BERLIN,  GERMANY.- Officials from the Berlin Art Museum were friendly, but they drove a hard bargain, wrote John Burgess of the Washington Post Foreign Service.  They wanted to display the cream of the Museum of Modern Art’s collection of paintings and indoor sculpture, and they wanted the 25-foot steel garden sculpture known as "Broken Obelisk" thrown in, recalled Glenn Lowry, director of the New York institution.

 "This must be in Berlin," insisted Peter Raue, the German representative of the Neue Nationalgalerie. "It never travels," responded Lowry.

But today, "Broken Obelisk" by Barnett Newman is the first thing that people see when they approach the doors of the Neue Nationalgalerie to visit the display of more than 200 pieces from the New York museum.

"MoMA in Berlin," as the show is called, is one of the largest collections of art from the United States ever to cross the Atlantic. The German media are reporting that the show will cost about $11 million, and so the Berlin museum will need every single attraction it can get to draw ticket-buyers. The Museum of Modern Art has declined to comment on financial arrangements for the exhibit.

Certainly Berlin is a good city for such a gamble. It was one of the world’s great fonts of modern art early in the 20th century and today has countless studios, galleries and artists, struggling and otherwise. There is no shortage of people who know the names to be found in the show: Monet, Picasso, Rodin, Dali, Warhol, Lichtenstein, de Kooning and Pollock, to mention a few.

For some of the transplanted artworks, it’s a homecoming. Max Beckmann’s troubling triptych "Departure," a commentary on the rise of fascism, was completed in Berlin in 1933. The artist was later forced into exile by the Nazis, who condemned work such as his as degenerate.

Not since 1995, when the environmental artist Christo created "Wrapped Reichstag" by draping the historic parliament building with close to a million square feet of aluminum-coated fabric, has the art scene here felt so much in the spotlight.

The show is "exactly what this city needs -- a higher profile in the world of culture and art," said Dieter Bachmann, managing director of Galerie Tableau in western Berlin.

The new Berlin has "a creative atmosphere -- it’s the right place" for a show like this, said Mayor Klaus Wowereit, looking pleased as he took in a preview of the show Tuesday night. He heads a city that is thick with museums but is always looking for more -- it recently gained possession of the archives of fashion photographer Helmut Newton, a Berlin native who left the country in 1938 and died last month at age 83.

The MoMA show is a byproduct of an $860 million expansion and renovation underway at the New York museum. The work has closed the main Manhattan facility and put much of its collection off exhibit.

At a Berlin dinner attended by Lowry and Raue, who heads the Friends of the Neue Nationalgalerie, the German side proposed taking in the paintings while construction proceeded.

The Americans were intrigued. For one thing, Berlin had a special role in the history of the Museum of Modern Art. Its founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., had visited the city in the 1920s and been so impressed with what he saw, and how seriously it was collected at the national gallery, that he resolved to create something similar in the United States.

Lowry said at a news conference Wednesday that his side insisted that if the art came, it would have to get the entire space of the Neue Nationalgalerie, a glass-walled structure completed in 1968 by another German pioneer of modern design, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

The show they eventually negotiated has lots of crowd-pleasers, such as van Gogh’s "The Starry Night," Rousseau’s "The Dream" and Picasso’s "Three Musicians." It’s also got Jackson Pollock drip paintings and the brightly hued workbench items of Jim Dine’s "Five Feet of Colorful Tools." Pop art is there; so is minimalism.

It opens to the public today and will run for seven months.

Corporate money is coming from Deutsche Bank and the Coca-Cola Co., which discovered that its 75th anniversary of doing business in Germany coincided with the New York museum’s 75th birthday.

The collection would be prohibitively expensive to insure, so the German government is taking financial responsibility for any damage. It’s standard policy in Germany to spend heavily on the arts, but this show holds the additional benefits of easing strained relations with the United States and bringing in tourists to help Berlin’s stagnant economy.

The works will be shown nowhere else in Europe, giving the Berlin show the chance to draw people from all over the continent.

"We see this not as competition but as an enrichment" for museums at large, said Anne Buchholtz, spokeswoman for the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, which specializes in modern art. "It’s great that it’s here. . . . It is positive to have an attraction for the public and something that is so important art-historically speaking."

Special correspondent Shannon Smiley contributed to this report.