‘AMASIS,’ ‘EBLA’: MUSEUMS GET BACK TO BASICS

American museums are, today, places of popular entertainment producing extravagant exhibitions that draw crowds so large the audience winds up viewing each other instead of the art. This Blockbuster Syndrome creates a lot of pious dissension among critics who nonetheless chase after the flashy shows with all the fervor of paparazzi in pursuit of Hollywood’s latest sex symbol.

The truth is that thus far the Exhibitiomania epoch inaugurated by the “Treasures of Tutankamun” in 1978 has probably produced more worthwhile exhibitions than authentic clinkers. For every overblown “The Search for Alexander” there have been a half dozen spectaculars that were nonetheless enriching for being grand. The recent “Treasure Houses of Britain” at the National Gallery, for example, was as fine as it was precisely because it was sweeping and complex.

All the same the Blockbuster Syndrome creates a climate for authentic concern about the role of the art museum. These institutions traditionally hold their cachet not just as places of amusement and distraction but as cloisters for contemplation and education.

This role tends to blur in an ambiance where exhibitions are promoted for their glitter-and-twinkle factor. People develop a mind-set that expects even the most sober scholarly exercise to goggle them with opulence or uniqueness. They are let down when they confront an obdurate mass of material that demands that they think hard, feel generously and continue to work on the problem after they get home.

What? You mean going to the museum is not like going to Chianti for dinner?

Not exactly.

There are currently a couple of exhibitions in town that bear on the question of the Blockbuster Syndrome not because they are all bells and whistles, but rather the opposite. “The Amasis Painter and His World” at the County Museum of Art through next Sunday concerns vase painting in 6th-Century Greece. “Ebla to Damascus” at the Natural History Museum to June 1 is a strew of ancient art from Syria.

Anybody conditioned by the distractions of the treasures exhibition might be forgiven for taking one look at each and turning--with a twinge of cultural guilt--toward something more immediately amusing.

“Oh well yes. Greek pots. ‘Oh thou still unravished bride of quietness.’ Keats and all that. Maybe I’ll come back later.”

There is little about these works that imparts an obvious jolt. In fact, their graceful shapes do rather the opposite. They are calm in their slow, sighing curves and confident colors of muted orange and black. Painted surfaces are so beautifully integrated to the shape of the vessels that it takes a minute to realize that they have a rich life of their own.

“Well that’s nice but a pot is a pot. Everybody knows that ceramics are a secondary applied art.”

Maybe in some epochs, but in ancient Greece ceramics attracted the finest artists and their work is all we have left of Grecian pictorial art. They urned our respect (sorry). These Amphorai, Oinochoai, Lekythoi and other vessels are our only means of gaining an idea of the vigor and inventiveness of the Greek painters.

Like all ancient artists the Amasis painter is swathed in the mystery of time. Scholars are not sure if he was both the potter and painter of his works but they are reasonably sure he had a long career--nearly 50 years--in Athens where he worked from 560 to 514 BC. Comparison with others of his time ranks him among the finest of Attic artists, those pre-classical pioneers who brought Greek art out of patterned design into the open air of observed nature.

The Amasis painter, with his silhouetted black figures, seems to have lived largely in myth tempered by enough observation to bring his work intensity and animation. He drew warriors and gods in a profiled, cut-out way that has the clarity of Egyptian art set free to run and fight at will. The distinguished scholar Dietrich von Bothmer, who selected the 64 works on view, says that Amasis was more interested in art than subject matter, and that is clear. But he welded art to subject seamlessly. A pair of satyrs plop happily down in a sexed-up, tipsy stupor. If Amasis needed to solve a problem in an unconventional way he does so boldly, as in an Oinochoe from the British Museum, where he suddenly depicts a chariot and four horses in frontal pose.

Amasis was sweet, barbaric and full of high spirits. His art helps us along to insight--like Matisses--with sheer aesthetic lift. But it is the kind of show that is clearly not complete in itself. If we are not somehow inspired to go home and curl up with the catalogue we have missed the point, that delectation should act as inspiration for education and vice versa.

Among the lurking shortfalls of the treasures exhibitions is precisely that they make art so attractive. Exhibition design and cleaning techniques in the art museum have reached such a peak of sophistication that the art takes on a boffo theatrical glow when it is on stage and cunningly lit. When seen in ordinary illumination in a storeroom, it tends to look a little tatty, like an actor in his dressing room.

And, in their Baroque fashion, corporate spectaculars like, say, the Met’s “Liechtenstein, the Princely Collections” offer such a delicious variety of stuff from paintings to armor to porcelain and carriages that important distinctions between differing kinds of aesthetic vectors are muddled and everything plays on the same musical comedy wavelength.

Obviously the audience can be trusted to make certain discriminations for itself, but “Ebla to Damascus” over at the Museum of Natural History involves one of the classic dilemmas of the exhibition world. Is it an art show or an archeological demonstration? The exhibition announces that it is both. The viewer gives himself a headache trying to make up his mind.

Given the Blockbuster Syndrome mind-set almost everything is wrong with “Ebla.” It is set up like a conventional archeological demonstration, perfectly neat and orderly but missing its attempt at theatrical panache. Although it claims to be “historically and archeologically more important than the King Tut display” in the exhibition brochure, it is utterly lacking in Tut’s obvious charm, coherence and visual blandishment. “Ebla” uses some 300 objects to cover 10,000 years of history in one of those volatile patches of the planet that passed from the Neolithic to the styles of the Ancient Near East to Hellenic, Byzantine and, since the 7th Century AD, Islamic culture. Exhibitions about such crossroads cultures are always tough to digest, but how are we to make sense of this cornucopia of potsherds and cylinder seals, necklaces and carved screens statuary and cuneiform tablets?

Education to the rescue.

The truth is that archeology and art are inextricably twined and part of the point of looking at any art is to deepen our understanding of the civilization that produced it. If we have trouble understanding the Middle East in today’s industrialized world, the simple realization of the age and profoundly layered quality of the culture is a revelation in itself. No wonder they are so conservative.

And the serious aesthete does not go begging. There are textbook-classic types such as the Akkadian-period depiction of Anzu the Lion-headed eagle in gold and lapis. A statue of Shibum, surveyor of the land, pops right out of the old college survey section on the Tigris-Euphrates area with his huge eyes and bulbous body.

The familiar ferocious good looks of the Assyrians turn up painted on a piece of plaster wall from Aleppo and the same period yields the masterpiece of the show, an ivory carving of a pair of regal Sphinxes from Hadatu, the Assyrian capital in Syria.

Predictably we are treated to those hybrid styles that emerge in crossroads cultures. Native handling of Roman styles in Palmyra turned up a wonderfully etherealized form of realistic tomb carving. Other Roman/native overlays produced fantasy-edged art that recalls the later art of the Mexican colonial period.

The best thing about the Amasis and Ebla exhibitions is their reminder that the fun of art is not the fun of passive entertainment. Art needs a bit of effort and pays off with a broader scan of the world and a deeper vision of the soul.