ART REVIEW : Pictures at an Exhibition : County Art Museum Mounts a Superb Show From the Walter Annenberg Collection

It’s been a rough century. Now, here at the end of it, we are enchanted with art made in France in the twilight of the last century. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism appeared when European life was marked by private anxiety and public self-satisfaction, much as the West is today. Their discontinuities were more civilized, of course.

The French scorned the art. Supporters had to wage a battle to get the Louvre to accept a gift of it. We have come to embrace it with the enthusiasm of a mother clasping her first grandchild. Starting Thursday, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hosts a traveling exhibition of it.

“Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: The Annenberg Collection” consists of 54 paintings regularly characterized by insiders as the very finest compendium of its kind still in private hands. There are six works each by Renoir and Monet, eight Cezannes, four Gauguins, five Van Goghs and signature masterpieces you thought must surely belong to great museums--Gauguin’s “La Siesta” and Van Gogh’s “La Berceuse,” among others.

Hard to imagine a show with such popular appeal and professional pedigree opening with strikes against it, but there are a few. First, there’s the danger the super-hip will feel obliged to disdain such beloved art on principle. Then, there is the problem of current art prices so obscenely escalated that visitors might look at, say, Picasso’s “Au Lapin Agile” and see nothing but the $40.7 million that Annenberg paid at auction. Finally, there is the unseemly and slightly ghoulish speculation that has dogged the tour, wondering which museum is finally going to receive all this loot if Walter Annenberg decides to donate this art to a public collection. People used to have better manners.

Anyone anxious that all that will somehow cloud minds and taint enjoyment can happily forget it. One look and all secondary considerations just drop away. It’s a superb show chocked with pleasure, passion and revelation. Undoubtedly it will pack in the public until it closes on Nov. 11. The wise are forewarned--one needs a ticket.

Philip Conisbee, LACMA curator of European painting and sculpture, has spaced the work out leisurely in six capacious galleries. He caused walls to be painted in subdued tones that key off the assembled works and make them look sumptuous without getting in the way.

Arranged in rough chronological order, the tour begins with such Impressionist precursors as Camille Corot, whose “The Curious Little Girl” turns to us from peering over a fence. She reveals a face at once innocent and smoldering, like that of the child in the graveyard in Thomas Mann’s “Tonio Kruger.” Corot’s concentration on depicting weight and roundness keeps his pictures in the past. Henri Fantin-Latour’s flower still lifes stay there, too, despite wistful delicacy. Eugene Boudin influenced Monet, but the loosening brushwork in his beach scenes looks more like a formula for simplification than a quest for a new way to paint. His pictures remain as quaint as his formally dressed subjects, who sit on the beach on stiff wooden chairs.

When we encounter the first Monets and Degases something new happens. Their work is on our side of the historical Rubicon. They have followed Baudelaire’s advice and depicted the modern world in a modern way, making the first art that holds up a mirror in which we can still see ourselves today, albeit barely. The modernity of Monet’s and Degas’ work is subtle, as befits the French, but unmistakable. So subtle, in fact, that one wonders at the fuss and ostracism that greeted this work. What was that all about? Simple enough. The French of the fin de siecle were as worried about the arrival of the modern world as we are about its departure. They were afraid of progress. Down with the Tour Eiffel . We are afraid of grinding o a halt. Up with the Trump Tower.

Folks out for a nice time in the galleries love the Impressionists for their worship of the good, simple life--perfect sparkling Sunday afternoons in the country, cafes full of saucy girls and dashing dandies, draped living rooms with pianos and pretty children like Renoir’s “The Daughters of Catulle Mendes.” The scene is so seductive you barely notice the tension between Renoir’s desire to combine the surface of the present with the structure of the past, but it shows in the doll-like stiffness of the figures.

Impressionism is pleasant and reassuring of a middle-class beatific vision. People don’t usually notice the ennui and melancholy that lurk in even the most beautiful of these pictures, forecasting urban alienation. Berthe Morisot’s pearly “The Pink Dress” has deep poignancy that carries right over to Edouard Vuillard’s “The Album.” The seven female figures in the Vuillard nearly disappear into the wallpaper until one head firms up like a Vermeer. It’s like Proust’s Swann discovering his love, Odette.

