The press previews for Seattle Art Museum exhibitions are a joy. A small group of local and national writers is led around the exhibition by SAM director Mimi Gates and a small group of curators and experts, most of whom have lived with the art long enough to become ... conversational with it. They don't talk about the pieces with the dry, academic detachment they reserve for the audio tour; they speak of them as old friends, highlighting their eccentricities and accentuating their positives.

That was the case when I previewed "Inspiring Impressionism," a fascinating show of Impressionist art and the works that inspired their creation. Director Gates, Deputy Director for Art Chiyo Ishikawa, exhibition co-curator Ann Dumas and Seattle artist Jeffry Mitchell led us through the galleries, chatting up the press and the paintings with a loose and informal air.

At the end of the tour I realized that I had a better appreciation of the Impressionists than I'd ever had before. The paintings and sketches -- many of which have never traveled to SAM before now -- are empirically gorgeous, and the way "Inspiring Impressionism" places them in a historical and artistic context gives you a real sense of what Manet, Degas, Cassatt, Renoir, Cezanne and the like had hoped to accomplish. They respected the masters who had come before them and copied their styles and themes, but gave them more color, more light, more air.

The good news is that you can have the same experience I did. With this exhibition, SAM introduces a cell phone audio tour hosted by Gates, Ishikawa and Mitchell, plus Gary Faigin, the artistic director at the Gage Academy of Art, and artists Margie Livingston and Joseph Park. You simply dial a central number, enter the extension number above the pieces you're interested in and listen to those aforementioned experts having an ongoing conversation about the work.

It's an absolute delight. The audio tour is witty, freewheeling and packed with astute observances. Mitchell's recorded comments on Alfred Sisley's "The Pike" are truly left-field -- would you have ever seen the sky in the scales of that dead fish? -- and are so extemporaneous that Mitchell, when asked by Ishikawa to repeat himself during the press tour, didn't even remember making them. She had to whisper them to him.

"Inspiring Impressionism" pulls a nice trick by taking the past and comparing it to the more distant past. Even comparative dummies -- cough, cough -- can see how the Impressionists bent and broke the rules. It's a testament to SAM's mission that the exhibition begins and ends in a gallery of "Fresh Impressionism" -- pieces by several artists (including Mitchell) that take those re-forged rules and joyfully bend them again. It's a fitting overture and coda to an exhibition that is rife with joy, both painted and elocuted.

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