ART REVIEW : Russian Treasures : Art: Faberge’s fabulous eggs highlight a trove of Soviet art that includes photos at Balboa Park’s Museum of Photographic Arts and “Posters of the Soviet Union” at La Jolla’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Well, the town laid an egg. How can that be?

To the occasional visitor, San Diego looks vibrant these days. Its once-blighted downtown bustles with amenities. It has all the hallmarks of a mini-metropolis. The community has such an understandable case of self-afflatus it is throwing itself an arts festival, subtitled “Treasures of the Soviet Union.” So far, reviewers of musical and theatrical events have been impressed. It was time to go down and sample the festival’s art exhibitions.

Yup, the town laid an egg.

Was it because Mayor Maureen O’Connor played too much of the art czar in organizing the fest as some locals are grumbling?

Actually, if you’re going to be a czar, a Soviet arts celebration seems the time to do it. It wasn’t that.

San Diego laid an egg to prove that laying an egg is not always a bad thing. Actually, it gently laid 27 eggs in the galleries of the San Diego Museum of Art. The orbs are encased in jade, encrusted with diamonds and festooned with pearls. Diamonds are a pearl’s best friend.

They are, of course, those rare baubles that make you wonder for once if the word fabulous is not an understatement. They are the imperial Easter eggs fashioned for the last two Russian czars by Peter Carl Faberge from the 1880s to 1917, when the Bolsheviks put an end to the fun.

This, due to the miracle of glasnost , is the first time the eggs have been allowed to wander abroad since their incarceration in the museums of the Kremlin, where even Soviet citizens could not see them for decades.

We already know what Faberge eggs look like. About five times the size of a chicken egg, they are fashioned of enough precious stuff to sink a dowager. They come with little windows that open on miniature paintings of everything from imperial pooh-bahs to vast landscapes. Kind of like painting the Grand Canyon on your fingernail.

They have themes and open up to reveal their leitmotifs. The Azova Egg is 3 1/2 inches long and contains a tiny replica of a naval cruiser complete with rigging. The Trans-Siberian Railway Egg disgorges a footlong working model of the fabled train. Ditto for the Gatchina Palace Egg. Whole dang palace right there inside. An ant in the courtyard would look like a large horse.

We already know what we think about Faberge eggs. If we are pure aesthetes, they are simply the most intricate, clever, goggling examples of sumptuous objets d’art ever to come out of a westernized court. If we are political idealists, they are symbols of oppressive royal decadence taunting overthrow by the downtrodden.

We may even think we already know how we feel about the famous ova--superficial spawn of self-indulgent silliness. One look, however, and you don’t much care whether or not they are art in the most exalted sense. One look and you are seduced. The eggs were made to give pleasure and charm an essentially childlike part of the mind that believes in diamond trees and people the size of peanuts. It works every time, from the tiny golden swans to the near-invisible rock-crystal egg with a peacock inside.

If the adult part of the mind gets loose, it may see a tragic scenario as the eggs’ designs move from sweet early ones celebrating spring flowers to a late example where a steely egg looks like a bomb mounted on cannon shells.

Judging from the length of the lines and the rapt attention of visitors, it appears that the show (through Jan. 7) is a veritable popular hit. Potential visitors would be well advised to call ahead--(619) 232-7931--for admissions information. Every time I try, the line is busy.

Other exhibitions are bound to be less dazzling, but there is something to be learned from the ensemble. There is radical contrast between the Byzantine Faberge tchotchkies and an exhibition of contemporary Soviet photography across the Balboa Park arcade in the Museum of Photographic Arts (to Nov. 19).

Titled “An Insight Into Contemporary Soviet Photography; 1969-88,” it was organized in Paris and includes some 150 images by 39 photographers. At a glance, it looks much like an American show of our scruffier sort of street artist, from Robert Frank to Diane Arbus. There is even one artist--Evgueni Ioufit--who appears to be hip to Cindy Sherman. Like her, he dresses up for his own pictures, but the result are funkier and more authentically haunted.

If these shows do anything, they should shake up any lingering middle-class assumptions that, really, the Soviets are just like us. Their art says they are not.

These photographs show the Soviet Union as a vast, bleak land roamed by a voracious and oppressive minotaur. The monster is industrialization in works like those of Aurimas Strumila, who photographs factory funnels like predatory dinosaurs.

Soviet space is a yawning emptiness, so that a man caught standing in Red Square by Alexandre Lapin is so isolated he makes Sartre’s Existentialism downright cozy.