Careful viewers value the Impressionists for the serious way they explored the use of paint and visual possibilities behind their dappled facades. Monet and later Seurat broke up the color spectrum in a way that was a metaphor for our century’s scientific vision--probing until the whole universe is caught being made of the same particulate matter. Musical types can scan the six-foot-plus swath of Monet’s grand water lilies and hear Debussy. Artniks know Jackson Pollock would have been impossible without Monet. The Impressionist sensibility could be mistaken for ours in the 1950s. The Impressionists were classier, of course.

Every gallery has at least one drop-dead masterpiece and the first is Edgar Degas’ “At the Milliner’s.” How could even an egghead resist its drowsy three-o’clock afternoon charm and the intimacy of the woman helping her friend try on a new straw bonnet? If the scene is nostalgic, the vision is still new. With its tipped floor and cropped edges, this is a scene we’ll only see for seconds out of the corner of an eye. Slow action, fast take. Very timely.

The fact that Impressionism offers satisfaction to such a broad audience defines it as one of those breathless moments of harmonic artistic balance that genuinely offers something of value to the most and least demanding members of the audience. Such instants are rare and never last. Post-Impressionism sustained the moment even as it headed to a crossroad that would fraction off the popular audience and make art into an insider’s game for most of modern times.

The Impressionist vision was middle-class and stay-at-home. It flirted with japonisme about the same way Gilbert and Sullivan did in “The Mikado.” It was up to the Post-Impressionists to dig deeper into the exotic, the primitive and--with seeming contradiction--the purely formal. They set the prototype for the modern Bohemian and invented the counterculture. They were the ancestors of hippies. Better artists, of course.

If the county museum owned only the pictures in the rooms devoted to Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, it would be transformed into a great repository at a stroke. The Cezannes manage to define the artist in just eight pictures. A still life and a Mont Sainte-Victoire encapsulate the monumental effort of pictorial logic that would lead to Cubism. A picture of a monk captures his ascetic dedication and an abandoned house speaks of his isolation.

Van Gogh has become so universally revered it’s almost impossible to talk about him. Luckily we can still look at him, and the Annenberg pictures find him at his gentlest. His “Vase of Roses” was done at the asylum at Saint-Remy in a period of calm. White blossoms standing against a pale green background make a haiku-like simile of petals that will fall like snow. “La Berceuse” is a portrait of the wife of his friend, postman Joseph Roulin. The chunky, cloisonne image lives somewhere between the Middle Ages and rural Japan.

These artists combined human and pictorial basics in ways that would lead to bottom-line abstraction, gutsy Expressionism and--in Gauguin--primitivism. Annenberg, however, likes them relaxed. The deep blue gallery devoted to Gauguin is dominated by his wonderful, easy Tahitian masterpiece, “La Siesta.” No artist since Watteau had painted a back so eloquent as that of the central figure. We learn all about her from her earthy foot, faux-native sarong, gauzy blouse and the perky straw hat that speaks of youthful humor and zing.

The curator says his final gallery is “something of a grab-bag.” It bounces around from Lautrec’s brooding, big-bottomed hooker to Braque’s crystalline “The Studio” and Matisse’s eccentric odalisque, but a kind of theme emerges. We’re back in sleazy, sophisticated, bewitching Paris. Picasso’s 1905 “Au Lapin Agile” finds the artist youthfully cynical about the fleshpots after the death of his best friend, Carlos Casagemas. Structurally, the painting shows him trying out the use of multiple modes of perception. He combines poster flatness with carved-out drawing, shifting gears for the 20th Century with its clashing angles of view.

Maybe what we really like about this art is an encouragement hidden within it. If they could leave such a legacy from the tumultuous end of their century, maybe we can survive the end of ours, Saddam Hussein notwithstanding.

Getting In to View the Masters

Tickets for “Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: The Annenberg Collection,” which runs through Nov. 11, are available through all Ticketmaster outlets (including all Music Plus and May Company Stores), through Ticketmaster’s telephone reservation service, and at the museum ticket office.

Exhibition hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays and 10 a.m.-6 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

Tickets are $5 for adults, $3.50 for senior citizens and students, and $1 for children ages 5-17. They are issued for each hour, guaranteeing entry to the exhibition during that time; visitors may remain in the exhibition as long as they wish.

To charge tickets by phone, call (213) 480-7575, (714) 740-2000, or (619) 278-TIXS.