ART REVIEW : A World of Philanthropy : Exhibit: ‘As Many Worlds as There Are’ celebrates the County Museum of Art’s 25th anniversary on Wilshire Boulevard.

Museums have had a tough time getting the aesthetic gentry to give them artworks lately. The 1986 revision of the federal tax code virtually eliminated the tax deduction donors used to get when they gave a treasure to a museum.

For certain hard-headed collectors, that took the fun out of generosity.

A few days ago, the Senate Finance Committee voted to restore the collector’s full write-off. Now we’ll have to see what happens in the House, where populist sentiment tends to paint donors as fat cats rather than philanthropists.

All of which is germane to an exhibition opening Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (to Jan. 6). It unveils works given or promised to LACMA to celebrate its 25th anniversary on Wilshire Boulevard.

The show is titled “As Many Worlds as There Are,” which is a slightly enigmatic fractional quote from Marcel Proust. What he really said was, “Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.”

Quite a few unique worlds reside in the 70 objects here. There are also cultures from European to Oriental and Indian to Latin. Disciplines range from painting to printmaking and from decorative arts to costume design.

There are 15 charming netsuke, tiny Japanese carvings depicting everything from “Mt. Fuji and Plovers” to a diving girl embraced by an octopus. There is a chic 1925 dress by Madeleine Vionnet in black chiffon over tan silk crepe that makes the flapper era look elegant. There are Wedgwood plates, a magisterial chair, an Indian Sivalinga that looks like a Brancusi and who knows what all. We even see photographer Cindy Sherman in one of her well-known self-portraits gussied up as a Colonial forefather.

For the average museum visitor who is not much interested in how art gets on the walls, it all might make for a somewhat befuddling browse. Maybe that’s a kind of acid test. If such a grab-bag can hold attention, it must have something going for it.

This does.

Some of these objects will just do the workmanlike service of filling historical gaps in the collection, but a surprisingly large fraction will actually be art that gets people out of the house.

Crucially, most are paintings, and, curiously, most of the best of these are landscapes. No matter how hard we try to love all art equally, it is by their painting collections that museums tend to be judged.

LACMA will be judged better when people see its one and only Gauguin, his 1888 “A Swineherd, Brittany.” It depicts a domesticated Breton landscape rolling away to the teacup-blue sky, cradling a white village church in the valley. A boy in an azure smock stands with hand to mouth while two young yellow pigs root enthusiastically.

Both endearing and important, the picture is something of a watershed, balanced between the observation of Gauguin’s Impressionist phase and the decorative stylization of his Symbolist years. With pigs traditionally standing for human love of fleshly pleasure, we see Gauguin evolving from the banker he once was to the self-created “savage” he became.

If Gauguin was an inheritor of the Romantics, 17th-Century Dutch painter Jacob van Ruisdael was their precursor. His “The Great Oak” shows why. The looming, dark tree fairly defines the meaning of gnarled . It bears the same relation to pictured figures who stand dwarfed by it as they do to the ancient power of nature and to the compelling emotion it has put within all people.

Americans Fitz Hugh Lane and Martin Johnson Heade are another thing altogether. Painting in the Civil War era, as if seeking shelter from the storm, they produced images of luminescent, eerie calm. Lane’s “Boston Harbor, Sunset” is a masterpiece. The sails and masts of its tall ships seem to create an exquisite architecture in the pastel air. But there is something weary and melancholic about it, as there is in Heade’s “Rhode Island Shore.” Everything is a bit distanced, like private thoughts. It’s that time when the day holds its breath and stillness is slightly unsettling.

Ignored for decades, such painting has been recently rediscovered as “Luminism” by contemporary scholarship. It appeals to a modern sensibility, hinting at both Mondrian and California Light and Space art.

Speaking of the contemporary brings us to LACMA’s luck in receiving the outright gift of Willem de Kooning’s “Montauk Highway.” More than a fine example of his late ‘50s abstraction, the picture is visceral. A doubled stroke of brown crashes into a yellow field as if releasing sulfurous smoke that drifts up in front of glimpsed underpainting. Appearing slightly the worse for wear, it remains powerful.

The spirit of Cezanne lurks around two other pictures. At first you wonder what a still life by the hermit of Aix is doing in the 20th-Century gallery near Alberto Giacometti, Billy Al Bengston and David Salle. Then you realize it’s not a Cezanne at all but an early Stanton Macdonald-Wright. It’s no insult to be mistaken for Cezanne.

One doesn’t mistake the author of David Park’s chunky, thoughtful “Two Women” but it does allude to Cezanne’s bathers. LACMA is blessed to have such a fine example by the founder of the Bay Area figurative school.

What is that ?

Standing on one wall is a monumental sculptured head that looks for all the world like an ancient Oriental work painted blue by Yves Klein. On closer approach it is clearly a wax, mechanically carved by computer. Technology meets the Tao.

It turns out to be a version of Robert Graham’s head of Duke Ellington from his monument to the musician. Far more than an oddity, it speaks to anyone who has ever sculpted and found his developing work repeating the historical evolution of sculpture.

As many worlds as there are, in the end they blend into one.