ART REVIEW : The Russo-Gallic Connection : Exhibition: Masterworks in the collection ‘From Poussin to Matisse’ at the Met reveal a Russian lust for Gallic culture.

In the 18th Century, Russia’s privileged classes went gaga over French culture. The romance lasted 200 years. Peter the Great had vulgar taste but loved the French. Later, Catherine the Great had good advice and thus bought outstanding French art. The buildup to the French Revolution caused consternation among conservative czarists, slowing interest in radical artists such as Jacques Louis David. The whole fascination went sour after the War of 1812 and little significant art was bought again until the dawn of modernism.

Somebody--maybe it was Tolstoy--left us with the notion that the attraction was somehow a foppish affectation visited upon an otherwise earthy and spiritual people. Whoever it was didn’t take into account that Russian lust for fancy foreign fripperies would eventually result in two of the world’s great art repositories, Leningrad’s Hermitage and Moscow’s Pushkin museums.

Now, Americans have a chance to mull over the Russo-Gallic connection in 50 masterworks brought from the two treasure houses in a exhibition just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Titled “From Poussin to Matisse: The Russian Taste for French Painting,” the exchange show runs to July 29 then moves on to Chicago’s Art Institute. Los Angeles will have to get along without it.

Tant pis. Not every work on loan is the eyeball-melter one expects from such an event. Some pictures look musty and official despite august authors. The Met has better Ingres’ and David’s than those sent by the Soviets but they do have the values of novelty and instruction.

What were the czars up to anyway? Maybe it was just a classic case of magnet opposites--Russian passion, brooding and mysticism drawn to French wit, sense and clarity. There was a certain amount of glasnost involved. Peter wanted a Western opening and not just for strategic reasons. The Met reminds us that the rational Enlightenment was in the air by including its own bust of Voltaire in the galleries.

The Cossacks wanted cultural respectability and so bought heavily intellectualized works by French Romanists such as Nicholas Poussin. Two complex scenes depict the biblical battles of Joshua. A far cry from the cool idealism of later years, these early Mannerist-influenced works are a tangle of archers, shields and steeds. Poussin had clearly not figured out what to do with space. First, he chocks it full then starves it spare in “Tancred and Eminia.” The czars did better with Claude Lorrain, whose “Landscape With the Rape of Europa” carries the Arcadian calm of the ancient world he imagined.

Complex motive can be glued to czarist Francophilia but it seems likely the poor over-ceremonialized things were just trying to have a little distraction for a change. Using the holy guise of art to slip a pinch of naughtiness into life is an old dodge.

Antoine Watteau’s innocent “The Savoyard” offers a titter for the linguistically hip. The roving musician carries a basket containing a furry rodent called a marmot. In 18th-Century slang la marmotte also referred to the female’s sex.

Francois Boucher was a franker frank in “Hercules and Omphale.” In contrast to his usual smirking boudoir romps, this painting shows virile passion in both partners. Its combination of urgency and innocence must be some sort of landmark in the history of eroticism. For sheer youthful charm, try Jean Honore Fragonard’s “The Stolen Kiss,” about an ardent boy and a surprised but willing miss sneaking a smooch while the grown-ups play cards.

You get the feeling the pious aristocrats suffered bad conscience from their voyeurism. This is just too much fun to be righteous. Better atone by contemplating the moral lessons of Jean Baptiste Greuze.

Greuze predicted the sentimental Dickens more than the conscience-ridden Dostoevsky and the Russians loved him. “The Paralytic” is a very good composition. Ten figures if you count the dog. It shows a sick old man tended by his solicitous family. The fact that the son-in-law plays a major role is supposed to demonstrate the old man’s wisdom in picking him--a lesson in filial piety bound to be appreciated by the czars.

In “The Spoiled Child,” Greuze’s combination of sentiment and kink clog credibility. It is pretty Freudian. A toddler sneaks food to the dog while ogling mom’s decolletage.

The show chugs along like a small train on a steep grade. The scenery is not uninteresting. Well, my, my, there are two Roman landscapes by Claude Vernet. They must have been a comfort during glacial St. Petersburg winters.

Lovely portrait of Count Grigori Chernyshov by Elizabeth Vignee Le Brun. He was a refined drone of the court, she was Marie Antoinette’s pal before the lady lost her head. Spent six years of her exile painting in Petersburg. Louis Boilly’s “Young Artist” reminds us there was a boomlet in talented women painters at the end of the 18th Century. Very restful trip even though David’s “Sappho, Phaon and Cupid” looks like it was dipped in syrup and Ingres’ Madonna in saccharine.

Waydaminute. Something’s happening to the train. The freight of history is accelerating. What is this?

Enter Free Enterprise.

If these exchange exhibitions were the sort of cultural propaganda some say they are the message of this one would be, “Hooray for individualism.” And as far as I know it wasn’t even curated by Gorbachev.

Enter Sergei Shchutkin and Ivan Morozov --a couple of cultivated mercantile impresarios who collected everybody from Renoir to Matisse. If anything is proven here it is that their private eyes had better and more adventurous insight than their aristocratic predecessors. Both their collections were nationalized after the October revolution and both collectors died in exile.

Now the poignancy of that is redeemed by the galleries, which display their bold and prescient selections. They make the exhibition lift off like a jet.

The sheer solidity, clarity and gravity of the Cezannes make modern art seem like an inevitable corrective to the accumulated dust of history.

Morozov, the more conservative of the pair, liked Pierre Bonnard. No wonder. He found works by the shy painter of the Nabis that take him straight out of his stereotype as an intimist. The big “Mirror Over Washstand” uses a boudoir scene to deal with the same pictorial complexities as Velazquez’s “Las Meninas.” Shchutkin grew up isolated by a severe stutter but developed into a visionary businessman with a taste for aesthetic risk. When he brought his first Gauguin home to his dark timbered house in Moscow he was risking his social status. He said, “A ma-ma-madman painted it, a ma-ma-madman bought it.”

He opened his home to Russian intellectuals and artists such as Tatlin and Malevich--thus midwifing a direct inspiration for the Russian avant-garde.

Ten major Matisses on view are as refreshing as the day they were painted. Scenes of satyrs and nymphs are executed as spontaneously as the playful love and games they depict. The profoundly witty “Conversation” finds the artist and his wife chatting in their bedclothes before cobalt blue walls and a window overlooking a garden that could only be imagined by a child who had seen the Agean 2000 years ago. The picture is gently ironic about its own casual sophistication and at ease with the visual evolution it forged.

Best revolution the Russians ever had.