ART REVIEW : A Burning ‘Passion’ for Ancient Art : The Getty Snares the First Public Display of One of the World’s Best Private Collections

The grandiose “treasures” exhibitions of recent memory were a lot of fun, despite critical grumbling. One essential quality they really did lack, however, was a sense of the personal. They were like sultanic elephants designed by committee. All the same, now that they’re gone we miss them and the good times they represented.

As if to both cheer us and correct the shortcomings of the past, the J. Paul Getty Museum presents an exhibition that is, hands down, the best thing of its kind we’ve seen in living memory. The sort of event the public should embrace and artniks revere, it marks the first public display of one of the world’s best private collections of ancient art from the Mediterranean world.

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“A Passion for Antiquities: Ancient Art From the Collection of Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman” encompasses more than 200 objects from ancient Etruria, Greece and Rome. Its curators are the Getty’s Marion True and Arielle Kozloff of the Cleveland Museum of Art, where the ensemble will travel after closing here.

Scholars will find its copiously illustrated, carefully annotated catalogue indispensable. Casual visitors should be delighted with an installation design revolving around themes rather than formal categories. They emphasize the human factor that created this art and inspired the Fleischmans to collect it with such a heartfelt intuitive grasp of its intrinsic meaning.

The overarching theme of all this art is our species’ striving to transcend its animal nature while retaining vitality.

The exhibition’s earliest work, a magnificent marble Cycladic “Head of an Idol,” was made about 2600 BC. It has an awe-some simplicity that evokes humankind’s earliest impulse to control the universe through rational thought. Little more than a smooth slab of marble with an inquiring nose, it is like a philosopher’s touchstone. No wonder modern artists like Brancusi were so taken with such work.

If its directness strikes anyone as esoteric, there is an endearing little “Beak Spouted Jug” nearby whose pulled-back neck evokes a small bird drinking. In a way it echoes the head’s combination of rational thought and natural observation. Looks practical too.

The whole exhibition has this quality of revelation. Gold jewelry, for example, usually attracts some of the value of the material and puts others off for the same reason. Here intricacy and artifice take the day. Earrings not 2 inches tall bear fully modeled figures of a winged woman. A pair of piping satyrs are even smaller. It’s the art that counts, but we are reminded that the special physical qualities of gold make it possible.

Objects are generally small, but it costs them no power. A section on animals includes a late Roman folding tripod whose uprights are topped with muscular horses. Their naturalism echoes exaggerated in other Hellenistic works like a Farnese-style statuette of Herakles and another of Jupiter clearly based on a Greek model.

Of the various sections, none is more enchanting and impressive than “The World of Dionysos.” The Greek god of wine and revelry was, quite logically, also the patron of the theater. Barbara Fleischman wanted to be an actress as a young woman and her sensitivity to the subject shows.

Objects here look almost unsettlingly contemporary. A Roman bronze head of an adolescent Dionysos with his long curly hair and look of longing sensuality is a physical type women swoon for to this day.

A porky little bronze thought to represent the god as an infant also suggests him as the corpulent old Falstaff buffoon he became as the Bacchus of Rome (and Disney’s “Fantasia”). But the piece is not jokey. The child’s heavily lidded eyes bespeak the price of gluttony while his open stance reminds us that the urge to revelry is always a call back to childhood.

The theater’s tolerance for the unconventional shows in the figure of a mime in drag as a goddess, a grotesque terra-cotta mask and a little comedy face worthy of a modern special-effects artist.

But the real showstopper of the section is a wine caldron that looks like something only Hollywood could have invented. The body of the vessel resembles an ancient Chinese urn run through the Arabian nights on its way to an Art Nouveau Paris Metro station. Its legs bring modern rolling casters to mind. The smiling figure of Dionysos sprouting irrationally from the object is as delightfully energized as Carpeaux’s sculpture around the Paris Opera House.

But the piece is, in fact, a unique 1st Century BC object from the much-maligned Roman Hellenistic period. Just goes to show that our culture is not the first to be gleefully eclectic.

The section is followed by an engaging nook of fantastic animals such as griffins and sirens. There are more sober presentations such as a grouping of related objects from the Roman provinces, but by then you’ve already started to absorb the graceful enthusiasms and eye for emotional authenticity that is the essence of this rare collection.

* J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu; to Jan. 15, closed Mondays, advance parking reservations required, (310) 458-2003.