COMMENTARY : Lasting Favorable Impressions : The popularity of Post- and French Impressionism goes back to that sense of idyll and beauty before the world wars

Is there man or woman alive in the United States today who, with a passion approaching moral fury, absolutely loathes the paintings of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists?

Someone for whom the very thought of all those dappled fields of bobbing red poppies, those sun-streaked garden trellises, those idyllic views of seaside paradise, either exotic or close to home, induces awful nausea?

A person who hears the name Claude Monet or Edgar Degas or Vincent van Gogh and curls a lip to mutter, with a revolted snarl, “ Yecch “?

Maybe there is, but it’s hard to imagine. Yawning indifference is likely the most agitated response someone might be able to muster against the bourgeois pleasures so prominently displayed in French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. “Everybody’s favorite,” those paintings are, and they can most always be counted on to draw a crowd. They’ll probably do so yet again at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where, starting Thursday, the estimable collection of 54 such paintings, drawings and watercolors assembled by Ambassador and Mrs. Walter H. Annenberg will go on public view (through Nov. 11).

An assertion of the overwhelming public popularity of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art doesn’t require much in the way of proof. Yes, statistical evidence could be rounded up to convince a doubter. Start with the Wilshire Boulevard museum itself, where the most widely attended show of the last decade was 1984’s “A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape” (500,000 visitors in 11 weeks, and second only to King Tut in LACMA’s all-time ranking). Or, for economic validation from the marketplace, look to Christie’s auction house, which recently announced its tally of worldwide sales for the 1989-1990 season: Of every three works of art that sold for more than $1 million--there were 247 in all--one was by a French Impressionist or Post-Impressionist; all but three of the 14 that sold for amounts in excess of $10 million were, too.

But why go on? One would be hard pressed even to find a doubter who needed convincing. It’s a given. The more intriguing question is, how did it get that way? What is it about the art of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Gauguin, of Berthe Morisot and Georges Seurat, of Camille Pissarro and Paul Cezanne that has so definitively captured the popular imagination?

The answer is not so simple as it might appear. It isn’t enough to settle on the paintings’ unabashed beauty, on their typically lush surfaces of often broken color, or on their capacity to transform a lowly patch of weeds into a dazzling chromatic spectacle. Certainly they tend to possess extreme sensory appeal; but, so do many other kinds of art that do not stake anything that remotely approaches a firm claim on the popular imagination.

The celebrity status of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art was a century in the making, and there is of course a moment when mere celebrity catapults into the Hall of Fame. That jump guarantees future reverence. And as with any Hall of Famer, encrustations of myth assume a significance at least as productive as the facts--sometimes more so.

The fact is that Impressionist painting was the most radical artistic phenomenon of the 19th Century, and the reason for its outsize popularity today is buried deep inside this seemingly paradoxical truth. The emergence of the new painting in the 1860s set off a remarkable chain of events. Included among them were numerous reactions against Impressionism, such as those the critic Roger Fry was retroactively to bring together under the rubric of Post-Impressionism in a landmark exhibition of 1910.

In the space of 50 years, the life of art was inexorably altered by the work of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, and by the volatile and shifting milieu within which they moved. The alterations were far-reaching. Together, they touch on virtually every aspect of cultural life which we take for granted today.

Impressionist artists had turned to smaller easel painting as a necessary vehicle to accommodate their desire to paint outdoors, easel paintings that subsequently turned out to be far more portable for the newly arising purposes of international exhibition. Indeed, both the invention of the commercial art gallery as a venue for the display and sale of portable works of art--and, hence, for a new measure of independence for the artist--as well as the emergent concept of the art museum as the final source of posterity’s validation for an artist’s endeavor, are dual phenomena largely born and nurtured during the same era.

Even newspapers, whose greatest proliferation dates to the mid-19th Century, were poised to spread the word, both for and against the new painting. Officially sponsored Salon exhibitions of the day regularly provided fodder for literally scores of columns in the numerous Parisian papers, and the upstart artists received regular attention. In 1874, the first independent exhibition of Impressionist painting garnered 15 articles, including 10 substantial reviews (six enthusiastic, only four hostile). An expectation of broad public interest in such events contributed to the formulation of the modern idea that art takes place in a public climate of pointed and partisan critical discourse.

