ART REVIEW : Drawings by Tiepolo: Vividly Contradictory : The 24 works at the Getty Museum by the great 18th-Century Venetian fresco painter are from the Met’s extensive holdings of the artist’s work, unsurpassed in the U.S.

During the past dozen years, the J. Paul Getty Museum has assembled an increasingly distinguished collection of Old Master and 19th-Century European drawings. Typically, selections from the array of what now adds up to several hundred sheets are on view in a small, comfortable, dimly lit gallery at the Malibu museum.

Currently, however, that room holds something else: a lovely group of 24 drawings by the great 18th-Century Venetian fresco painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696--1770), which are not owned by the museum. More than a decade has passed since the last loan exhibition of drawings was held at the Getty.

“Drawings by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo From the Metropolitan Museum of Art” comprises one-half of an exchange with New York’s venerable 5th Avenue treasure house. A show selected from the Getty’s drawing collection will go on view at the Met later this month, before traveling to London’s Royal Academy in the fall; the Tiepolo sheets are from the Met’s extensive holdings of the artist’s work, which are unsurpassed in the United States.

In fact, all but one of the Tiepolo drawings are from the Met’s celebrated 1937 acquisition of 49 drawings and four oil sketches from the renowned collection of the Marquis de Biron. They include sketches for specific ceiling paintings and frescoes, studies for prints, drawings most likely intended as independent works of art and one sheet packed with quick, rudimentary figure studies. These last record an artist engrossed in working out pictorial ideas in a ruminative, exploratory way.

Although the show’s drawings date from most all periods of Tiepolo’s life, most are executed in the rapid ink line and pale wash of brown color that were the artist’s way of suggesting physical bodies acting within atmospheric space. There’s a wonderfully vivid, contradictory sense to such sketches.

They seek to give weight, heft and tangibility to such mythological figures as Venus or Time or Apollo, while simultaneously rendering the insubstantial, light-filled froth of condensed water vapor that is the actual cloud on which the figure inevitably is seated.

A brilliant interior decorator astride an age that long predates interior decoration’s modern (and foolish) demotion to the ranks of amusing trivia, Tiepolo expanded on the precedent of his Venetian colleague Paolo Veronese. Tiepolo’s frescoes, and especially his ceiling decorations for elaborate palace chambers, begin with the actual architecture of a room, then slide surreptitiously into illusionistic mimicry of the architecture; finally, they blow off the roof to visually open up the interior to symphonic scenes of cavorting gods in heaven.

Standing in the famous salon of the Prince-Bishop’s Palace at Wurzburg--a sort of High Rococo Cinerama Dome--you become a privileged spectator for whom a splendid, aristocratically sanctioned pageant of history unfolds. Tiepolo’s rendering of an infinite and expansive universe has as its dramatic focal point nothing less than your own bedazzled eye.

In many of the drawings, Tiepolo works out the extraordinary shifts in otherwise mundane perspective that such schemes require. He shows, for instance, Apollo driving his chariot onward through the sky, as it would be seen from below by a mere mortal.

A few lines of black chalk create Apollo’s pinwheel-like thrust, which is further outlined and elaborated in brown ink; fluid washes of pale brown and puddled shadows of dark brown yield contrapuntal drama, since the sheet is otherwise mostly white paper.

Tiepolo’s extraordinary gifts as a draftsman are in abundant evidence early on, in two highly finished drawings from the 1730s. The spectacular “Beheading of Two Male Saints” and the almost equally remarkable “Beheading of a Male and a Female Saint” are different in manner than most everything else in the show; however, they demonstrate a complexity of spatial organization that formed the firm foundation for the artist’s subsequent work.

You have to peer at “Beheading of Two Male Saints” for a while before you can even sort out the action. It’s jam-packed with figures--15 of them, from those at the left idly watching the gruesome martyrdom from the foreground plane, to those gleefully surrounding the executioner, who holds a freshly severed head aloft.

When you finally locate the body of the beheaded saint--he’s just below center, his rump ignominiously thrust in your face, his corpse prayed over by the second, and soon-to-be-decapitated, saint--the compositional clarity begins to emerge. The dark, downcast eye of the saint who is about to meet his Maker marks the exact center of the page, while the rest of the drawing snaps into place as an intricate network of horizontal, vertical and diagonal planes.

Tiepolo exploits some remarkable devices. The stagelike setting on a staircase is compressed and shallow, but the clever use of a dark, grated window below the scene and a light-filled grated window above intimate other, unseen spaces.

And the second drawing, which shows a male and a female in mid-execution, occupies a very similar setting, but deftly reverses the composition of the first: Now, the action of the martyrdom and of the observers is pushed to the periphery of the sheet, while the bull’s-eye center is an empty void.

These are images of appalling brutality and violence, whose compacted density heightens a sense of disorienting chaos. Yet, the complex clarity of the spatial organization enmeshes the slaughter within a monumental orderliness, actually endowing the martyrdom with a sense of transcendent valor.

If there’s one feature of this otherwise engaging show that’s disappointing, it’s the brief descriptive labels that accompany each sheet (a free, small brochure does provide some useful background information). The wall labels contain the kind of learned arcana appropriate to scholarly catalogue entries, but essentially useless to all but the most ardent Tiepolo specialist.

As it is doubtful that many of those will be in attendance at the show, especially compared to other sorts of museum visitors, you wonder to whom these dour labels are meant to speak.

So listen to the drawings instead. They speak with eloquence.

* J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, through July 25. Closed Mondays. Parking reservations required: (310) 458-1104.