THE SEQUEL SYNDROME IN MONTREAL

The cultural imperatives up here this summer are two art exhibitions that are both less and more than they seem.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts hosts “Picasso--Meeting in Montreal” through Oct. 10. Meantime, over on Ile Notre-Dame, “Ramses II” holds forth through Sept. 29 in the Palais de la Civilisation. Tickets are marketed through Ticketron and Teletron. Hanging banners on Rue St. Catherine triumphally trumpet the shows. Crowds are thick and enthusiastic. Local newspapers carry fervent letters to the editor. (Evidently the sport of denouncing Picasso as either a charlatan or avatar of dangerous modern subjectivity has lost none of its charm a dozen years after his death.)

Everybody appears to be having too fine a time enjoying the bustle of events to notice a slightly tinny ring emanating from the galleries. It’s a kind of invisible hum. Is it my imagination, or an annoying ringing in the ears that nobody else can hear? After all, these are certainly exhibitions of more than routine interest.

The Picasso show includes some 80 substantial paintings belonging to his widow, Jacqueline. Most have never before been publicly exhibited. Another 80 objects celebrate the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II, whose colossal statues to himself are part of every literate person’s mental baggage, if not part of this show. Objects that are on view range in character from occult magnificence to exquisite intimacy and are bound to be of some interest.

So what’s the problem? There probably isn’t a problem. Ignore it and it will go away. . . .

It didn’t go away. It got stronger and clearer and became the unmistakable shrill skreigh of shameless hype. Hype lacks dignity. Hype blunts delicate aesthetic and educational nuances. Hype is the handmaiden of the corrupt muse that has transformed art exhibitions into public spectacles, circuses for the slightly snobbish and status symbols for sponsors.

“Ramses” is the worst of the pair. It begins with two strikes against it because it is such a transparent attempt to repeat the blockbuster success of the “Treasures of Tutankhamun” phenomenon that launched the whole sorry glittering mess.

Things only slump further as one realizes the site of the exhibition is what is left of “Expo ‘67,” the financially disastrous World’s Fair that nearly bankrupted Montreal. What could create worse karma than putting the ruins of an ancient civilization inside the ruins of a modern one with its skeletal globular buildings and deserted pavilions of the future?

The Palais de la Civilization is in a cavernous sci-fi wedding cake style about as hospitable to art as a 747 hangar. Its spaces gobble up two-ton Egyptian granite statues like a dragon eating after-dinner mints.

Well, that was a tasty little morsel. Got any more? That gold jewelry looks good. Crunch. Yum.

A good designer could have smoothed out insoluble problems by closing off an area that admits that this exhibition is a worthwhile, medium-size treasure trove with a few very good large pieces, like the magisterial Horus guarding the child pharaoh, four very fresh painted sarcophagus lids and a pink granite monolith of Ramses with wonderfully liquid volumes.

Small objects on hand are even better. A simple plumb-bob level in the form of a square has the magic of the best modern art. A pair of immense earrings reminds us of the boggling grandiosity (and discomfort) of ancient ceremonial adornment. A carved box handle in the form of a swimming nude girl is as elegant a piece of innocent lyric eroticism as longing ever concocted.

The material cries out for intimate jewel-box presentation. The show has opted for a combination of operatic impressiveness and crowd-pleasing special effects. You keep thinking of “Aida” at the Baths of Caracalla. Here, real camels and elephants are substituted by plywood obelisks, a fake tomb made of photo blow-ups of wall paintings and such like theatrical frummery. The good stuff is finally so diluted that we are left with an impression of self-centered bombast equalled only by the old pharaoh himself.

All together now, kiddies, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. . . .”

The Picasso exhibition, by contrast, is hung in perfectly sensible (if chronologically eccentric) fashion at the museum. It is possible to view the work thoroughly even on the busiest Sunday afternoons by a clever combination of persistence, peeking between elbows, tip-toeing above shoulders and pretending to drop your free folder to take in the lower bits between peoples legs. It is also tactically useful to note that people with audio guides tend to coagulate around certain paintings leaving you free to look at the rest.

Performance of this polite rain dance reveals a group of paintings of remarkable freshness. The sensation balances between a hope they represent a taste for crispness on Mme. Picasso’s part and a suspicion that the maestro may have been inclined to palm off unfinished pictures on her. A significant number--such as representions of a dog and a rooster--are little more than gray, monochrome, line-and-wash renderings that look like the opening moves on pictures than never got any further. One has the choice of finding them interesting insights into a great painter’s attack or disappointingly thin.

If the latter conclusion is reached, there are compensations. There are nice little oddities, such as a dove painted by Picasso’s teacher-father, and one of his own precocious demonstrations, a very solid academic oil study of “The Flight Into Egypt” done when he was 14 years old. There’s a blue period nude, a dazzling trio of bullfight-theme pictures and a tour-de-force 1964 “Jacqueline Seated With Her Cat.” In it, he moves effortlessly from a Cubist body to a classical head and throws in an Expressionist kitty for laughs.

It may just be impossible to do a bad Picasso exhibition. The man was such a phenomenon, a pictorial genius with more moods than a Colette heroine, more insight than Svengali and more bratty choler than Rollo the Rich Kid. Looking, you can’t decide whether to be more amazed at his technical command or his temperamental range. One minute he’s this delicate sentimentalist painting his son as Pierrot, the next he’s mad old Lear having a tantrum over age and impotence.

All that given, the closest thing this show offers to a new insight is the whiff of a hint that Picasso may have done something he is never suspected of doing. It looks like, just maybe, the old boy occasionally worried about other artists even after he was the undisputed King of the Hill. Some late pictures suggest he couldn’t resist the urge to prove he could beat Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon at their own games. For good measure, he tossed some Bronx cheers in the direction of the Minimalist and Pop artists. Maybe.

But truth to tell, these unseen Picassos inspire nothing beyond routine (if scarely insignificant) admiration. The show balances its interesting offbeatness with gaping holes in the Cubist period and scarely a great painting from any time.

Finally, the Montreal exhibitions make a cosmopolitan city of 3 million souls look a bit provincial. The shows not only succumb to the extravaganza syndrome, they try to repeat previous successes. May St. Catherine preserve us, the museum world is now spawning sequels, just like Hollywood.