Maybe it’s because the photographers tend to be young, but most of the people pictured are kids who look like American hippies of the ‘60s--except the Soviets didn’t have to don their weird outfits as costumes. It’s the way they dress.

We know that pictures of older Russians give them immense leathery character and the bulk of endurance, but the young ones look like frail souls about to leave their skinny bodies in the gutter. Especially in pictures by Andrei Biezoukladnikov. His little half-nude tomboy Lolita is so fumingly indifferent you know she cares a lot. Igor Moukin’s shot of a satanic street dandy lurking tensely on a corner finds him lost in some Dostoevskian fantasy.

Literature tells us about Soviet suffering, soul and poetry. These pictures give us a gut sense of the emptiness that compounds it. Soviets are traditionally seen as serious and philosophical, even ponderous. Chekhov shows us they are also subtle and funny, as does “Posters of the Soviet Union” up the road at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art (to Jan. 7). Not a heavyweight show and lacking a catalogue, it nonetheless fills a couple of galleries with posters in the well-designed European style familiar in the old Graphis magazine. Influenced by everything from turn-of-the-century Paris to the Russian avant-garde, the works are not only visually striking but engaging for what they tell us about the way Soviet graphics communicate.

A mordant sheet by K. Ivanov shows simplified silhouettes of figures eaten to Swiss cheese by a sputtering red blob. The motto--very small--is “AIDS Attacks.” Far too oblique for an American design.

We might get an environmental exhortation by I. Maystrovskiy showing a dragon made of belching factories with the legs of bureaucrats, but there seems to be a double message here--a criticism of The System. Much of the work is uneasy with internal contradiction, double-entendres, asides and defensive pessimism. The slogan of a work by M. Mikrtchan announces “Every Student Is an Individual,” but the image makes the students into identical teeth in a comb.

Curious.

Contemporary art buffs will surely want to start their festival tour with a Soviet show that is not even officially part of the celebration. It is UC San Diego’s presentation of the emigre art team know as Komar and Melamid. Widely known as they are in art circles these days, they have never had an exhibition in these parts.

The show (to Dec. 10) is a pleasant surprise. Reproductions of their best-known works show Vitaly Komar and Alexandre Melamid as clowns camping on the style of Soviet Realism they learned back home. Such images as a statuesque Stalin with a muse kneeling at his feet appear as cultural one-liners, trying to get contemporary mileage out of a boring, academic style.

By contrast, the 30 works here are loose, conceptual and full of affection, accompanied by a lot of winks, nods and muffled guffaws.

Typically, they are made up of three or four joined canvases each in a different style suggesting a sly theme. They read best from right to left. “I Love NY” (with a heart for the “love”) starts with a bag emblazoned with the motto and stuffed with trash. The next image is a nude with a brown bag over her head, followed by a photographically reversed image of the N.Y. logotype. Despite its downer colors, the work has energy and bristles with sotto voce asides including everything from dirty jokes to an implication that American society can be--in its way--just as oppressive as the U.S.S.R.

The boys appear like a couple of puppies into everything from vintage kid photos to John Cage, but while they are romping around they’re also deflating all the forbidden icons: politics, religion and sex. One work suggests that all three are forms of seduction and all seduction is propaganda. “A Bright and Lofty Goal” shows ideology as a tacky triple ceiling fixture with two bulbs burned out being saluted by a red-blob paranoid figure in the style of Jon Borofsky.

“Portrait of Kafka” juxtaposes a comic priest, a girl with a sexy gape and a painted plastic bag. It cocks an eyebrow at the links between repression, eroticism and religion.

After a few hints that Stalin was a pervert, they move on to their recent series based on a depressed New Jersey town, “Bergen Point Brass Foundry.” The signature picture is a loosely painted image of molten metal being poured by workmen. The use of metallic backgrounds makes--it seems to me--some Marxist commentary about wealth and means of production, but what comes across is the artists’ immense affection for the beat-up town and its regular-guy inhabitants.

If you are fussy about the way art is made, you may not be utterly enthusiastic about Komar and Melamid, but you can’t help liking the spirit of the art.

In the end, what unites these divers shows is the capacity of the Soviet artist to identify with his subject. The combination of realism and sympathy allows the viewer access to the same spirit, so the work has a quality conspicuously lacking in our contemporary art. All of it--even the bedizened eggs--has soul.