ART REVIEW : Remarkable Man’s Remarkable Trove : The L.A. County Museum’s ‘Degas to Matisse’ exhibition showcases the acquisitions of collector Maurice Wertheim, who was also an agent of history.

“Degas to Matisse: The Maurice Wertheim Collection” is a small, often choice exhibition of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting and sculpture, which is installed next door to a large, jam-packed store, specially built for the occasion on the second level of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The store is filled with similarly French-themed notecards, posters, jigsaw puzzles, videotapes, books, postcards and such. You can’t miss it. Just past the other cash-register station, which sells recorded tours of the lovely little show, the big store is in a temporarily converted gallery that’s as large as the largest of the three galleries housing the exhibition.

If you liked the Van Gogh self-portrait that Maurice Wertheim surreptitiously acquired in the notorious, 1939 Swiss auction of art deemed degenerate by the Nazis, you’re gonna love the Gauguin refrigerator magnet that you can snap up in the shop.

The Van Gogh has long been a personal favorite among the 43 paintings, drawings and sculptures from the Wertheim collection (40 are on view here), which was bequeathed to Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum at the collector’s death in 1950. Van Gogh’s self-portraits are almost uniformly astonishing, but this one, painted in 1888 and dedicated to his friend and colleague, Paul Gauguin, has a covert power.

On the surface it’s simple and straightforward. Before a vivid, green background, Van Gogh shows himself chest high and in three-quarter view. He wears a bulky brown suit, edged in electric blue, that visually peels back in layers--jacket, vest, shirt--not unlike an onion. His golden head, shadowed with green and violet, and highlighted with red, is held splendidly erect before the green background, which is painted in thick, flat, circular strokes, as if a halo.

Here’s the surprise: The whites of Van Gogh’s eyes are not white. They’re green--exactly the same green that swirls behind him. So, when you look the painter in the eye, you can see right through him.

When Wertheim acquired this astonishing Van Gogh in 1939, he’d been seriously collecting art for only three years. He was 50 when he’d started, with Picasso’s grim 1903 watercolor “The Blind Man” (not in the show), and within six months he’d added Picasso’s double-sided oil “Young Girl Wearing a Large Hat” and “Woman With a Chignon,” both painted in 1901.

The double picture records one major turning point in Picasso’s rapidly evolving art. The bright, flickering exuberance of Impressionism in “Young Girl” gives way to the somber, acidic melancholy of “Woman,” who rests her head heavily in her hands, as she sits hunched at a table.

A year later Wertheim bought Picasso’s large, Blue Period “Mother and Child,” a kind of working-class Madonna filled with pathos (the haggard duo may have been based on a syphilitic prostitute and her infant). This acquisition was soon followed by that of a small, 1904 crayon drawing of a “Mother and Daughter,” in which the woman’s long, slim torso and listlessly bowed head are related to the famous painting “Woman Ironing,” in which all the weight of daily drudgery is ponderously felt.

Wertheim bought a number of other, mostly small paintings and drawings before the Van Gogh purchase; still, these citations are enough to suggest a certain continuity to his interests. John O’Brian, an art historian at the University of British Columbia and former graduate student at Harvard, observes in the exhibition’s thorough--and thoroughly first-rate--catalogue that the collector began by acquiring Modern images of a certain type: Most showed, or were associated with, suffering, sacrifice and disillusionment.

That Wertheim might do so in the darkest days of the Great Depression is unsurprising. This doesn’t, however, seem at all a case of a silly rich man buying expensive paintings of the poor, in order to salve a troubled conscience.

Wertheim was an unusual man, who seems to have developed a similarly unusual insight into social and cultural politics. He was committed to a variety of liberal causes. During the Depression he kept The Nation, the journal of liberal opinion and the oldest magazine of its kind, from going under. He was later instrumental in transforming the staid, conservative American Jewish Committee into an activist agency that fought for the creation of a Jewish state as an answer to Hitler’s nightmare.

During World War II, and into the postwar years, Wertheim added many of the most significant works in the collection. A son of privilege who made a successful career as a Wall Street banker, and whose advisers on art were of the caliber of Harvard’s legendary Paul Sachs and Art News editor Alfred M. Frankfurter, he acquired Degas’ “The Rehearsal” (c.1873-78), an exquisite picture paradoxically dominated by empty space, which is among the first of his ballet paintings; Pissarro’s energetic aerial view of the Boulevard Montmartre; a superb example of Monet’s smoke- and steam-filled views of the Gare Saint-Lazare; a small Seurat figure study, one of 30 for “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte”; Manet’s exuberant, 1877 image of the Parisian craze for roller-skating, in which variegated marks of paint become vivid equivalents for movement and flux, and more.

Not everything Wertheim acquired is by any means major. But he does seem to have used his developing art collection in an influential way. The cautiousness of his initial Picasso acquisitions quickly solidified into a full-bore commitment to the early School of Paris. Paintings and drawings by Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, Constantin Guys, Rousseau and Bonnard entered the collection, as did bronzes by Degas, Maillol and Charles Despiau.

This last is a curious but revealing name. Despiau (1874-1946) was a minor French sculptor, conservative and classical in style, known largely for having been Rodin’s principal assistant. He was very much alive when, just before the war, Wertheim acquired a bust and a study for a funerary monument, both from a decade before. It’s as if the Despiau bronzes had a talismanic quality, connecting the darkening present to the bright crucible of French Modernism.

As the German war machine tore up Europe, the idea of Americans collecting Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art was certainly not aesthetically adventurous. But John O’Brian persuasively identifies the heightened significance French art had come to hold in the United States.

“The ownership and loan of French art for exhibition in America came to be viewed as an act of patriotism, an expression of support for the liberation of Europe and its culture from totalitarian domination,” he writes. “In recognizing the superiority of French culture--the preservation of which was ‘vital to world civilization’--the United States found a reason (among many reasons) to think of itself as the champion of what was proper and just.”

In assembling this focused and often remarkable collection, Maurice Wertheim was, in his way, the collector as agent-of-history. One can only speculate on the impact this might have had on shaping the outlook of his daughter, Barbara W. Tuchman, the distinguished journalist and historian.

So, in this spirit, maybe it’s worthwhile to think of the huge knickknack shop that’s been erected in a LACMA gallery adjacent to the exhibition as an educational tool. When you’re gazing at Degas’ dancers and you hear the cash register ring, remember: Wertheim made his fortune as a banker, and our contemporary adoration of French art might just be a highly patriotic way to dig ourselves out from a disabling economic slump.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through April 25. Closed Mondays .