Matisse de Resistance : N.Y. Exhibit Is Masterstroke of Tour for Newport Harbor Supporters

It wasn’t easy giving an art lecture aboard the noisy charter bus that rumbled down Fifth Avenue on a sun-dappled wintry morning.

But after two days of guiding Orange County art buffs on a tour of Manhattan’s contemporary art scene, Bruce Guenther was used to it. And so was his audience.

“Matisse redefined how we understand color in painting,” the chief curator of the Newport Harbor Art Museum said as the bus inched in traffic toward the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street.

Tour-goers, Newport Harbor Art Museum activists all, strained to hear Guenther’s words. This was the exhibit--”Henri Matisse: A Retrospective”--that had lured them to the Big Apple. This was New York’s hottest ticket. And this , advised the country’s art cognoscenti, was the never-before show that represented the unprecedented cooperation of museums in Russia, Western Europe and the United States. The exhibit features 275 of Matisse’s most important paintings and 125 of his sculptures, drawings, prints and paper cutouts.

“Before Matisse,” Guenther continued, balancing himself as he stood before the group, “color in painting had been about reporting--recording a green tree against a blue sky. He turned that upside down, gave us a pink sky and an orange tree, for example, and our world was never the same.”

Sunday’s MOMA tour was the culmination of the activity-crammed jaunt organized by Guenther and offered to the Founders support group of the museum. Tour-goers paid from $1,375 to $1,725 (single occupancy) for three nights at the tony Mayfair Regent hotel on Park Avenue at 65th Street (home of Manhattan’s chic Le Cirque restaurant). Suites decorated with red roses and fruit baskets awaited each guest.

The itinerary included a Friday excursion to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to view an exhibit by Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte (“much of our commercial advertising and our world has been shaped by this quiet man’s vision,” Guenther explained) and a behind-the-scenes tour of the restored and expanded Guggenheim Museum--originally designed by Frank Lloyd Wright--and its exhibit, “The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932.”

A highlight at the Guggenheim was the chance for the group to view Central Park--its forest of trees a carpet of ruby and gold hues--from the museum roof.

A tour of a privately owned townhouse--studded with contemporary art--was next on the agenda. Accompanied by her black poodle, Lois Plehn escorted the group on a leisurely stroll through her 6,000-square-foot, five-level manor. (“She is one of New York’s Top 50 collectors,” Guenther said.)

“Isn’t this fabulous, traveling with Bruce?” asked tour-goer Gloria Hassett, a member of the Visionaries board. “I could see the whole world like this.”

Just what the museum has in mind. “The museum hopes our art tours will help our supporters bond, establish a kinship,” Guenther explained during the flight to New York. “And, after seeing these historic retrospectives, they will recognize something of the world today they didn’t know they owed to art.”

On Friday night, tour-goers, who included Joan Beall--president of the museum’s board of trustee--dressed in evening finery and rode cabs to Rockefeller Center, where they dined at Rainbow and Stars, a 65th-floor cabaret featuring performances by singers Ann Blyth and Bill Hayes. (Immediately next door is the romantic old Rainbow Room, its chandelier-lit space jammed with the dancing-cheek-to-cheek set.)

On the menu, besides a heart-stopping, 180-degree view of Manhattan: choices of grilled lamb chops, swordfish and New Guinea hen and desserts including tira misu (served within a crown of ladyfingers stuck with a lightning bolt of sugar) and a hunk of chocolate pave cake presented in a pool of Grand Marnier sauce.

Saturday was synonymous with SoHo. After the group took tour after tour of the area’s avant-garde galleries, they attended the opening of the new Charles Cowles’ loft at 84 Mercer St. “It has no name ,” sniffed Cowles, one of Manhattan’s more respected gallery owners.

Here, Guenther and museum supporters schmoozed with the likes of William Lieberman, chief curator of 20th-Century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, artist Alex Katz, and Lenore Tawney, 84, doyenne of American sculptural textiles.

Later in the evening, several members of the group--Layne Matthess, Gloria and Howard Hassett, museum board member Margaret Sprague, and Alison (president of the Founders) and Bud Frenzel--dined at Lotos, a very French and very private restaurant/hotel established by Mark Twain in 1870. Among the glitterati on its roster: the late Leonard Bernstein, Jessica Tandy, James Michener, Richard Nixon and Beverly Sills.

Of course the post-tour talk has been about Matisse: “The retrospective was a culmination of all of the times I have seen his work,” said Matthess, wife of Jack Matthess, once vice president and manager of Saks Fifth Avenue on the West Coast (Jack Matthess also brought the first Chanel boutique--the one in Beverly Hills--to California.) “It was beautifully presented.”

Said Gloria Hassett, a painter: “I am in utter awe of the retrospective. I know it’s going to significantly influence my life and my paintings.”

Guenther summed it up this way: “The exhibit flowed along so beautifully you felt like you were experiencing the life of the studio, the vision of Matisse.

“The pleasure of his life came through. And it adds to the pleasure of our own.”