ART : COMMENTARY : Making a Poor Impression : LACMA’s ‘Monet to Matisse’ exhibition lacks curatorial vision and is an embarrassment for a prominent museum

OK. Let’s be blunt. As an exhibition, “Monet to Matisse: French Art in Southern California Collections” is a crock.

Absent any compelling curatorial motive, larded with the marginal and the second-rate, this poor excuse for a show is among the more embarrassing in recent memory to have occupied the prominent ground-floor galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Bluntness is necessary in discussing “Monet to Matisse” because, whenever you’re in the vicinity of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, the risk of delirious swooning is great.

You know the symptoms: a slight cocking of the head, a quiet gasp, perhaps a gentle grasping of the breast. (For pictorial description, see most any 17th-Century painting of a saint by Guido Reni.) The condition is sort of like getting all googly-eyed in the presence of a happily burbling baby. Regardless of how dull, clumsy or tedious it might actually be, every Impressionist painting is imagined to be ravishing. You simply wouldn’t dream of uttering aloud anything unfavorable about the sweet thing.

The deeply ingrained legend of Manet and Monet, of Gauguin and Van Gogh, speaks so profoundly to the collective modern unconscious as to render clear-eyed response an arduous task. The blanket popular regard for Impressionism and its offspring tends to be irrational, like faith. Tragic earthly sorrows and glorious redemption after death are the secularized centerpiece of this legend, a hoary myth of artistic genius woefully misunderstood, cruelly ignored or even laughed at in its own time--but finally triumphant in our more enlightened era.

This fairy tale is powerful because personal identification can be strong. Notice how “our era” gets to be the heroic savior of these poor, benighted artists. And who among us has not, at one moment or another, harbored precisely such battered feelings about having been grossly misinterpreted in life?

Any shard of Impressionist or Post-Impressionist painting or sculpture thus becomes venerable, a kind of holy relic of the One True Modern Art. When it does, thinking and seeing grind to a halt. Blind sentiment kicks in.

“Monet to Matisse,” which continues through Aug. 11, is an orgy of sentimental incognizance. Among the approximately 100 assembled objects, a mere handful of fully realized paintings will be found. (Few sculptures are included, although works on paper are abundant; more about the latter in a moment.) They include Gauguin’s smashingly decorative “Swineherd, Brittany” (1888), which is a promised gift to LACMA; Matisse’s startlingly gruff “Standing Male Nude” (1900); a fine, late, loosely brushed “Water Lilies” (1919) by Monet; and Miro’s small, gem-like “Group of Figures” (1939).

Yes, Miro was Spanish, not French. But, like Picasso, whose long tenure in Paris was indispensable to his art, Miro’s extended expatriate status has made him an honorary Frenchman in the history of art.

Besides, this show needs all the good paintings it can get.

The single finest work in the assembly is a subtle but brilliantly composed landscape by an artist whose name is less popularly celebrated than these four, but whose art is nonetheless significant for it. In Camille Pissarro’s “Banks of the Oise, Pontoise” (1872), a tree-covered path at the left and a factory-lined river at the right converge in the foreground, as if at the viewer’s feet.

In the center of this mirror-like composition, a tall tree and a belching smokestack stand as twin sentinels on the horizon, piercing the cerulean sky the way church spires typically do in Dutch landscape paintings. The transformative tensions between the rise of urban industrial culture, on one hand, and a gentrified natural order, on another, are laid at the viewer’s own doorstep.

The deceptive simplicity of Pissarro’s wonderfully conceived picture pretty much blows away everything around it. In qualitative company like this, most of the rest have no business taking up space in the museum. “Monet to Matisse” is largely a show of overpriced wallpaper.

To cite a couple of egregious examples in the very first room: What is one to make of the prominent display of such hack 19th-Century Realists as Leon Lhermitte and Jules Breton? Their phony ennoblement of back-breaking peasant labor--cloying sanctification of the working class principally for the aesthetic delectation of bourgeois city dwellers--is not about to be seriously examined in a show that comes across as deeply courageous for having mustered the wherewithal to describe these paintings’ style as “conventional.”

Conventionality ain’t the half of it.

Mounting exhibitions that survey holdings in (mostly) private collections defined by a certain geography is not an uncommon practice. Museums periodically do them. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art just showed “Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863): Paintings, Drawings and Prints from North American Collections.” Yet, as anything other than a wish-list show--that is, a spotlighted assembly of potential gifts the Met would surely like to add to its permanent trove--”Delacroix” was a crock, too.

