A Vacuous Tour of Impressionism

Being at an art museum and looking at an art exhibition that seems clearly designed as a vacant entertainment for people who have virtually no interest in art is, needless to say, an unusual experience. But just such an oddity is currently available in the West building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where a cheerful exercise in dumbing-down the museum is underway.

A display called “Around Impressionism: French Paintings From the National Gallery of Art” offers next to nothing to look at and even less to think about. Composed of some 69 French paintings from the great Washington museum, the show was organized by the National Gallery for a tour to Japan and is stopping off here on the way back home. Apparently, the paintings were carefully chosen so that nobody in Washington would notice they were gone. The National Gallery owns some extraordinary works of art from the period but, with scant exception, none of those has traveled to L.A.

What has been assembled is an almost uniformly undistinguished group of second- and third-tier pictures by artists major and minor. All but 20 come from celebrated collections donated to the National Gallery over the years by Ailsa Mellon Bruce and her brother, Paul Mellon. Perhaps these were the pictures the Mellons used to decorate the powder rooms and back hallways at home.

With a show called “Around Impressionism: French Painting From the National Gallery of Art,” you might expect one of two things (or, for something truly remarkable, possibly even both): an illuminating survey that sheds new light on the circumstances around one of the most popular periods in the history of European painting; or, an illuminating survey that sheds new light on the collection of the nation’s art museum.

This show offers neither.

It starts with Camille Corot (1796-1875), whose habit of sketching outdoors has long been cited as a precedent for the Impressionist painters’ later conviction that painting on-site was essential to an art dependent on the shifting play of light, and with Eugene Boudin (1824-1898), whose little scenes of bourgeois vacationers at the seashore were in fact painted at the beach. Pleasant if uninspired examples by both artists line gallery walls.

Almost entirely ignored is the so-called Barbizon School of artists who, disgusted with the rigid, puffed-up demands of the French Academy, settled in the forest of Fontainebleau to paint intimate scenes of life in the countryside away from Paris. Theodore Rousseau and Jean-Francois Millet were leaders of the group, but neither artist is represented in “Around Impressionism.” One minor picture by the minor Barbizon painter Charles-Francois Daubigny (1817-1878) is on view.

And so it goes through the exhibition, as the minor piles up on the mediocre, and the undistinguished jostles for attention with the also-ran. One begins to yearn for at least a painting or two that is just plain flat-out bad, in order to relieve the grinding tedium of it all. But, no, nothing truly awful will be found.

Nor will anything truly great--if by great we mean the best the National Gallery has to offer. Mostly the 1866 “Flowers in a Vase” and the 1872 “Pont Neuf, Paris” by Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) give you an inkling of what Renoir was about to lose as his work went into steep decline after the 1870s. Naturally, the 40-year period of decline is abundantly represented by four bathetic pictures.

A couple of fine paintings can be seen, the signature example being “Woman With a Parasol” (1875) by Claude Monet (1840-1926). A woman (Mme. Monet) is shown standing on a flower-dotted hillside, a swirl of breeze having captured her skirt; we look up into the intensely green interior of her sun-shielding umbrella, which stands out against the blazingly blue sky above. The sun-blanked eyes of the little boy beside her might be our own.

Most often, though, you can’t help looking at something on the wall at LACMA West and thinking about what’s been left behind in Washington. Edouard Manet’s tasty little still-life “Oysters” (1862) is a sensual slather of creamy brushstrokes describing eight erotically suggestive mollusks and one astringent lemon, while a fork thrust forward off the table’s edge invites our indulgence in the visually licentious experience. The little picture is worth the whole passel of Boudins and Corots through which you’ve just waded to get to it--but it’s a mere bagatelle compared to Manet’s “Dead Toreador” (1864) back in D.C., a little ditty in which the artist simultaneously paid homage to and metaphorically killed off his great Spanish predecessor, Velazquez.

“Around Impressionism” is a show that adds exactly nothing to our understanding, either of French painting in the 19th century or of the collection of the National Gallery of Art. The mindless vacancy of its ambition is underscored by the absence of a publication.

At least there’s comic relief. An introductory videotape, produced by LACMA and screened continuously in an antechamber, actually pilfers techniques from the famous Laguna Beach sporting event known as “The Pageant of the Masters.” (The pageant is a sporting event rather than an art event because its focus is on the incredible physical demands of not budging a muscle.) For no obvious reason, actors portraying Mme. Monet and her young son create an actual on-screen tableau vivant of “Woman With a Parasol.” Wow!

An audio guide is also available, so you’ll have something to occupy your ears while your eyes are being glazed over by mediocre paintings. Its nattering chitchat about the art is distracting, while the level of its insights shouldn’t be too taxing on regular fans of the Teletubbies.

Also, I seem to recall there was a museum shop after the final gallery.

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* “Around Impressionism: French Paintings From the National Gallery of Art,” LACMA West, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through Nov. 29. Closed Wednesdays.