NEW YORK.- The Museum of Modern Art presents Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, on view through January 29, 2007. Organized by John Elderfield, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture. Abandoned by the French government that sent him to Mexico, the Emperor Maximilian was executed by a firing squad of Benito Juárez's army at Querétaro, north of Mexico City, on June 19th, 1867. News of the execution reached Paris on July 1st, just as Napoleon III was inaugurating that year's Universal Exposition. Edouard Manet set to work almost immediately, and by early 1869 completed a series of three large paintings, an oil sketch, and one lithograph of the subject.

Manet and the Execution of Maximilian will unite these works for the first time in the United States, with selected additional works, examining the evolution from one painting to the next, which was fuelled by a steady stream of written and graphic accounts of the event. Organized by John Elderfield, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, the exhibition will be accompanied by education programs and a fully illustrated catalogue.

Major support for the exhibition is provided by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.