The money's on Monet

LAS VEGAS -- The French countryside could not be farther away, in distance or sentiment, from the long stretch of neon lights that line the Las Vegas Strip.

But as the impressionists launched a revolution in the art world more than a century ago, a small art gallery inside the Bellagio resort has been quietly doing the same, albeit to a lesser degree, over the past six years.

"It was shocking particularly to the art world that there was a gallery in a Las Vegas casino," said Matthew Hileman, managing director for the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art. "Not only have people come, they've come in amazing numbers."

This month, the gallery launched its ninth exhibition, titled "The Impressionist Landscape from Corot to Van Gogh." On the heels of a wildly successful Claude Monet show, gallery officials are confident they are accomplishing their mission of bringing art to the masses -- even if it is in a casino.

"If you look at Las Vegas we are all about doing things you might not do at home," Hileman said. He said surveys show nearly 30 percent of visitors have never been in a museum before. "I think there is something very non-threatening and very welcoming about it."

First conceived to display a $400 million art collection owned by Steve Wynn and his casino company, management of the gallery was taken over in 2001 by PaperBall, a division of New York's PaceWildenstein gallery. The move occurred shortly after MGM Grand acquired Wynn's company, Mirage Resorts Inc.

Over the years, the gallery has stuck largely to exhibits with the biggest name recognition -- Faberge, Andy Warhol, Monet and now a wide-ranging exhibition with artists such as Renoir, Cezanne and van Gogh.

The latest show, though spanning decades surrounding the impressionist movement, is sharply focused to present the artistic evolution from the young painters at the Barbizon School outside Paris to the post-impressionists.

"What's interesting in this show is that you have these idyllic, beautiful Barbizon landscapes and realist landscapes," said Marc Glimcher, gallery chairman. "Those landscapes were as much of a departure as van Gogh 50 years later."

The 34-piece exhibition opens with an image of the famed Forest of Fontainebleau in a painting titled "Pool in the Forest" by Theodore Rousseau, who led the Barbizon painters. The group helped spark the impressionist movement with their devotion to nature and their abandonment of traditional subjects.

The Barbizon painters were part of a wider realist movement that had turned away from the fantastical works of their day to present life stripped of illusion. To illustrate this collision of realism and art, the show includes a painting by Jean-Francois Millet, titled "Washerwomen," in which sunset hues provide a stark contrast to the realities of peasant life.

Other paintings feature dancing nymphs, a flock of sheep and the sea-swept coast of France. But the focal point of the exhibition remains Monet. Those who saw the previous exhibit will recognize the five Monet masterpieces included in this latest show -- though the paintings are worth seeing again.

The most striking, and perhaps most famous, is the "The Water Lily Pond, Japanese Bridge," which Monet painted in 1900. But a pleasant surprise is Monet's "Rue de la Bavolle, Honfleur" an example of the artist's early work as a realist.

Works from Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley complete the impressionist bloc. The final pieces are devoted to the post-impressionist period that followed -- with two paintings by Vincent van Gogh, including "Houses at Auvers," which was painted weeks before the artist's death in 1890.

The painting is a sharp representation of how art had progressed since the Barbizon landscapes of the 1850s.

"These landscapes were the way for the artists to break all the rules," Glimcher said. "One rule breaker leads to the next rule breaker. That's the revelation."

The gallery partnered with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to present the impressionist exhibition. The deal is similar to a multimillion dollar arrangement that reportedly brought Monet to the Bellagio last year and generated criticism among some in the art world.

At the time, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight described the show as "without intellectual merit, is educationally corrupt and puts a fast-buck premium on financial gain."

But the crowds didn't care. An estimated 450,000 people saw the Monet exhibition, the most successful at the art gallery since its October 1998 opening. Nearly 20,000 have already seen the impressionist exhibit since its June 10 opening.

From the casino company's perspective, the gallery has proven fine art in a casino can be an unqualified success.

"All they need to do is watch the lines at the gallery and listen to the people coming out," MGM Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman said. "I just find this notion that there's a time and place, a singular setting in which we can see art is a completely self-limiting argument."

Feldman said the primary motive behind the casino is less about money and more about the experience.

"The financial benefits are in all honesty modest, especially when you are talking about an enterprise the size of Bellagio," Feldman said. "It was really intended to enhance the persona of the hotel and to give guests another must-see attraction."

And the key to the gallery's success, according to Glimcher, has been never underestimating its audience.

"If you just give them some very obvious, completely unelaborated exhibition, but it has a lot of famous names in it, it's not enough," he said. "There is a sense of discovery that is going on. If we are accomplishing that ... then we are doing what we set out to do."

The current show runs through Jan. 8. Tickets are $15 per person and $12 for students, Nevada residents and those age 65 and older.

The gallery is open 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, and audio guides are available in English, French, Japanese and Spanish.

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On the Net:

Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, http://bgfa.biz