To be sure, wide appreciation of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism came slowly. Scott Schaefer, former curator of European paintings at LACMA and a co-organizer of the museum’s aforementioned 1984 Impressionist exhibition, noted in the show’s catalogue that Impressionist paintings only started to become generally desirable in this century’s second decade, after the advent of Cubism. I think the sources of the transformation begun during that decade could be made even more explicit. Artistically, the development of a new art of pure abstraction played a vital role. And socially, the unimaginable horror of the Great War did, too.

The traumatic devastation of World War I, which left the countryside smoldering and in ruin, couldn’t help but endow the already Edenic landscapes and celebratory cityscapes of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists with a rosy aura of “paradise lost.” The painters themselves were likewise all of a much earlier generation. (Save for the notable exception of Monet, who was well into his 70s, most were dead long before the war ended, or even began.) Their paintings--whether Monet’s evocative world of blissful harmony in nature or Cezanne’s magisterial constructions of an immovable and eternal Mont Sainte-Victoire--typically depicted a luminous, eternal world that now stood in stark contrast to the shattered dreams of contemporary Europe.

Even Gauguin’s sharply etched Tahitian idylls, which already radiated more than a hint of remorse for civilization’s lost humanity, gained new layers of poignancy. Like Rubens’ “Garden of Love” or Watteau’s “Embarkation From the Island of Cythera,” which envisioned the darkening approach of night at the mythical place where the goddess of love emerged from the sea, Gauguin’s South Sea island pictures are luxurious pastorales edged with melancholic intimations of mortality and loss.

Eventually, that sweet, nostalgic longing began to be transferred to the paintings themselves. They slowly accumulated the talismanic aura of aesthetic charms, as a second pivotal development of the early 20th Century lent force to the wider appreciation of paintings from the late 19th Century. The fitful appearance of a totally abstract art, and the rise of such anti-art doctrines as Dada and Surrealism, had profound effects.

For the public, the schism between the avant-garde and the bourgeois audience was progressively widened. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism made it safe for a public increasingly skeptical of modern art’s claims to declare allegiance to at least some aspect of modern culture. They could embrace the tradition-bound radicalism of the “old” art as a safe substitute for the new. The typical aspiration of the middle class is upward mobility, toward the aristocracy, and with Monet you could have your modern cake and eat it, too.

For art, on the other hand, the rise of abstraction, in particular, reorganized the way in which Impressionism and Post-Impressionism were seen by subsequent generations. Formal properties of color, pattern and flatness were elevated to a high plateau of critical importance, while the range of particular land- and cityscape motifs were retroactively erased as unimportant, or at least marginal, to the paintings’ significance. Formal properties were singled out in order to provide historical antecedents charting crucial steps on the road to total abstraction--as if Cezanne had chosen to paint Mont Sainte-Victoire simply because, like Everest, it was there.

Today, virtually every museum visitor can recite the half-truth that the timeless subject of Impressionism is really the play of sunlight in nature. And it’s easy to ignore, or simply be unaware of, the historical side of the coin: In a century that saw the hardening of the modern idea of the nation-state, and whose people worked diligently for its elevation to the ranks of nationalist ideal, the painterly irradiance of the French landscape had certain extra-aesthetic implications. France, which had once been autocratically ruled by a Sun King, was now a post-revolutionary nation in which the sun shone brightly on the newly governing bourgeois class. In Impressionist pictures, their position seemed naturally ordained.

Today, the story of modern art is filled with caricatures of starving artists and misunderstood geniuses who labored in obscurity with no real hope of serious recognition. Sometimes, that grossly distorted story of the revolution in art reminds me of the equally simplified picture commonly drawn of America’s own democratic revolution. In both, a hardy band of middle-class rebels demanded their independence from the tyranny of oppressive aristocrats--and won.

It is, of course, a Classic Comics rendering of actual events. But the newly developing machinery of mass culture, whose arrival was coincident with that of modern art itself, is devoted above all else to identifying middle-class taste and feeding it back in all kinds of stunning ways. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are a touchstone: They enjoy a special place in the popular consciousness today because, for Western culture, they constitute the art around which an intricate founding myth of modern life could be--and has been--woven.