Anatomy of an Art Discovery : Sculpture: The latest coup by the Getty Museum is its acquisition of a bronze by Dutch sculptor Adriaen de Vries. The piece was rescued from an auction of garden statuary.

The latest star in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum is neither a prime painting by Vincent van Gogh nor a monumental Greek sculpture of Aphrodite, but it’s very big news in the art world. “Male Figure,” the Getty’s new bronze by Dutch sculptor Adriaen de Vries,caused a sensation last winter when it was rescued from an auction of ordinary garden statuary and it subsequently commanded the whopping price of $10.7 million, a record auction price for sculpture.

The 30-inch-tall nude figure had languished in the English country garden of an unidentified elderly gentleman who bought it around 1950. He consigned it to a sale of garden sculpture in Sussex, at an estimated value of $2,000 to $3,000. Elizabeth Wilson, Sotheby’s sculpture specialist, spotted the valuable piece in the auction catalogue and transferred it to a much more distinguished sale in London. Sotheby’s trumpeted the news and the art world watched when London dealer Cyril Humphris made the winning bid at a Dec. 7 auction.

Great discovery. Record price. End of story--until this week when the Getty announced that it had quietly purchased the rescued masterpiece and had put it on display at the museum in Malibu.

What took so long? First, there was the standard six-month waiting period for an export license, required by British law for the removal of valuable artworks. (The law is intended to stem the tide of exported treasures by giving the British time to match the price paid by foreign buyers.) When the sculpture finally arrived in Malibu, it had to undergo treatment for corrosion in the museum’s conservation laboratory.

Now that “Male Figure” holds a commanding position in the museum’s grand gallery of Old Master paintings, curator Peter Fusco minces no words about the status of the new acquisition. “It’s the most important bronze from the late 15th Century through the early Baroque period to come on the market in years,” he said.

There are only four significant bronzes by De Vries in America and two of them--”Male Figure” and “Rearing Horse,” acquired a few years ago--are at the Getty. The other two are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Fusco said.

De Vries, who was born in the Hague in 1545, studied with Florentine master sculptor Giambologna and became court sculptor to Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. That city was once the major repository of De Vries work, but about 200 of his bronzes were taken to Sweden as war booty in 1660 and they remain there, Fusco said.

“Male Figure” depicts a muscular nude juggler at a precarious moment. Holding juggler’s plates--one right side up and the other upside down, with the help of centrifugal force--the agile figure stands on his left foot while pumping bellows with his right foot. The pose was inspired by a Hellenistic marble “Dancing Faun,” which is now at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, but the faun plays cymbals with his hands and pumps a foot organ, Fusco said.

De Vries’ version, which was executed around 1610-1615, is thought to be an allegory about balance, enacted by a figure performing a balancing act while striking a pose that stretches aesthetic concepts of balance. “The figure is extremely animated and balanced at the same time. It’s not often that you find a sculptor doing something new and doing it so consummately well,” Fusco said.

The sculpture is highly regarded for its rarity and ingenuity, but its value is heightened because it is a unique piece, like all of the artist’s bronzes. Although De Vries used the lost wax process of casting, which allows for duplicates, he did not make molds and is not known to have produced more than one of any of his works, Fusco said.

The Getty this week also announced the acquisition of another Baroque bronze, “The Abduction of Helen by Paris” by Italian artist Giovanni Francesco Susini and put it on display. The museum purchased the 1627 sculpture from a French dealer who bought it for $3.6 million at a Paris auction on April 15, 1989.

Using a subject from Homer’s “Iliad,” Susini has depicted the Trojan prince Paris kidnaping Helen, queen of Sparta--a move that led the Greeks to declare war on Troy. In the 26 3/4-inch bronze, Paris sweeps Helen off her feet and fends off another nude woman who has fallen on the ground. All serpentine lines and three-dimensional action, the dramatic sculpture shows the influence of Gianlorenzo Bernini, the leading figure of the Italian Baroque period.

The Getty’s unveiling of the De Vries and the Susini is only the latest evidence that the museum has built an astonishingly fine bronze collection in the last six years, since Fusco became the museum’s curator of sculpture and works of art. Fusco has also helped the museum to extend its decorative arts well beyond the 18th-Century French period that J. Paul Getty favored.

“We have acquired about 70 sculptures, 72 pieces of glass, 40 pieces of ceramic, 20 pieces of Italian furniture and 35 metal works including jewelry and silver,” Fusco said. The collections are not the biggest in the country, but the museum has distinguished itself “in terms of masterpiece quality,” he noted.

“We have a Frick-like collection with select groups of objects on a very high level,” Fusco said, referring to the prestigious Frick Collection in New York. The sculpture collection, which is now one of the finest in the country, includes marbles and bronzes by such major figures as Antico, Cellini, Giambologna, Bernini, Houdon and Canova.

Fusco was associate curator of European painting and sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for 10 years before coming to the Getty. He had hoped to build a collection of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes for LACMA but that proved to be too expensive, so he concentrated on later, less pricey sculpture. At the Getty he decided to go for “earlier objects rather than later ones because of their rarity. You have to grab them while you can. Also these pieces complement the County Museum of Art’s collection from later periods,” he said

“I’m very proud of our glass, maiolica (Italian Renaissance ceramics) and bronzes,” Fusco said. “Our success with sculpture was a surprise because I had no idea what would come on the market. I feel that I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had great support from (former director) Kenneth Donahue and (director) Rusty Powell when I was at the County Museum of Art and from (director) John Walsh and the board here at the Getty. Kids coming out of graduate school who want to build a collection now find that museums have been priced out of the market.”