You might think that an exhibition of a pivotal European artist pointedly drawn “from North American Collections” would develop the occasion as a way to analyze a significant, perhaps even crucial development in the history of taste. But no. The foreword to the catalogue does declare that “the artistic achievements of Eugene Delacroix have been appreciated by American collectors of French paintings for a very long time.” Yet, just why Delacroix’s art, from among the equally momentous daubings of countless others, should have had an ostensible hold on the American imagination, especially at the turn of the century, 40 years after the artist’s death, is apparently a question of fundamental irrelevance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As an exhibition, “Delacroix” carried on as if it was a full-dress retrospective, rather than a pleasant little show of about a dozen mostly small paintings and oil sketches and about 90 works on paper. Lee Johnson, the English author of a formidable catalogue raisonne of Delacroix’s paintings, penned two essays about the artist’s work and life for the accompanying hard-bound book, when the show itself provided only the merest glimpse into either.

A principal difference between the Met show and the LACMA show is that, when you’re dealing with a single pivotal artist, rather than a variety of often unrelated painters and sculptors who span 100 years, you’re at least on relatively firm aesthetic ground. The Delacroix show may have been patently unable to suggest the Frenchman’s artistic evolution in any but the most rudimentary and haphazard way, but at least you could console yourself with the steady brilliance of Delacroix.

At LACMA, you get to stumble through the leaden likes of Henri Harpignies and Armand Guillaumin on the way to more satisfying things--compensations that, incidentally, do not include the seemingly endless supply of late travesties by Renoir, such as the mud puddle of a still life “Vase of Roses,” and the scores of other resolutely minor doodles by any number of major names.

It is reasonable to suggest that a major motivation for LACMA’s show, as for the Metropolitan’s, is to grease the way for potential gifts. Fully 40% of the Delacroix show had been loaned by a single, apparently astute private collector, while at LACMA the point is made by the otherwise inexplicable inclusion of one whole room devoted to high points from the museum’s own collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.

It isn’t news that the museum’s high points are, comparatively speaking, rather low. Monet’s “Water Lilies,” from the collection of LACMA trustee Ray Stark and his wife, Fran, or the great Pissarro, lent by the Lucille Ellis Simon family, would instantly occupy pride of place in the otherwise middling permanent assembly. Their juxtaposition here is pointed.

The museum says that “Monet to Matisse” is meant to celebrate the distinguished tradition in Southern California of collecting art from this period. In fact, the show ends up demonstrating that LACMA missed the boat, and that, save for a few notable, if isolated, exceptions, the days of vigorous Southern California collecting of modern French painting are long since over. Not an upbeat display, needless to say.

To keep the enterprise from being a total loss, here’s some advice on how to salvage a modicum of satisfaction amid the daunting dross: Stay off the main highways, look for the less conspicuous byways. That means keep an eye out for quirkier items by artists not necessarily of the first rank; and, above all, don’t pass up the works on paper.

The degree of consistent quality on paper far outstrips the typically banal paintings. In fact, the drawings, pastels and prints constitute a surprisingly strong show-within-a-show.

Among the important sheets are Manet’s lovely crayon and pastel head of Victorine Meurent, she of “Olympia” fame; his deft ink study of the boy in a straw boater from his great canvas, “Luncheon in the Studio”; Degas’ hallucinatory pastel, “The Song of the Dog,” and his paradoxically robust “Dancer Resting”; Pissarro’s shockingly abstract watercolor, “View at Eragny”; several fine Cezannes, especially the muscular “Group of Bathers”; Leger’s and Picasso’s Cubist “Contrast of Forms” and “Man with Pipe, Seated in Armchair,” respectively. And there are more.

The exhibition also claims notable oil studies of two significant pictures in other museum collections: Gustave Caillebotte’s “On the Pont de L’Europe” (1876-77) and Leger’s “The Luncheon” (1921). Both are of decided historical interest--if not quite as much fun as tracking down the several paintings of decidedly offbeat charm.

If works on paper seem to constitute the most potent area for local collecting in modern French art, the show also suggests that Southern Californians have had a penchant for the more decorative manifestations of Cubism and its offspring. They’re abundant. Four less-than-major but nonetheless curiously appealing canvases fall within that sphere: a crystalline portrait of a mother and child by Jean Metzinger, a wonderfully noisy seascape by the little-known Felix del Marle, a baroque composition by Auguste Herbin and a wild, visionary abstraction by the Czech expatriate, Frantisek Kupka.

These are the kind of out-of-left-field pictures that can give a collection personality. That three of the four come from one private assembly--the collection of Ruth and Murray Gribin--suggests that, among Southern Californians, there is life after Renoir.

Renoir, however, and Monet, Matisse, Picasso and other big guns are the exhibition’s principal concern. (Can you imagine a museum titling a display, “Pissarro to Del Marle: French Art in Southern California Collections”?) This is a feel-good show, which, like feel-good politics, substitutes floss for an utter lack of hard-nosed discrimination. To be blunt just one more time: Holding aloft such dullish ambitions isn’t worthy of a prominent museum.