An exhibition of Claude Monet’s beloved Water Lily paintings at the High Museum of Art this summer will inaugurate a high-profile partnership with New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

The three-year program will feature an exhibition of 12 modern art pioneers from Picasso to Warhol, which opens in fall 2011, and will draw from the heart of MoMA’s vaunted 20th-century holdings. Smaller shows from MoMA’s collection of photography, design and contemporary drawings are in development.

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The Museum of Modern Art

Monet’s Water Lily paintings, such as this one from 1920, will be at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta this summer.

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“The collaboration is also an incentive to think about attracting younger audiences, ages 18-40,” says High director Michael Shapiro. “We want to learn from MoMA’s efforts to speak to young people through its Web initiative and social networking.”

The MoMA program is modeled on the High’s partnership with the Louvre, which ends this fall. The format, a combination of large long-term exhibits and smaller rotating “focus” shows, is similar. The underlying goal is the same: to bring great art from major museums to supplement the High’s limited collections.

“Monet Water Lilies,” which runs June 6-Aug. 23, is the appetizer. It includes the monumental 42-foot-wide triptych, “Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond” and three other paintings by the impressionist master that depict views of the garden and ponds at his home in Giverny, near Paris.

In their scale and trend toward abstraction, Monet’s late works presage the art historical developments that will be explored in the 2011 exhibition. In addition to Picasso and Warhol, the exhibit will include Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock.

The two museums have worked together before. Exhibitions from MoMA’s collections on Matisse, Picasso, Pop Art and Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” were presented between 1997 and 2000.