Monet, Monet, money

Things are not always what they appear to be in this city of dreams and disappointments. When a single street is lined with facsimiles of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Palace of the Doges, a medieval castle and an Egyptian pyramid, what you see is not necessarily what you get.

The pretense usually doesn’t extend to the city’s art galleries. But a new exhibition, “Claude Monet: Masterworks from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” has raised questions about the relationship between the venerable museum that owns the pictures and the high-toned gallery that is presenting them.

The beautifully installed assembly of 21 paintings -- including trademark images of the cathedral at Rouen, waterlilies at Giverny and a grain stack at sunset -- surveys the artist’s career from 1864 to 1905. With an illustrated catalog and a $15 admission fee that includes a recorded tour, the exhibition resembles a miniature museum retrospective.

But Boston’s MFA hasn’t established a Las Vegas branch, like the joint venture of New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum. The Monets are on loan to the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, a commercial enterprise at the luxurious Bellagio hotel-casino. The gallery is operated by PaperBall, a division of PaceWildenstein gallery in New York.

This is not the first time a nonprofit art museum has loaned artworks to a for-profit galley, although loans as large as this are extremely rare. And -- thanks to the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum and the Wynn Collection, a small display of paintings owned by casino mogul Steve Wynn -- it’s no longer a novelty to see splashy advertisements for blue chip art on the Strip.

What has the art world talking is that the Boston museum stands to reap an enormous return from the Monet show -- a sum reported by Newsweek as a minimum of $1 million.

“That figure is speculative,” says Malcolm Rogers, the museum’s director. He also deflects questions about additional revenue based on attendance. But he doesn’t deny the profit motive: “There are financial arrangements, which I can’t discuss in detail but which are beneficial to the museum.”

And therein lies the controversy. Even as leaders of financially stressed museums all across the country seek creative ways to bring in more people and money, they wrestle with just how far they can -- or should -- go.

“Professional Practices in Art Museums,” published by the Assn. of Art Museum Directors, offers this guideline: “In any decision about a proposed loan from the collection, the intellectual merit and educational benefits, as well as the protection of the work of art, must be the primary considerations, rather than possible financial gain.”

Rogers says that cashing in wasn’t his primary concern when he was approached about the show. “We first of all looked to see if we could actually do an exhibition of Monets,” he says. “Did we have enough that weren’t needed for our own walls or promised to other exhibitions? We wanted to fill the Las Vegas space beautifully with an exhibition that would tell a coherent story and represent each phase of Monet’s career.”

With 39 works by Monet -- 36 paintings, two pastels and one drawing -- the Boston museum has one of the largest holdings of the artist’s work outside France. Rogers and curator George Shackelford decided they could assemble the desired exhibition by taking five paintings off the walls and 16 others out of storage. “There have been some adjustments made in our display,” Rogers says, “but I suspect that visitors will not find what we have on our walls disappointing.”

Rogers has come under fire for reorganizing the museum’s curatorial departments, dismissing staff and presenting an increasingly lowbrow program, including a planned exhibition of fashion designer Ralph Lauren’s car collection. But he says the museum’s trustees and curators are united in their support for the Monet show.

“This is a very interesting opportunity,” he says. “We love to have our works seen in new cities by new audiences, and we are always looking for new funding sources. Unlike most of the major city museums of the country, Boston is entirely privately funded.” With a 350,000-piece encyclopedic collection and 1,000 employees, the museum operates on an annual budget of about $50 million.

“This will make a very nice contribution to our overhead,” he says, “as well as bring great masterpieces to new audiences. The money will pay salaries, heating and lighting -- keep this museum open.”

At the Bellagio, the Monet show is a coup for gallery President Andrea Bundonis and her husband, Marc Glimcher, president of PaceWildenstein. They share responsibilities at PaperBall, formed in 2001 to, as Glimcher puts it, “do all the fun stuff that doesn’t fall into the category of selling art.” That includes licensing artists’ images for products, but the company’s primary activity is running the gallery in Las Vegas.

The Bellagio gallery opened in 1998 to show the collection amassed by Wynn, whose company, Mirage Resorts, built the Bellagio hotel-casino. But much of the art was sold two years later, after MGM Grand bought Mirage. The first show under the new management presented 26 paintings and sculptures by Impressionist and modern artists from the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., with proceeds from ticket sales going to the museum.

Glimcher made his first trip to Las Vegas early in 2001, hoping to buy some of the artworks from Wynn’s collection, but he became interested in organizing exhibitions for the gallery. His first effort -- scheduled to open Oct. 1, 2001, three weeks after Sept. 11 -- featured Alexander Calder’s work. PaceWildenstein represents the artist’s estate; works in the show were drawn from his foundation.

Las Vegas suffered such a drastic loss of visitors after the terrorist attacks that the hotel management decided to close the gallery. Determined to put on the show, Glimcher rented the space, and the arrangement has continued. He and Bundonis have replaced the gaudy carpet, fabric-covered walls and brass fittings of the Wynn era with hardwood floors and more restrained appointments. Temporary walls are constructed to fit each exhibition.

The Calder show was followed by “Faberge: Treasures From the Kremlin,” which explored the final days of Imperial Russia through objects from Russian state collections. Then came “Andy Warhol: The Celebrity Portraits,” largely drawn from a private collection. And now “Claude Monet.”

“Faberge” has been the biggest hit so far, Bundonis says. It attracted 150,000 people during its five-month run, an average of 1,000 visitors per day. “Monet,” which has a 7 1/2-month run and extended hours, is expected to far surpass that mark. On opening weekend, the exhibition drew nearly 4,000 visitors.

“This has to be a successful business,” Glimcher says of the gallery. “The exhibitions have to grab the attention of the public,” he says, but they also “have to tell a concise story” -- one that puts the art in a historical context and helps people understand its importance.

Parsing ethics doesn’t help museums survive in a changing world, Glimcher says. “What it comes down to is: What kind of a show are you going to do? You loan to a good show, not to a bad one. Museums retain the right to make that judgment call.”

The Monet exhibition is only the latest development in a populist trend often credited to Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim Museum director who has established branches around the world and brought in extravaganzas of motorcycles and Armani clothes. But reactions of museum directors and academics are mixed.

“I am thrilled that the Boston MFA’s collection of Monet is so extensive that enough works are available to make up an independent loan show anywhere,” says Edmund P. Pillsbury, the former director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, who worked briefly as an art advisor to Wynn and now directs the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

“I’m trying to keep an open mind,” says Hugh Davies, director of San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art. “It’s too easy to sneer at Las Vegas and assume they are commercially driven and lack taste. But a museum showing art in a commercial gallery to turn a profit has to be a little careful.”

Selma Holo, an authority on museums who teaches at USC, sees the Monet show as the latest slide down a slippery slope. “In the blurring of the line between financial gain and museum missions we have moved from the Guggenheim’s franchising and having a branch in the Venetian hotel-casino to a kind of residency in a commercial gallery within the Bellagio. One really has to ask, what’s next?”

For Rogers, the answer is easy: “We will always look at people’s proposals and consider them on their merit.”