Casinos add Mir, Modigliani, Renoir to their lures

LAS VEGAS -- Walk past the woman singing opera from the second-floor balcony, the gondolier steering his craft under a bridge, and head straight for the large sign in bold letters that reads: ''Guggenheim Hermitage." Inside the four galleries hangs a veritable ''Who's Who" of the 19th- and 20th-century art world: Georges Seurat, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Czanne, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Joan Mir. Welcome to the highbrow world of fine art, Vegas-style.

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The Guggenheim Hermitage in The Venetian Hotel Resort Casino is one of a growing number of miniature art museums sprouting on the strip in the last five years. Having already accomplished the feat of importing the finest restaurants in America, including New York's Le Cirque and San Francisco's Aqua, Las Vegas has been eager to form alliances with noteworthy museums. So far, the results have been mixed. Since Guggenheim Hermitage opened in 2001, the number of visitors is not nearly what was expected. The other gallery space in The Venetian, Guggenheim Las Vegas, has remained dark, due to lack of financing since the introductory exhibition, ''The Art of the Motorcycle," closed in January 2003.

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As the name implies, the Guggenheim Hermitage is a collaboration between two of the world's foremost museums, the Guggenheim in New York and the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna also has entered into an agreement to loan some of its works. The revolving collection is hung by powerful magnets on rusted steel walls to give the space a rugged, modernist feel.

Pay the hefty $15 admission, grab an audio tour, and you'll be treated to an introductory art history lesson on the great masters. ''A Century of Painting: From Renoir to Rothko" is the current show, running through May 2. In Renoir's ''Woman with Parrot" (1871), a young woman tenderly grooms the small bird that sits on her hand. Jackson Pollock's ''Ocean Greyness" (1953) is a swirling frenzy of color and motion on the canvas. Kazimir Malevich's ''Morning in the Village After Snowstorm" (1912), with the triangular heads of its figures, is recognizable to anyone who's been to the Guggenheim in Manhattan.

While the exhibit might be interesting for the person who rarely if ever ventures to an art museum, others may find it too simplistic and yearn for a visit to the originating museum for a more in-depth study of the artists.

Down Las Vegas Boulevard, the 11 works on view at the Wynn Collection of Fine Art follow a similar one-painting-per-artist theme. Yet, these works are so extraordinarily beautiful they seem to shine on the velvet-red walls of this one room.

Steve Wynn, a hotel casino mogul and avid art collector, was instrumental in the Guggenheim's decision to move into Las Vegas. When Wynn opened Bellagio in 1998, he unveiled a gallery with 50 paintings from his private collection. More than a million people shelled out $12 each to see them in the first 18 months. After Wynn sold Bellagio and its gallery to MGM Mirage, he placed some of his artistic holdings in the closed Desert Inn. This is to be the site of his next hotel venture, the $2 billion Wynn Las Vegas slated to open next spring.

Wynn had intended to name the resort Le Reve, after Picasso's painting by that name (''The Dream," 1932), which is on display in the collection. The artist's young mistress Marie-Thrse Walter sits back in her red chair, head tilted, peacefully asleep; the painting fetched one of the highest prices ever for a Picasso. Amedeo Modigliani's ''Nude on a Couch" (1917) is just as sensual a portrait. The voluptuous woman, unique among Modigliani's more common long, angular figures, looks back at the viewer from atop the soft white sofa.

Wynn narrates the audio tour, providing far too much detail on each painting, perhaps making up for the small exhibit. But he has a sense of humor. About Andy Warhol's 1983 triptych (of who else?) ''Steve Wynn (Red, Gold, White)," the narrator chuckles and says, ''If you can stand it, you can look at the three pictures of me."

The Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art continues to present temporary exhibits at Wynn's former address. The latest exhibit is 21 paintings by Claude Monet, a controversial loan from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, which opened Jan. 30. Critics have said the exhibit, in a for-profit gallery, lacks true intellectual or artistic merit and is simply a way for the MFA to make $1 million. Malcolm Rogers, MFA director, has defended the show, saying it is a way to bring art to people who otherwise might not be able to see it -- and make money for the MFA at the same time.

The Monets in question are displayed in two rooms, available for $15 admission to folks who need a breather from the poker tables and want to rest their weary eyes on something far more seductive than the queen of hearts.

Curator George Shackleford of the MFA selected paintings by Monet that best illustrate the painter's career and reflect the strengths of the museum's collection. They include Monet's work in Argenteuil in the 1870s, his landscapes of Antibes in the '80s, and masterpieces from his Giverny garden in the early 20th century.

Indeed, anyone new to art museums may find the exhibits in Vegas to their liking. More experienced aficionados may find more intriguing fare in another section of Bellagio. Here, they may sit enraptured as trapeze artists, high divers, and contortionists create their own innovative art above an oval pit of water in Cirque du Soleil's ''O." If that lover of harlequins, Picasso, were alive today, he might find these myriad performers just as imaginative as many of Vegas's museum offerings.

Stephen Jermanok is a freelancer in Newton who writes about the arts for Art & Antiques, Town & Country, and Boston magazine.