ART REVIEW : Impressive Impressionists From Local Collections : ‘Monet to Matisse,’ a LACMA exhibit loaded with Impressionist dapplings, is bound to be a crowd-pleaser this summer.

Is it a vision of things to come, or a sumptuous tease?

Opening Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is “Monet to Matisse: French Art From Southern California Collections,” consisting of about 75 paintings, graphics and sculpture all drawn from local collections and nicely arranged by curator Philip Conisbee.

Innocent browsers probably don’t much care where an exhibition’s art came from as long as they have a good time. People concerned about the future of the people’s museum will be heartened to know there is so much vintage work gracing private collections hereabouts. After all, if the museum properly dances the stately minuet called “Courting the Collector,” some of this art could end up in LACMA’s holdings.

Some have already been promised and some of that is very good indeed. No one could ask for a nicer or more significant Gauguin than his 1888 “A Swineherd, Brittany” from the Lucille Ellis Simon family. As if to underline the point, the museum has moved its permanent 19th- and 20th-Century French collection into an adjacent gallery.

It fleshes out the show for the general audience, but it also broadcasts a subtext to the lenders. It whispers, “Look, do the right thing and donate your art to the public. It will be in good company. Behold such worthy holdings as Degas’ ‘The Bellelli Sisters’ or Toulouse-Lautrec’s classic ‘The Opera Messalina.’ ”

The museum suffered a couple of major disappointments recently when it lost the Hammer collection and the Walter Annenberg trove. If what is presently on the walls stayed there, the world would be a better place. There are pictures here the Louvre itself might sin to own.

Regardless of the outcome, the exhibition is bound to be a significant hit since it’s loaded with beloved Impressionist dapplings. Its most radical art is today as classic as, say, the music of Stravinsky. Actually, it brackets time both earlier and later than what is implied by the title. Starting off with realists like Corot, Courbet and a Jules Breton that is better than his reputation, time slips all the way into the 1950s with three works by Jean Dubuffet. That was the last time the French even pretended to have significant artistic clout. So the show not only gets the imagination to France in comfort, it gets it there in a time frame only accessible through art and history.

Degas’ “The Song of the Dog” is a wonderful Lautrec-like vignette. A chanteuse who looks like a chunky Gallic Barbra Streisand twitters a saucy song clearly winning her outdoor cabaret audience by sheer force of personality and decollete. As a painting, it works suavely all the way from its poster-like Japanese patterning to its dappling of gas lanterns and the marvelous, weird footlight illumination that carves out the main figure.

Monet’s big 1919 “Water Lilies” is a heart-stopper that combines the serenity of his Giverny garden with a kind of tumultuous ecstasy that comes from water reflections of sky and clouds. If it is better than a similar example in the Annenberg collection, so much the better.

Lovers of the solidity of early Impressionism will be impressed with the juxtaposition of Eugene Boudin’s “The Beach at Honfleur” and Monet’s “The Beach at Trouville.” A connoisseur taking an early look at the show spotted three Cezanne watercolors and pronounced that for him they were, “the whole show.”

Anybody who thinks local collectors are a band of arrivistes with too much money and too little taste will be agreeably surprised at their capacity for finding excellence in the understated and lesser-known. A Manet etching called “The Absinthe Drinker” shows a shadowed addict in top hat and cloak. It is as haunting as a Goya and uncannily evokes Baudelaire’s poem “The Happy Death.” His brown-ink study for the famous painting “Luncheon in the Studio” captures all the endearingly self-conscious nonchalance of the central young man in the boater. A small Degas self-portrait is exquisitely sensitive to the passage of light.

For decades, Gustave Caillebotte was better remembered as a collector and friend of the Impressionists than a painter in his own right. Recent art-historical revisionism has given him his due. His sonorous gray “On the Pont de l’Europe” has the gravity of a good Manet. His “Nude Reclining on a Divan” is startlingly sculptural. Good academic salon art sometimes came close to this effect but Caillebotte simplified volume and subdued bombast so the work has a peculiarly contemporary erotic charge. The only other thing like it in the show is Balthus’ classically eerie 1939 “Interior” painted nearly 70 years later.

For the rest, nobody needs any help being seduced by the Morisot, Cassat and Pissarros.

Aside from the great Gauguin, the Post-Impressionists are rather lightly represented in number and quality. Van Gogh’s etching of Dr. Gachet smoking a pipe is an exception. The kindly doctor is so immersed in care and compassion he seems to be turning to smoke. The group known as the Nabis were inspired by Gauguin as we see in Paul Serusier’s “Young Girl Knitting: The Savoyarde.” In both style and signature, he is so close to the master that his work has been successfully palmed off as Gauguin’s.

The Nabis became increasingly eccentric intimists. Pierre Bonnard’s Satie-like graphic wit shows to full wry advantage in “Nannies Promenade, Frieze of Carriages.” His friend Eduard Vuillard was a friend of Marcel Proust, and it shows. His domestic interiors are as subtle and closely patterned as French wallpaper. His self-portrait is as wryly comic as Proust’s description of a man who stared into his top hat as if it were deep as a well.

The section on the 20th Century is marginally disappointing considering the richness of the period. One is, however, saved from somnolence by a strong small version of Leger’s key painting “The Luncheon,” a particularly keen Modigliani, a vibrant Fauve period Vlaminck and an Amedee Ozenfant that is as cool as a peppermint aperitif.

All things considered, “Monet to Matisse” is a good trip.