ART REVIEW : The Paley Collection: A Whole Trove of Choices : The late founder of CBS reveals himself to be his own man in works from the early Picasso to those of the Color-Field generation.

Rather curious affairs. The William S. Paley Collection, just opened main-stage at the County Museum of Art, ignites a mental review of the downside baggage that often comes with exhibitions of private art holdings.

They often come with a good bit of extra-aesthetic freight. We don’t expect them to have the historical completeness or thematic coherence of organized shows. Sometimes inspired by in-house politics, they are often shown less to enlighten the public than to flatter a collector into eventually bequeathing their holdings to the host institution, so the latter can strip them down to the one or four good things the collector bumbled onto. In the meantime, the museum doesn’t seem to think it’s doing any harm by lending its cachet to the bad art on view.

That can’t be a problem here. Paley died in 1990 and left this collection to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He was a big patron.

There is also an edge of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” when we folks in the street are invited in to see valuable baubles that normally adorn the private precincts of wealthy persons. It’s virtually impossible to view such troves without some feelings about some people having so much money and without some attempt at divining the character of the collector through the taste he manifests through his choices. And are they indeed private choices or those of some professional adviser employed in very much the same spirit as a stock broker? As it turns out, Paley was his own man. It shows in his selections.

Does any of that matter to innocent citizens who pay their ducat for the pleasure of seeing swell things and furthering their understanding of the ever-esoteric world of art? It does when the mixed motives just enumerated can result in an experience that doesn’t live up to its billing.

LACMA has been urging us to “Gogh See the Impressionists” in an advertisement illustrated by one of Vincent Van Gogh’s most glorious and touching self-portraits. The implication is that the Paley collection plus the recently opened Maurice Wertheim collection from Harvard University will provide an overall experience that lives up to Van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin.”

Happily it does. Both shows offer superb Degas, such as “The Rehearsal,” outstanding Monets, such as “The Gare St. Lazare, Arrival of a Train, 1877,” and vintage Manets, such as, “Skating.”

By featuring a Van Gogh in its advertising campaign, the museum signals that it includes Post-Impressionism along with the older style. That is pretty much where the Paley collection picks up the historical thread. Paley was, of course, the founder of CBS, a captain of communications, news and entertainment industries. MOMA is touring the show to six cities along with a catalogue by William Rubin and Matthew Armstrong.

Paley’s Post-Impressionist paintings begin to reveal the point at which the combined shows do not live up to their billing--and thank goodness. There is a kind of iconic, front-cover-illustration character to Paley’s Gauguin South Seas maiden, “The Seed of the Areoi.” We begin to see, however, that Paley understood that a symphony that is but an endless crescendo can wind up as nothing but impressive noise. Nearby hang two softer, more ruminative, less self-conscious Gauguins, “Tahitian Landscape” and “Washerwomen.” The latter may have been painted during the stormy time when Gauguin and Van Gogh roomed together at Arles, but you’d never know it from this gentle scene.

Cezanne’s “L’Estaque” and “Milk Can and Apples” look like the major monuments they are, with Cezanne playing the same role for modern art that Giotto played for the Renaissance--the humble titan that moves the mill of time. He looks so formidable that it’s very nice to seem him softer in a little watercolor and a drawing of his wife.

Paley loved Picasso. From what we’ve seen already it makes perfect sense that he’d buy the kind of early Rose Period masterpieces that grow directly out of Post-Impressionism, such as the trademark work of the collection, the “Boy Leading a Horse.” Its combination of structure and poetry, of contemplation and action come close to summarizing Paley’s taste.

Yet Paley’s collection continually surprises us with his picks. One of the lines demarcating aesthetic choice in Paley’s generation was between the Easy Picasso of the Blue and Rose periods and the Tough Picasso born with Analytic Cubism. It was a line rarely crossed, but Paley did it with the obdurately modern “The Architects Table,” pulling in excellent small examples by Gris and Braque to underline his point.

The Matisses here are more than respectable, but more significant is the almost confessional character of a room housing, among other potential embarrassments, three paintings by Andre Derain. Derain started his career at the turn of the century as Matisse’s most gifted comrade in the forging of Fauvism.

Derain’s “Bridge Over the Riou” is a brilliant bit of early modernism that sums up Post-Impressionist color and sets the stage for Cubism. It is followed by another landscape that makes a dangerous devil’s bargain with convention, and then by a theater scene that is a downright pot-boiler.

Nearby lurk several works by Georges Roualt and a couple by the American Ben Shahn. Both join Derain as artists who had international reputations in their heydays but fell out of favor at the first probing historical scrutiny. You can almost hear the shade of William S. Paley chuckling and saying, “Well, sure, I can get swept up in the wave of the moment like everybody else. Maybe Derain and Shahn were mistakes but I liked them at the time and I’m not going to try to cover that up.”

There was something solidly centrist about the Paley eye. In sculpture he liked Bourdelle, Maillol and Lachaise and that was that. When he moved into contemporary work he took in George Segal with perfect consistency.

The contemporary gallery is the final surprise, as if Paley stretched himself to see if he had another giant step of appreciation left in him. He did well. His Abstract Expressionist examples are few and small but smart and juicy. Still, Motherwell and Pollock. That’s it.

Same pattern for the Europeans. A weak Dubuffet, a prime small Giacometti and two Francis Bacon portrait triptychs that are as immediate and scary as slipping on a waxed floor.

The Color-Field generation attracted Paley’s love of structure. He apparently got curious with an unusual Josef Albers that looks like a Rothko. He then extended his understanding to fine things by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Agnes Martin.

There is one gaping, and amusing hole in the contemporary section. Paley, the mega-media giant, collected no Pop art. None. Maybe it reminded him too much of the office.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. , through May 16 . Closed Mondays (213) 857-6000.