SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Art in Absentia : The Ventura County museum exhibit has gathered the remains of a rare collection of California work lost in the Oakland Hills fire.

In more than one sense, the current exhibition at the Ventura County Museum of Art and History is a tribute to what’s missing, what you don’t see.

In its intended form, “California Grandeur and Genre” would have relied heavily on the impressive early California art collection of James L. Coran and Walter A. Nelson-Rees. Then, in October, fire ravaged the Oakland Hills, destroying their entire collection.

What we see in this traveling show, organized by the Palm Springs Desert Museum and moving across the country after its run in Ventura, is a shadow of what it might have been, but still striking. Art from the same period--late 19th- and early 20th-Century--has been culled from the collections of friends of the original collectors, and also from the Palm Spring Museum’s holdings.

The silver lining in the tragic story lies in the fact that before the original collection was destroyed, it was documented in a 108-page commemorative catalogue.

One subtext of this show, then, has to do with the fragility of art objects. Despite conscientious care and handling, art still exists in the physical world and is subject to the perils therein.

You can also view these paintings, mostly adoring depictions of California landscapes and simple city scenes, as representing a wistful vision of a territory whose innocence and natural purity has long since been lost.

These westward-bound painters, from other parts of the country and from Europe, came, saw and conquered in their benevolent way. They idealized a frontier paradise that was soon to turn into a boom state.

Vested regional interest plays heavily in the emotional response to this art. Californians with a preservationist streak will look longingly at the untrammeled, unpaved life the show depicts. With art this close to home, we can easily make points of historical comparison.

William Wendt’s painting of Montecito, for instance, shows a spare, rolling land expanse long before the onslaught of movie stars, swimming pools and the Ventura Freeway. On the other hand, Cambria hasn’t changed so very radically since 1924, when Franz Bischoff depicted it as a picturesque village nestled in its surroundings.

Rural calm floats off of Virgil Williams’ “California Farm Scene” like the dreamy expressions of its lazy calves.

Thaddeus Welch’s “San Geronimo” is the most oddly compelling image in the show: lolling bovine subjects on gently rolling hills with wispy cumulus overhead, the picture of indolence. It’s a cow’s life.

Many of these artists were Europeans who, no doubt, found in California an especially idyllic source of inspiration. Herman Herzog of Germany appreciated the sheer rough-edged majesty of a mountainscape.

One of the best known of early California landscape painters was the German, Albert Bierstadt, here represented by “High Sierra” with distant craggy peaks set into relief by the softer grassy foothills in the foreground. English painter Thomas Hill reproduced, with selfless awe, Yosemite’s Half Dome, which glows in ideal natural splendor.

Who can deny the natural wonder that is Half Dome, or countless other sights to behold in this state? But what is missing from this art is a sense of pushing aesthetic limits and exploring new means of self-expression.

These artists were, unabashedly, under the spell of lupines, picturesque bodies of water, orange orgies of poppies and the general lay of the new land.

Seldon Connor Gile’s “Fall’s Beginning,” with its quasi-pointillistic explosion of dots and dabs, at least approaches a modern mode of artistic reflection.

Messages can be read into paintings only through the benefit of hindsight. Unintentionally representing aristocratic California, Arthur Frank Mathews’ “Ladies in the Garden” focuses on affluent women looking quite ethereal, tipsy even, in their elaborately landscaped garden (a cow’s life, revisited). It’s as if they are getting high off their proximity to hydrangeas.

For the most part, though, this is art destined for gilded frames, with no real socio-political reference point other than the support for environmental conservationism it tends to inspire in retrospect.

One hundred years ago, California was an expanse teeming with promise and purity. Now it’s teeming with many other types of energies, as witnessed in Los Angeles two weeks ago. The type of earnest reverie these painters felt is difficult for us to approach; the dreamy dimension in the museum is a world away from the landscape of South Los Angeles.

X-ray vision: Saul Bernstein, an art teacher at Northridge, has spent many years analyzing X-rays of Old Master paintings in search of new insights to the artists’ working processes. He has investigated painting techniques and reworked sections of paintings, undetectable to the naked eye.

Unfortunately, the intrigue of Bernstein’s enterprise is lost in the hastily assembled exhibit, which consists of photocopies of the original artworks and accompanying X-rays. The nature of the project on display at Conejo Valley Art Museum is marred by a woeful lack of supportive information. A 45-minute videotape hosted by Bernstein helps illuminate what should have been focused in the exhibition itself.

Tropical dreaming in the back yard: Lisa Marshall, the featured artist at the Buenaventura Gallery this month, wallows in a kind of simplicity that becomes more fetching the longer you share in the experience.

Her watercolor floral subjects are nicely handled and delicate, but it is the series of gouache portraits of a young woman that gets under your skin. This woman, the model of tranquillity and repose, triggers parallels to Gauguin’s tropical models and is depicted in a variety of scenes rendered in flat planes of bright color.

Once you’re synched with Marshall’s breezy romantic spirit, you don’t even flinch when you see the man-in-the-moon in one of the works.

Also on view are ceramic vessels of Linda Ulfers-Gaines, informed by a rare wit and quasi-primitive panache. Leeann Lidz’s works celebrate the beauty of chaotic vegetation in the back yard.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* “California Grandeur and Genre” at the Ventura County Museum of Art and History, 100 E. Main St. in Ventura, through July 15. Call 653-0323.

* Lisa Marshall, watercolors and gouaches, at the Buenaventura Gallery, 700 E. Santa Clara St. in Ventura, through May 23. Call 654-1235.

* “Secrets of the Old Masters Revealed by X-Ray and Computer,” presented by Saul Bernstein, at the Conejo Valley Art Museum, 193-A N. Moorpark Road in Thousand Oaks, through May 31. Call 373-0054.