NEW YORK.- Museum-quality works of art in all genres will be exhibited at The Art Show, America's most prestigious art fair, through February 28, 2005. An outstanding selection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs, and ceramics from the 19th century to the 21st century will be on exhibition at the Seventh Regiment Armory, Park Avenue at 67th Street, New York City. Organized by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA), to benefit Henry Street Settlement, for the 17th year, the show is known for extraordinary opportunities to see rare and highly sought after masterpieces from prominent artists. Proceeds from The Art Show Gala Preview on February 23, 2005, will benefit Henry Street Settlement, a pioneering social service agency on New York's Lower East Side.

The Art Show continues to be the most prestigious art fair in the United States based on the quality and diversity of the works of art presented by this very select group of modern and contemporary art dealers," says Richard Solomon, President of Pace Prints and the Art Dealers Association of America. The Art Show Chairman Roland Augustine, of Luhring Augustine, notes, "In a field now populated with an abundance of art fairs worldwide, The Art Show continues to distinguish itself not only by the quality and selectivity of the works exhibited but by the intimacy and scale of the fair itself. The range of these seventy galleries under one roof, including many of the nation's best contemporary galleries, provides clear evidence of the dynamism of the Art Dealers Association of America, upon which the resounding critical success of The Art Show is founded."

An unprecedented number of solo exhibitions will be on view at The Art Show 2005 including exhibitions of work by Gene Davis, Françoise Gilot, Nancy Graves, Jess, Isamu Noguchi, Adam Straus, Tom Wesselmann, and Christopher Wool. Françoise Gilot's self portrait with her two children Claude and Paloma Picasso, entitled The Telephone Call, 1952, will be offered by Elkon Gallery, Inc., which will devote half of their space to a one person exhibition. On the occasion of The Art Show 2005, Gilot, 85, recently wrote about the painting and noted that, "In the upper left corner of the canvas, a mirror, instead of reflecting objects in the room, is mostly black as if announcing a dark fate in complete opposition to the youth and joy of the three characters depicted." To celebrate the centennial of Noguchi's birth, PaceWildenstein will present a solo exhibition of a dozen small stone sculptures from the 1980s that have never before been seen by the public.

A one-person exhibition of paintings, prints and drawings by Gene Davis (1920 - 1985) will be shown at Charles Cowles Gallery, Inc., including the artist's vibrant stripe paintings from the 1960s though 1985. The works, from the Estate of Gene Davis, are offered at the bequest of the artist's widow to benefit the Gene Davis Memorial Fund at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which supports the Smithsonian's' activities related to 20th century art.

Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art has organized a solo exhibition of the work of Nancy Graves (1935 - 1995). A full color catalogue will accompany the exhibition. On view at The Art Show will be Pleistocene Skeleton, 1970, the last existing camel skeleton made of the original materials (including wax, marble dust and acrylic) that has not been cast into bronze. The sculpture has not been exhibited publicly since 1971. While Graves did extensive research on modern day and prehistoric camels, her forms were from her own imagination. As a result, she saw the works more as abstract objects rather than literal ones.

A retrospective of work by Jess, the reclusive San Francisco-based artist who died this past January, will be the focus at Odyssia. Known for his idiosyncratic paintings and densely layered collages, works by Jess are in the collections of major museums including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Just Short of Too Late, a one-person show of recent landscapes by Adam Straus will be on view at Nohra Haime Gallery. Straus covers topics from the latest newspaper headlines, including global warming and war, with a combination of irony and sincere concern for our planet's future. Carroll Janis will devote his space to a solo exhibition of recent oils by Tom Wesselmann entitled The Great American Nude. A one-person exhibition of text work from 1988 through 2000 by Christopher Wool will be shown at Luhring Augustine. Wool is best known for his iconic text pieces. The show will include his proclamation Sex Luv Sex Luv from a 1988 untitled work on paper.

Modern and Contemporary - Scores of exceptional works from important artists can be found at The Art Show 2005. A Picasso pen and ink of a heavy set man who worked for the circus will be offered by Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago and New York. The drawing, Le Saltimbanque, 1905, is thought to be a study for Family of Saltimbanque, a masterpiece from Picasso's circus period in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The year before, Picasso had moved to Montmartre and his mistress, Fernande Olivier, introduced him to a circus troupe camped out under a massive red tent at the foot of Montmartre. Olivier said later, "I never saw Picasso laugh so happily...he was like a child and quite unaware of the relative shallowness of the humor."

Pace Prints will exhibit Portrait de Jacqueline, 1959, a Picasso linocut. The work is one of the most beautiful and noble portraits the artist made of his last wife Jacqueline Roque. By 1963, Picasso had made more than 100 linocuts, exploiting the medium to create a revolutionary reductive method of printing multiple colors on a single block of linoleum.

Galerie St. Etienne will exhibit a rare oil by Gustav Klimt, which will be shown in the U.S. for the first time. Klimt painted Portrait of a Lady Facing Front, 1898 - 99, at the height of his popularity in turn of the century Vienna. The sitter may be Adele Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy patron of Klimt's who is also thought to have been his lover. The portrait belonged to Bloch-Bauer's family but was stolen by the Nazis. The artist had numerous affairs with his models and consequently a number of illegitimate children. In a rather shocking turn of events, one of Klimt's sons grew up to be a Nazi. As a result, he had access to Klimt paintings snatched by the Nazis and actually was able to donate his father's work to the Austrian National Gallery. Recently the museum restituted the painting, and it now belongs to several of Bloch-Bauer's relatives.