revealed such genius and such a collection of treasures that I did not pick up a paintbrush for a month."

According to the Whitney, by the end of the 1930s Picasso's influence had grown so powerful that he had become the main source of inspiration for a number of American artists including Gorky, de Kooning and David Smith.

The same can be said for a number of more contemporary artists, whose works are part of the exhibition, including Roy Lichtenstein and Warhol.

The exhibition runs through Jan. 28.

by Catherine Hours, Copyright 2006 Agence France Presse