Brushing Up on France’s Art Heritage : Exhibit: The director of the Cartier Foundation hopes that a Santa Monica Museum show will help shatter stereotypes.

“France is food, wine, fashion, beauty--and art that was made a long time ago,” Marie-Claud Beaud said, reciting stereotypical images of her country. Most foreigners think that nothing happened in French art after Claude Monet’s late Impressionist landscapes of the ‘20s. Those who know a bit more go as far as Henri Matisse, who died in 1954. And people who are really sharp think French art ended with Jean Dubuffet, who emerged in the ‘40s, she said.

As director of the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Beaud’s job is to update these notions. She hopes to do exactly that in an exhibition of Gerard Garouste’s paintings and drawings, opening tonight with a private reception at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St. The show will be open to the public from Friday through June 3.

Beaud has been laboring on behalf of contemporary French art since the foundation’s inception in 1984. Working on Cartier’s 37-acre wooded estate in Jouy-en-Josas, an idyllic village near Versailles, she has organized a program of contemporary art exhibitions and artist residencies that blends French art with works from other parts of the world. Los Angeles video artist Bill Viola is presenting his work there this month.

But now Cartier, a renowned jewelry company with stores around the world, has branched out with a new international program that aims to promote contemporary French art abroad. According to Beaud, there was no better place to do that than Los Angeles--home of new museums, a gallery boom, an international art fair and a growing curiosity about European contemporary art. Garouste’s show in Santa Monica is the foundation’s biggest U.S. event so far and the first on the West Coast, she said. Plans are in the works for exhibitions of French contemporary art in Britain, Italy, Japan, Hong Kong and India.

The Santa Monica Museum of Art’s flexible high-ceilinged space--in an industrial-style complex designed by architect Frank Gehry--is a far cry from the foundation’s elegant French facilities, which feature a Directoire-period chateau used for a conference center, a chic cafe and galleries in modern buildings that were constructed in the ‘40s. A rambling sculpture garden includes such monumental surprises as Arman’s celebrated sculpture, “Long-term Parking,” made of 56 real cars locked in a 60-foot tower of concrete.

Beaud is delighted with the Santa Monica space, however, because it continues Garouste’s process of exhibiting his massive unstretched paintings in strikingly different venues--a bunker in France, an old church in the Netherlands and now a former egg processing building for Edgemar Dairy Farms. After leaving Santa Monica, the show is scheduled to go to the Touko Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo and possibly to an old palace in New Delhi.

The paintings, which are inspired by Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” lend themselves to a wide range of showcases, Beaud said, because they are made in sections that can be assembled in various ways. No two exhibitions of them are exactly the same, and Garouste likes it that way. In Santa Monica, some works are hung on walls, while other form a temple-like structure in the center of a gallery.

Brushed in black acrylic or rich color, the vast paintings are composed of sweeping gestures and visionary images of figures and animals. In keeping with the museum’s practice of exhibiting installations that might be too large or unwieldy for more conventional spaces, Garouste’s paintings envelope viewers in great expanses of art--rather like tapestry-covered walls in castles.

The likeness is not accidental, Beaud said. Garouste, who will be in town for the show’s opening, draws extensively from French traditions. His paintings, called “Les Indiennes,” are named for 17th- and 18th-Century paintings quickly made on Indian cloth to celebrate public occasions. They were the giant posters of an age of heraldry.

While Garouste’s contemporary version of “Divine Comedy” fills the majority of the museum’s 8,300 square feet, a group of gouaches continues Dante’s theme in a separate gallery. In addition, Garouste is showing drawings based on the confessions of St. Augustine. He has designed a handsome boxed book of text and drawings to serve as the exhibition catalogue.

Beaud said that the 43-year-old artist was selected for the show partly because his work is steeped in French tradition. In fact, Americans sometimes find his work “too French,” she said. “I don’t want to be a nationalist or to create a type of colonialism with this program. We just want people to look around and see that there are a lot of interesting things going on in France today.”

Foreigners aren’t the only ones who can learn something about French contemporary art, she said. French businessmen bump up against it when they attend seminars at the Cartier Foundation. “If this type of painting is in front of you while you attend a conference, you may begin to realize that art is something different than you thought,” she said.

Cartier created the first corporate foundation in France to support contemporary art, Beaud said. According to promotional literature, the foundation “offers a new concept for corporate patronage in France.” The foundation’s stated objectives are “to exhibit, commission and welcome resident artists, to encourage meetings with the public, but also meetings between companies and contemporary art.”

What does Cartier get in return? “Another image,” Beaud said.