STANFDORD, CA.- The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University presents “Spared from the Storm: Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art,” on view through October 5, 2008. This exhibition includes 80 paintings, drawings, and sculptures by many of the most influential artists of the 17th through the mid-20th centuries, featuring works by renowned artists such as baroque master Luca Giordano, impressionist Claude Monet, inventive modernist Pablo Picasso, and surrealist René Magritte. The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) has gathered one of the finest and most comprehensive collections in the American South. The vast majority of this collection survived the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. This exhibition celebrates the European and American portion of NOMA's distinguished and diverse holdings.

Reflecting the city's heritage, the collection is especially strong in French works. “The Surprise” by François Boucher is a delicate work of amorous intrigue by the First Painter to King Louis XV and favorite artist of the royal mistress, Madame de Pompadour. The exhibition also features a grand, life-size “Portrait of Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France,” by the prominent court painter Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun. Other works by French artists include a portrait by Edgar Degas of his sister-in-law and a landscape from George Braque's fauve period.

“Spared from the Storm” offers great variety and impressive quality among its American works as well. Those include “Blue Kimono,” a bold portrait by Robert Henri, leader of the New York realists known as The Eight; Mary Cassatt's “Mother and Child in the Conservatory”; Georgia O'Keeffe's “My Back Yard”; Jackson Pollock's early drip painting “Composition”; and “Radar Astronomy” by Joseph Cornell.

“Spared from the Storm” was organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art to benefit its Katrina Recovery Fund. Its presentation at Stanford is generously supported by the Clumeck Fund and Cantor Arts Center Members.