Pride of Pushkin

Last year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art celebrated the sculptural ineptitude of 1970s TV bombshell Farrah Fawcett with an exhibition. This summer, the vaunted Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow is displaying kitsch bronzes by 1950s cinema bombshell Gina Lollobrigida. Truly, the Cold War culture gap has now closed. Celebrity is the international language, bridging all divides, and beggared art museums desperate for attention (and the income it might bring) today speak with one show-biz voice.

Among actual artists, the reigning public superstars have long been the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists and two rarefied founding fathers of 20th century art -- Picasso and Matisse. They’re the Ben and Jen, the Tracy and Hepburn of the modern art museum. Moscow’s Pushkin is vaunted precisely because its collection is rich in holdings of work by these celebrity painters. Sunday, some Pushkin all-stars come to LACMA.

“Old Masters, Impressionists and Moderns: French Masterworks From the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow” presents 75 examples by 50 artists.

Fifty-three of these paintings have never before been seen in the United States. The show is short on trifles -- bland pleasantries by the mediocre likes of Francois-Hubert Drouais, Henri-Charles Manguin, Pierre Subleyras and others whose satisfaction with simple competence is stultifying. It is long on very good pictures by artists great and small, from Claude Lorrain and Georges Braque to Carl van Loo and Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Pena. Finally, more than a quarter of the show is of the first rank -- as drop-dead good as painting gets.

The works mostly date from the 19th and early 20th centuries, but in its entirety the show spans some 280 years. The earliest is a dazzling literary romance by Nicolas Poussin, circa 1630. It’s unusually resonant today.

The painting is based on “Jerusalem Delivered,” an Italian epic about the first crusade. It depicts the beautiful Armita, sorceress-niece of the prince of Damascus, kneeling over the elegant reclining figure of Rinaldo, a stalwart Christian knight. The passel of cherubs cavorting about their heads lets you know that love is abloom.

In the story, Armita had been charged with seducing and destroying the crusaders. When Rinaldo arrived on her enchanted island, though, she fell head over heels for the big handsome lug. This bald narrative casts Islam, personified by Armita, as seductive, feminine, magical and scheming, but finally no match for the forthright grace and masculine power of Christianity, to which Islam will submit. Poussin italicizes this political assertion of cultural supremacy through a dramatic appeal to history.

He’s adapted the shallow space and emotional gestures of Greek and Roman relief carvings. The painting’s glistening palette of primary colors (red, yellow and blue), coupled with the virtually Pythagorean geometry of the composition, also raise the sense of timeless order and stability to a powerful level of subliminal abstraction. It avers that this is the way the world is meant to be -- and always has been.

The brilliance of Poussin’s visual rhetoric is hard to match. Although other engaging Old Master works are included -- especially three by Francois Boucher that cover his full, fantasy-oriented range of religious, genre and mythological subjects -- it isn’t until Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and his marvelous 1841 “Virgin With a Chalice” that we’re in the company of an artist of equal stature.

Mary gazes down at the host balancing on a thin edge atop a plate-covered cup. She’s flanked by patrons and candlesticks and cloaked in garments that, together, form a rectilinear armature. Inside this structural “cage” her flawless oval face is visually suspended, like a mysterious egg.

The Virgin’s physical anatomy is impossible -- there’s no earthly way that her red right arm, floating off in space, could be attached to her shoulder, while her blue left arm is a mere stub. Yet, when gauged by the compositional demands of the picture, the figure seems exactly right.

Such is the genius of Ingres: Mary becomes a miracle of art, her Raphael-like gaze virtually willing you to believe, in spite of your own eyes. Given the metaphysical subject matter, isn’t that what a devotional painting should do?

This strain of French classicism is reinforced by the show’s installation. The clumsy space inside LACMA’s Anderson building has been squared off for the occasion. The Old Master pictures have been gathered in a long room flanked by arched doorways, with the building’s fat and awkward interior columns line up along one side, as if it’s some classical temple. The paintings hang on soft walls upholstered in azure fabric.

