FRENCH ACCENT SPOTLIGHT SHINES ON IMPRESSIONISTS IN `RENOIR TO MATISSE'.

Byline: Steven Rosen Correspondent

After a series of exhibitions with difficult imagery and concepts - ``Beyond Geometry,'' ``Jasper Johns' Numbers,'' ``Diane Arbus: Revelations'' - the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is rewarding us with an easy one.

``Renoir to Matisse: The Eye of Duncan Phillips'' needs little introduction or art-appreciation preparation. Stephanie Barron, the show's curator - and LACMA's chief curator of modern and contemporary art - simply selected 53 modernist European paintings from one of America's finest nongovernmental art museums, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (The museum is currently undergoing renovation and expansion.)

LACMA then created an unhurried, uncrowded environment across several galleries in its Hammer Building, where the occasional love seat is meant to show us that the Phillips Collection once was the home of collector Duncan Phillips.

So how easy is ``Renoir to Matisse'' to enjoy? A majority of artists are household names - Monet, Manet, Picasso, van Gogh, Bonnard, Cezanne, Gauguin, Braque, Klee - and the show is especially strong on French impressionists.

Yet not every painting can be considered a masterwork, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes' two contributions aren't even especially interesting. Considering the $17-$20 admission fee, one also wishes there were more impressionist works - perhaps at the expense of a few of the early abstractionists and German/Austrian expressionists on display.

The best paintings in the show are remarkable, however.

For instance, there is Pierre-Auguste Renoir's grand, celebratory oil painting ``Luncheon of the Boating Party'' of 1880-81, in which he posed 18 friends of his enjoying wine, conversation and each other's company on a sunny afternoon. This is the star of the show - and one of Renoir's finest paintings. He manages to combine portraiture, landscape and still life on a large scale while still maintaining the soft, fluid brush strokes that make his figures so human and intimate.

Phillips paid $125,000 for it, believing it would be a tourist destination in itself. It is.

``This is one of the high points of my life to have the pleasure of actually installing this painting,'' Barron says.

Also wonderful is Pierre Bonnard's 1921 oil painting ``The Open Window.'' It places layers of pattern and color onto a deceptively simple scene with a clever perspective - a view both from a window and into a room simultaneously. As a result, it has an alluring exoticism - like carpets at a Moroccan bazaar. And at the lower right corner, painted with just enough blurring softness to seem to be coming at you from the corner of your eye, is a black cat pawing at its sleeping owner. This canvas is a veritable roomful of surprises.

Pablo Picasso's 1934 oil painting ``Bullfight'' - one of four by him in the show - is interesting as a precursor to his ``Guernica.'' And yet on its own it still has a brutal power. It's a contorted cubist-surrealist depiction of a circle of bloody violence, in which a bull and white horse wound each other while figures in an arena watch. This wasn't just a bullfight; it was Spain moving toward its 1936-39 civil war. That event would prompt Picasso to appropriate some of the imagery here for his most famous artwork, ``Guernica.''

The Matisse oil painting that closes the show, 1948's ``Interior With Egyptian Curtain,'' is notable as one of his last paintings - he had switched to cutouts because of arthritis. (He died in 1954.) It is still full of life, showing a palm tree that appears ready to burst through a window pane. That display of exuberant vitality is framed by a curtain with a wildly tropical pattern. It is a still life, but one full of implied, explosive movement.

Since this show is as much about Phillips as his collection, it also attempts to educate us about him. He was a rich patron - but also something more: an eloquent and perceptive critic of the modern art he bought. If he at first disliked an artist he later came to admire, such as Matisse, he was frank about admitting his error.

In an anecdote recounted in this show's accompanying brochure, Phillips was once asked why he had but one Renoir while famed collector Dr. Albert C. Barnes had more than a hundred. ``It's the only one I need,'' Phillips replied. He knew it was about the art, not about him.

RENOIR TO MATISSE: THE EYE OF DUNCAN PHILLIPS

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

When: Noon to 8 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday; noon to 9 p.m. Friday; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; through Jan. 9.

Tickets: $17 for adults on weekdays, $20 on weekends; $14 all days for seniors 62 and older and students 18 and older; $12 for all after 5 p.m. weekdays; $15 for adults after 5 p.m. weekends; children 17 and under free all the time. [phone] or www.lacma.org.

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(1 -- 2 -- color) Above, Pierre-Auguste Renoir got together a group of friends for his famous ``Luncheon of the Boating Party'' (1880-81). Below, Henri Matisse's ``Interior With Egyptian Curtain'' (1948) is one of the artist's final paintings.