Russia's two greatest art museums were engaged Tuesday in an unsightly public feud over an idea to revive a Moscow museum of Western art that was shut down by Stalin in the late 1940s. The State Museum of New Western Art gathered the impressionist and early modern art collected by renowned Russian art collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov in the late Tsarist era.

Cosmetics billionaire Leonard Lauder has given New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art an astonishing, no-strings-attached collection of Cubist art that he assembled over four decades, the museum announced Tuesday. The enormous gift, estimated to be worth $1 billion, includes 78 works by Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Leger, and "will transform the museum," a statement said. The Met, a world-class institution that has long suffered a hole in its early 20th century art collection, will be transformed by the completeness and quality of the sudden addition.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Cosmetics heir and art collector Leonard A. Lauder donated his collection of 78 Cubist works valued at more than a $1 billion (652.7 million pounds) to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Arts, its director said on Tuesday. The collection, which consists of 33 works by Picasso, 17 by Braque, 14 by Gris and 14 by Leger, was amassed over 37 years and is considered one of the foremost collections of Cubism in the world.

Paris, Mar 26 (EFE).- The two big retrospectives devoted to Salvador Dali at the Pompidou Center in this capital have become the most-visited exhibits in the museum's history. The show that opened on Nov. 21 and ran through last Monday received 790,090 visitors, only slightly fewer than the record 840,662 people who saw the exhibit at the Center dedicated to the still-living Dali in 1979. With the aim of responding to the great anticipation created about Dali by the exhibit, the Pompidou Center expanded its hours to 11 p.m. every day but Tuesday, when the museum is closed.