Complaints about the homogenized experience of museums, everywhere, are commonplace. Walk through the doors of a museum most anywhere in the world, and you find the "one by each" presentation of canonized art history. The same stories are repeated many times, in many places, each offering greater or lesser examples to make their case. The exhibition of private collections offers a chance to break the pattern. There's a preliminary showing in Beijing of an exhibition with the long name of - "From Academia to Impressionism - Masterpieces of the 19th Century European Paintings from the Perez Simon Collection". The showing at Beijing's World Art Museum offers a brisk, idiosyncratic run - through a century of Western painting.The exhibition is ostensibly about the history and development of European modern art. What the viewer experiences strolling through the show, however, is the good taste of a single collector.The collector in question, Mexican business magnate Juan Anotonio Perez Simon has been amassing art since the early 1990's for his social service foundation, Juntos Actuandos. The 100 works chosen for display represent the highlights of more than a thousand Simon holdings. The exhibit represents an eclectic group of styles, subjects and approaches to art. There are fine examples of the Italian, German, Dutch, English, Flemish, Spanish and French schools.Among them are the 1871 work "Greek Girls Picking up Pebbles by Sea" by English painter and sculptor Frederick Leighton. There's "The Rose of Heliogabalus" by Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Heliogabalus was a late Roman emperor, infamous for attempting to suffocate his dinner guests with rose petals.Having shown his collection in many of the world's most prestigious museums and galleries, the famed art connoisseur and his foundation brought his collection to China for the first time. They believed that they will give Chinese art lovers an experience "never before seen".The exhibition's pride of place was given to Albert Moore's 1868 work "A Quartet: A Painter's Tribute to the Art of Music". Moore was one of the leading painters of the Aesthetic Movement. The relationship of art and music was particularly important to Moore, who was a keen amateur musician.In the painting, four male figures clad in classical drapery and with trance-like expressions play the instruments of a modern string quartet. Their listeners are three maidens clad in Greek costumes. The show officially opens to the public March 28th. Mr. Perez Simon will come to Beijing in person to unveil his exhibition. The exhibits will stay in Beijing for three months. Then, they will travel three other Chinese cities for further showings.