"Degenerate Art" Opens at Neue Galerie in the Spring Pinakothek der Moderne, Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen, Munich; bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, NY Adolf Ziegler's "The Four Elements," a 1937 triptych that was on Hitler's mantel. The Neue Galerie's big spring show, "Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937," has been nearly three years in the making, yet it seems particularly prescient after the discovery last month of what may well be the biggest trove of missing 20th-century European art - about 1,400 works suspected of being traded or looted during the Nazis" reign, including paintings by Matisse, Chagall, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso and a host of other masters. Some disappeared in the late 1930s, around the time the Nazis raided German museums and public collections, confiscating works they called degenerate because Hitler deemed them un-German or Jewish in nature. "It's a complex story," said Olaf Peters, an art historian based in Germany, who has organized the show, March 13 to June 30. "The exhibition will be exploring the 19th-century term "degeneration" and its long-lasting history." The first major United States show since 1991 to be devoted to modern art collected by the Nazis, it will include about 50 paintings and sculptures and 30 works on paper, along with posters, photographs and other memorabilia from public and private collections here and abroad. "I kept coming back to the events of 1937," Mr. Peters said, referring to a seminal traveling exhibition of art deemed degenerate in its day that opened in Munich that year. Although he had trouble locating much of the work from that show, he was able to secure several important loans, including Max Beckmann's "Cattle in a Barn," from 1933; George Grosz's "Portrait of Max Hermann-Neisse," from 1925; and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's "Winter Landscape in Moonlight," from 1919. A room will be devoted to sanctioned art of the period, like Adolf Ziegler's triptych "The Four Elements" (1937), which was over Hitler's mantel. It depicts four young, nude, blond women. "I wanted to compare what was considered official art and what was degenerate," Mr. Peters said, "and to examine the role modern art played in anti-Jewish policy, seeing how official art looks after 80 years." Say the name of the early Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca, and most art lovers think of his fresco cycle "The Legend of the True Cross," in the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo, Italy. A fanciful narrative that is Piero's history of the world, starting with the Garden of Eden and ending with the rediscovery of the cross, the symbol of humanity's redemption, it has influenced generations of artists, including Cézanne and Seurat. But his devotional paintings - intimate, personal and private - are less known and until now have never been the subject of an exhibition. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has gathered four of these devotional paintings, which will be shown together for the first time from Jan. 14 through March 30. On view will be "St. Jerome and a Donor," from the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice; "Madonna and Child With Two Angels" (the Senigallia Madonna), from the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino, Italy; "St. Jerome in a Landscape," from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin; and "Madonna and Child" from a private collection in New York. "It spans his entire career," said Keith Christiansen, chairman of the Met's European paintings department. One may be one of his earliest pictures, two from his middle life, and one is among his last. As an artist, Mr. Christiansen explained, Piero never was without work, and, unlike Botticelli or Bellini, he had not developed a large workshop for the serial production of paintings for private devotion. So these four paintings offer a rare glimpse of his ideas on the most favored themes. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was one of the first museums in the country to collect photography, beginning in 1924, with a gift from Alfred Stieglitz of 27 of his works. Since then, its holdings have kept growing, and this week, the museum announced that it has acquired an important touchstone of Modernist photography: F. Holland Day's "The Seven Last Words," along with three photographs of Day taken by Edward Steichen, James Craig Annan and Clarence H. White from Day's personal archives. An eccentric Bostonian who has long been considered a pioneer in the history of American photography, Day started to explore religious themes that have been admired for their relation to old master paintings. For "The Seven Last Words" in 1898, Day posed as Jesus. To play the part accurately, he lost weight and let his hair and beard grow. He also imported a cross from Syria and created a crown of thorns. The work consists of seven platinum prints, each representing one of the last phrases spoken by Jesus, set in a frame the artist designed. "Day defined photography as a high art," said Anne E. Havinga, the museum's photography curator. And this work bridges the ideals of 19th- and 20th-century photography. "The Seven Last Words," along with the three portraits, were purchased from the Norwood Historical Society, which is based in Day's former home in Norwood, Mass. The society gave the museum the original crown of thorns that Day wore when he impersonated Jesus. Only two other versions of "The Seven Last Words" exist, one in the Met (without the artist-designed frame) and the other owned by an unidentified collector and has an altered frame. The Museum of Fine Arts version is the only one with its original frame. It will be the centerpiece of "Truth and Beauty: Pictorialist Photography," which will be on view in Boston from April 17 through Feb. 16, 2015.