Getty Pulls Statue From Display : Art: New doubts surface over authenticity of the Malibu museum’s prized Greek work, “Kouros.”

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu has removed its prized Greek “Kouros” for study because of new doubts about the authenticity of the statue.

The 6-foot, 8-inch-tall marble sculpture of a young man, thought to date from the 6th Century B.C., is one of the museum’s three most celebrated Greek antiquities, along with a monumental marble “Aphrodite” and a bronze “Victorious Athlete.”

The museum in Malibu purchased the “Kouros”--reportedly for more than $6 million--in 1985 after 14 months of study and put it on view in 1986 after additional study and conservation at the Getty. But a recent discovery of a marble torso that is generally regarded as a forgery or a modern copy has raised new questions about the Getty statue.

The torso, which came to the museum’s attention in April, depicts only part of a male nude figure and it differs in surface and general appearance, but it is made of similar marble, “possibly from the same quarry” and it contains “subtle similarities of style and detail,” Getty curator Marion True said in a prepared statement Friday.

The museum has purchased the torso from an unidentified private collector who brought it to True’s attention. The “Kouros” was removed from the antiquities gallery on Friday, and the two pieces will be studied during the next several months in the museum’s conservation laboratory, museum director John Walsh said in a telephone interview.

“Naturally, we will be very disappointed if our new studies lead to the conclusion that the museum’s ‘Kouros’ is not an authentic work,” Walsh said, “but it’s most important that we try to discover the truth about the two statues.

“These cases arise in the field, and they occur at this museum as they do in other museums that collect antiquities. The main thing is to determine the truth and make it known,” he said.

The situation would seem to be an embarrassment to the wealthy museum, which is often in the news, but Walsh said the “Kouros” affair is more of “a puzzle, though a very prominent puzzle.”

Another, less-prominent sculpture in the Getty’s collection--a marble “Head of Achilles,” once thought to be the work of 4th-Century B.C. Greek master Skopus--was discovered to be a modern copy two years ago.

Walsh said the “Kouros” always has presented puzzling questions for the museum. Critics have commented on the statue’s archaic-style smile and the fact that its stylized hair, eyes and hands contrast with more realistic feet and flesh around the mouth.

In a study published by the museum, True acknowledged that the “Kouros” had “unusual stylistic features,” Walsh said. Some anatomical forms on the marble appear old-fashioned while others are more up-to-date, he said.

“That’s something that has to be explained. Marion weighed the possibility that it might be a forgery on the one hand or that it was done in a slightly provincial style on the other” and decided in favor of the latter interpretation, Walsh said.

Her conclusion was supported by scientific findings that the crust on the surface of the stone had occurred naturally over time and had not been induced by a forger. Before the sculpture was installed in the museum’s gallery, Stanley Margolis, a geochemist from UC Davis, studied the surface of the marble and Jerry Podany, head of the Getty’s antiquities conservation laboratory, ran tests determining that the marble had come from a quarry on the Island of Thasos.

But the torso has sufficient similarities in the execution of the anatomy to cause the museum to rethink its earlier conclusions, Walsh said. He declined to comment on the museum’s recourse if the “Kouros” is proven to be a fake. “That would be between us and the seller,” he said. The museum bought the statue at an undisclosed price from a private collector through an unidentified Swiss dealer.

When the “Kouros” was acquired by the museum, it was lauded as an extremely rare acquisition. A person with close ties to the museum was quoted in 1987 as saying that the Getty paid more than $6 million for the statue. Only about a dozen complete examples of “Kouros” figures are known to exist among about 250 fragmentary works around the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is the only other American museum that has a complete “Kouros” in its collection. The Met bought its statue in 1932, the last time a “Kouros” had come on the market before the Getty made its 1985 purchase.

Thomas Hoving, former director of the Met, editor of Connoisseur magazine and a frequent critic of the Getty, charged that the statue was a fake at the time of the Getty’s purchase. He based his argument on the opinion of Giuseppe Cellini, a Roman conservator, who thought the “Kouros” was an entirely different statue from the one the Getty actually bought. Subsequently, other scholars have expressed doubts about the piece, but “the weight of opinion was in favor of authenticity,” Walsh said.