GOING EAST.

The present sorrows of Beirut call to mind an underknown legacy of that city's last spell of ruin and its history of cosmopolitan ferment--the Dahesh Museum, a sleek institution in the I.B.M. Building, on Madison Avenue at Fifty-seventh Street, which is devoted to mostly nineteenth-century, mostly French academic art. It was envisioned for Beirut in the nineteen-seventies by the Palestinian-born Salim Moussa Achi--also known as Dr. Dahesh, which translates from the Arabic as "Dr. Wonder"--who was an enthusiast for Jean-Leon Gerome, William Adolphe Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel, and other long-devalued Salon heavyweights, casualties of modernism, and who bought masses of art by lesser academics, likely at fire-sale prices. In 1975, as civil war descended, he sold his collection to a Saudi-American family in Connecticut named Zahid. He died during a visit to New York, in 1984, at the age of seventy-five. The Zahids opened the museum, in quarters on Fifth Avenue, in 1995.

The museum's current exhibition has another timely resonance. "Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists and the Rediscovery of Egypt" memorializes the disastrous French military occupation of 1798-1801. Bringing along teams of scientists, scholars, and artists, Napoleon's folly reaped material for a twenty-three-volume opus, "Description of Egypt" (1809-1828), characterized by Edward Said, in his book "Orientalism" (1978), as "that great collective appropriation of one culture by another." Culture was all France got. The invasion faltered soon after it began, when Admiral Nelson came upon the French fleet in a sitting-duck formation near Alexandria and briskly obliterated it. French ground forces soldiered on, winning battles against a native insurgency and its Ottoman backers but losing the war. One man in three died. Survivors were returned to France in 1801. (The British seized the gem of the losers' loot: the Rosetta stone.) The campaign had no clear goal. Napoleon cited "glory."

Dr. Dahesh was the reincarnation of Christ. So he said, and Daheshists, once numerous in Lebanon, have believed it, pointing to his hundreds of purported miracles. Daheshism teaches a unity of all religions, a metaphysic of "spiritual fluids," and habitation, with more than six thousand lives for each soul, on planetary heavens and hells, Earth being the least onerous of the hell planets. Daheshists recount that, in 1947, in Azerbaijan, Dahesh was charged with being a spy and executed by firing squad. Back in Lebanon soon afterward, he explained that he had taken the precaution of substituting for his body the apparition of one of his six immortal spiritual avatars. (According to him, Jesus employed the same stratagem on Calvary, actually dying twenty years later.) Today, Daheshism has no official organization. The museum's directors and staff, when asked, have pleaded ignorance of Dr. Wonder's program for the universe. In any event, Dahesh seems not to have knitted his cult with his taste, which reflected a fashion among upper-class Middle Easterners of his time. He has proved prophetic as a collector, if in no other way (though he claimed to have predicted John F. Kennedy's assassination, among other occurrences). Lately, some French academic pictures--like a good deal of British Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian art, thanks largely to the fancies of Andrew Lloyd Webber and other epicurean celebrities--have ascended to respectability at auction, bringing dollar prices in the substantial six figures, with the odd million for a choice Gerome or Bouguereau.

The modest return of academicism is a sign of our time's spent faith in progress. The storied triumph of Impressionism over the art of the official Salons of late-nineteenth-century Paris has lost its evangelical clout. It can no longer be wielded to chasten people who enjoy the elaborately skilled, archaically styled, formulaic splendors of the old academy, with its devout ancestor worship and deluxe eroticism. Camp--the savoring of unintended ironies--is a factor. Consider Gerome's quite lovely "Napoleon in Egypt" (circa 1867-68), at the Dahesh: it depicts the soon-to-be emperor in sumptuous uniform, emitting terrific attitude, on a road lined to the horizon with mosques. It amounts to a retroactive "Mission Accomplished," given that Napoleon ...