The 19th century works are at the sides in ambulatory aisles -- Realists to the right, Impressionists and Post-Impressionists to the left. The Realists are generally fine, charming if not stellar. But the dozen mostly modest Impressionists leave a bit to be desired, if only because we expect more from them. Three strong works lead the group.

One is a great Renoir garden scene from exactly the right sun-dappled moment in his overblown career -- 1876, the year of “Moulin de la Gallette,” with its flickering light. Another is a crisp view of a bridge over a Giverny lily pond, by Claude Monet. My favorite is the third -- a wild ballerina by Edgar Degas. Her contorted limbs strain to hold a dance pose for an unseen photographer. Degas creates a controlled picture of painful beauty, which is a virtual definition of the punishing exquisiteness of classical ballet.

The show’s modern era truly takes off with the Post-Impressionists. Two by Van Gogh, three by Gauguin and four by Cezanne turn an alcove-like space (with an intrusive emergency exit door in the middle of one wall) into a flawless assembly of flawless pictures. Some are major, some minor. If they’re hung uncomfortably high on the walls, in order to accommodate the craning necks of expected crowds, blessedly few are displayed under glass. They seem wonderfully fresh and immediate.

Setup for a knockout

Next comes a domestic interlude. The so-called Nabis group, who explored decorative painterly effects of pattern and color, are anchored by nice examples by its two finest artists, Pierre Bonnard and Edward Vuillard. But then, over to one side, a mangled portrait of his wife by Maurice Denis is the one true honker in the show. Denis, unlike Ingres or Degas, distorts his figure for the simple reason that he doesn’t paint very well.

No matter. The modest pause provides the perfect setup for the exhibition’s knockout room. Three large canvases by Matisse -- dated 1912-13, they’re the latest works in the exhibition -- are so strong in their chromatic energy that they seem to blow Albert Marquet’s gray Parisian landscapes on the opposite wall a few inches back into the Sheetrock. Nothing, not even the charming imaginary jungle scene by Henri Rousseau nor the alienated cafe denizens in Picasso’s “Harlequin and His Companion” in the next (and final) room, can survive this dazzling onslaught of painterly brilliance.

The trio is composed of a monumental floral still life, the iconic “Nasturtiums and ‘The Dance’ ” and “Goldfish” -- a hypnotic, pivotal painting in Matisse’s career. The picture of a tabletop with a cylindrical glass vase filled with water and four goldfish eloquently wrestles to the ground Picasso’s innovations with Cubist space, submitting them to the will of Matisse’s own new discoveries with color.

In one of the great passages in all of Modern painting, four effortless smudges of bright orange pigment are surrounded by thin puddles of pale green; the daubs create the optical warping of space that occurs in nature, as light bends through water. Like a chain of vaporous smoke rings, the circular table support, table top, vase bottom, water’s surface and vase’s lip rise vertically through the picture, twisting and bending space without benefit of traditional methods of painterly illusionism. You’re left staring, wide-eyed and dumb, like the goldfish submerged in the bowl. It’s a breathtaking tour de force, worth the price of admission.

Moscow’s Pushkin is nowhere near as well-known as its St. Petersburg rival, the thousand-room Hermitage Museum, and this exhibition, the first in a planned series of international touring events organized in partnership with Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, means to raise its (celebrity) profile. In 1948, Josef Stalin began to use the art museum in Russia’s capital city as a weapon in the Cold War, which meant that “corrupt” Modernists like Degas and Matisse had to be kept out of sight in the basement. Our museums played the same cultural propaganda game, offering up Abstract Expressionism as the ultimate symbol of freewheeling American liberty. Those days seem like ancient history.

Now, in its American bid for cultural tourism, the Pushkin has fully joined the Western rat race.

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‘Old Masters, Impressionists and Moderns: French Masterworks From the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art,

5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.;

Friday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 9 a.m.-8 p.m.; closed Wednesday

Ends: Oct. 13

Price: $17-$20; seniors and students, $14-$17

Contact: (323) 857-6000