"Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse" at Philadelphia Museum of Art Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Tompkins Collection Gauguin's "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? PHILADELPHIA - Do not be fooled by the title, the extra money charged on top of regular admission or the gift shop lavishly stocked with cheesy souvenirs. "Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is not a blockbuster. It is anchored by three major paintings by the titular artists, but as a whole is a qualitatively mixed bag of 60 works by 25 artists, including Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, André Derain and some second- and third-rank Pointillists. Only 10 are by Gauguin, Cézanne or Matisse. The exhibition catalog is filled with excellent color reproductions of many great works not in the show, including Botticelli's "Primavera," Titian's "Concert Champêtre," Manet's "Déjeuner sur l'Herbe" and Matisse's "Bonheur de Vivre." An exhibition displaying everything in the catalog would be a once-in-a-lifetime event and a richly illuminating meditation on the classic Arcadian myth of pastoral bliss and what it means for the modern world. But if you want to know what you will see in the flesh, you have to consult the thumbnail-illustrated checklist at the back of the book. Can you say, "false advertising"? The show could have been fine had it been more tightly focused on the three core works. In the largest gallery Gauguin's "Where Do We Come From? (1897-98); Cézanne's "Large Bathers" (1900-6); and Matisse's "Bathers by a River" (1909-17) are having a profound conversation about their dreams of paradise. On his 4 ½-by-12-foot canvas Gauguin painted a tropical scene populated by about a dozen South Pacific islanders in various states of undress, their golden skin tones glowing against the mostly blue and green background. At the center a figure of uncertain gender in a loincloth reaches up to pluck a piece of low-hanging fruit, evoking the biblical fall. In the middle distance stands a blue sculpture of a local deity, while women, children, cats and dogs lounge about in the foreground. Despite the congenial environment, a mood of existentialist anxiety suffuses the painting, for a bigger back story gives it much of its poetic meaning: that is, the industrialization of the Western world that would enlarge the gap between nature and civilization to abysmal extremes. Cézanne's work is equally mysterious. The last of his monumental bather paintings, it represents 14 naked women rendered with sketchy outlines and patchy films of tan paint. They are gathered on the shore of a pond or river next to a group of slender, tall trees that bend from either side into an arch framing a sky of billowing clouds and a distant landscape with town spires rising from among more trees. Three of the women crouch in the foreground to examine something indecipherable. Others gaze across the water to where a standing figure and what might be a dog pause on the far shore like spiritual guides to the next world. Gauguin's ultimately questioning title could just as well apply to this haunting picture, which Cézanne completed not long before he died in 1906. Matisse was a big fan of both Gauguin and Cézanne, and there is much echoing of them in "Bathers by a River." But the differences are more significant. There are naked women, greenery and water, but Matisse has left behind the kind of coherent, pictorial space in which his predecessors installed their physically embodied figures, and he is less romantic. In his painting the basic repertory of images is abstracted into nearly hieroglyphic signs. The four faceless gray women resemble Cubist stone sculptures, and they look as if pasted onto the billboard-size rectangle, which is divided into six or seven vertical bands depending on how they are parsed. The left third of the picture is covered by a wallpaperlike pattern of spiky green leaves outlined in a cartoon-style black. Completed while World War I was in full swing, Matisse's work lacks the emotional poignancy of the Gauguin and Cézanne paintings. It is a somber, analytic play with pictorial conventions, a far cry from his own luxuriantly hedonistic "Bonheur." This is the disillusionment of painting and myth for the sake of Modernist transparency. There is another big picture in the room: "The Dream," Henri Rousseau's masterpiece whose image of a naked woman reclining on a chaise in the midst of a verdant jungle populated by staring, wild beasts answers Matisse's formalism with a vision emerging from the depths of the unconscious mind. While Matisse offers aesthetic equilibrium for a world wracked by terrible violence, Rousseau's odalisque points the way to a shadowy Arcadia of Surrealist fantasy. The rest of the show, which was organized by Joseph Rishel, the museum's senior curator of European paintings before 1900, gives a spotty sense of historical context. It includes some beautiful paintings by the 17th century classicist Nicolas Poussin and the Pointillist Georges Seurat, among a few others. A huge painting of three nudes in a landscape seen as if through fractured glass called "The City of Paris" (1910-12) by Robert Delaunay is striking if only for its ambition. There are two delightful small bather paintings from Cézanne's early years too, and, by Matisse, a loose oil sketch of his wife unclothed in the woods. Other paintings demonstrate how German Expressionists like Franz Marc and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and French Cubists like Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes applied new styles to the antique theme. For all its imperfections the exhibition presents something worth pondering. Until humans find a way to get along with each other and with nature, Arcadia will remain a beckoning, tantalizing figment of the collective imagination. "Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia" continues through Sept. 3 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street, (215) 763-8100, philamuseum.org.