THOSE RUSSIANS HAVE COME

Staff members at the County Museum of Art have the impression that more tour buses than ever disgorge waves of vacationers into the galleries. They are not surprised that the Southland--fabled paradise of sunny beaches and fantastic amusement parks--should attract folks taking a rest from cornfields or stock exchanges. What does surprise them slightly is that--on evidence--we are growing into a place where cultural ornaments are part of the attraction. It makes the town feel like an urbane center where cultivated residents watch waves of eager pilgrims come to drink at the well of aesthetic wisdom and refreshment, somewhat in the way they descend on the museums and monuments lining the Mall in Washington.

This has to ignite that slight feeling of polite disdain that locals always feel toward summer residents and that summer residents pass on to day visitors. It also has to kindle kindly hope that the visitors are amused by the institutional distractions. For all the popularity of the National Gallery, for example, it seems to be outdrawn by the soaring mechanisms of the Air and Space Museum or even the stuffed goats in the Natural History Museum. It must be a problem for an art museum to come up with summer shows of sufficient dignity to satisfy the knowledgeable audience while nourishing the attention of the innocent visitor whose next stop is Farmers Market.

Well, the County Museum could not have done better on the second count than to find “Russia, the Land, the People” to take up three galleries in the Ahmanson Building until Aug. 2. The exhibit includes 62 paintings on loan from the State Tretyakova Gallery in Moscow and the State Russian Museum in Leningrad as part of an exchange of 19th-Century art with the Smithsonian Institution, which sent a comparable batch of American paintings over there. Los Angeles was included in the tour due to the initiative of Dr. Armand Hammer.

It is the kind of art beloved of unpretentious citizens who like to go to museums once in a while but rarely find what they are looking for when they get there, namely pictures that are good because they look exactly like what the citizen wants to see, interesting faces and scenes that are by turns stirring and touching. Well, that is mostly what the viewer gets from “Russia.” The other day a visiting journalist found large clumps of happy viewers in two of the three galleries. (The third, a bit more modern, even includes some early works by Malevich, Kandinsky and Gontcharova and was noticeably emptier.)

The audience was having a fine time with the rest. Two young matrons in white were cooing over a little picture by Vasili Nikolaevich Baksheev that depicts a girl in white feeding white doves. A pair of senior citizens were riveted by Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskois’ “Mina Moiseev,” a portrait of a cuddly old peasant looking wise and amused, possibly at having grown a white beard in which you can count every hair.

“Now that is a face!” pronounced the senior citizen.

It is the kind of art that any middlingly knowledgeable viewer has been taught to disdain by subtextual contempt built into the lectures of art history professors. What is this compared to the grandiosity of Rubens, the subtlety of Vermeer, the originality of Picasso? Illustration. Kitsch. Pandering to popular taste.

So the show is a crowd-pleaser that will put off all groups save the tour-bus bunch?

Not quite. It has considerable interest for the jaded minority so steeped in art that any unfamiliar work provides a welcome occasion to learn something new, if not about art, then maybe about the Russian artistic character.

These paintings come out of a period when a peasant-farmer society was transmuting into a city-industrial society. Artists of the day--many of whom counted themselves among a group called the Itinerants--wanted to make an art free of European influence but wound up with a style that diverged from continental models more by its subject matter and pictorial attitude than by any truly radical stylistic breakthrough.

If that sounds familiar, it is because it so closely echoes the situation surrounding American art during the same period. As a matter of fact, the objections to this art sound very much like those still harbored by people who think that American art was a rather second-rate affair until the great breakthrough by the Abstract Expressionists.

The Russian pictures even look like our pictures, fueling the hypotheses that despite our superpower antagonisms the Americans and the Soviets have temperamental affinities as occupants of vast countries made up of diverse peoples. Both tribes are realistic, according to this art.

A shared concern for the commonplace, the anecdotal and the socially sympathetic shows up in the narrative art of both countries. The only real difference is in costume and setting. We had cowboys, they had Cossacks. Wryly satirical attitudes turn up in paintings like S. I. Ivanova’s “The Family,” with its gentle gibes at patriarchal pretentions. Social conventions are mildly mocked in V. E. Makovskii’s “The Explanation” and V. V. Pukirev’s “Checking the Dowry List,” which really looks like a British storytelling painting. All find parallels in George Caleb Bingham, William Sidney Mount and other forerunners of Norman Rockwell.

The Russians consider Ilya Efimovich Repin their foremost portraitist of the time, and he is represented by four works that put one in mind partly of a conservative Manet or a more conventional Eakins. A casual portrait by Konstantin Alekseevich Korovin has some of Sargent’s bravura, Igor Emmanuilovich Grabar’s “The Blue Tablecloth” looks like an American imitating a French Impressionist, and Filip Andreevich Maliavin resembles a California Ramona-School character painter imitating Frank Duveneck reviving Frans Hals.

One’s leaning is to decide that these Russian pictures suffer in comparison to their American counterparts, but that’s a tough call. Certainly the best Repin here is not as inventive or moving as the best Eakins, but who knows if we have been sent the best Repin?

There are very good Russian pictures but they are vaguely off-putting for consistent reasons. They put too much emphasis on formula painting. It looks as if their idea of technical mastery was to learn by rote how this or that is painted and then use the method without deviation. Landscapes like V. I. Polenov’s “Overgrown Pond” have an airy lyric freshness worthy of an Innes until you get up close and notice the superficial paint-by-numbers brushwork.

“A Drowned Woman” by V. G. Perov shows a pipe-smoking old soldier contemplating the corpse. Impossibly corny by present standards, it nonetheless has striking formal clarity approaching Magic Realist detail. Trouble is it starts to look as if it was blocked out on a drafting table.

This lack of technical subtlety is not omnipresent. A haunting image of a young student has the restraint of a Terborch, but all too often excessive technical intensity is linked to a hyped-up emphasis on character that gives the viewer the feeling the artist thinks we can’t figure out anything by ourselves. Repin’s portrait of a barefoot Tolstoi leads us by the hand through the

great man’s wisdom, humility and earthiness. It’s lugubrious and melodramatic.

It’s as if the same passion for character that made Tolstoi and Dostoevski towering novelists swamped the painters and left them heavy-handed and literary. It’s as if they intuited that art was moving in the direction of allowing the means to take over so that the paint itself becomes the expressive vehicle rather than the expression on the sitter’s face, but they just couldn’t make the leap.

As the show moves forward in time, that starts to happen and it is every bit as uncomfortable as when it happened to Germanic artists like Boecklin and Hodler. There are some sad near-misses like I. I. Levitan’s “Silence,” which has Edvard Munch’s shapes and colors but cannot really enter his Symbolist-Expressionist realm. V. A. Serov wants to cut loose expressively but the urge goes into the face of his female subject and she looks dotty.

When we finally get to those bright mosaics of color by Kandinsky, Malevich and Gontcharova, there is a pictorial catharsis and the pictures sing.

At that point, however, the lady from Dubuque wants to get back on the bus and get to the Farmers Market.