ART REVIEW : A Progressive Definition of Neoclassicism in ‘Visions’ : LACMA’s wide-ranging show emphasizes a style that merely depicts what ancient Greece and Rome might have been like.

“Visions of Antiquity: Neoclassical Figure Drawings” tackles a thorny art historical problem with style, rigor and invigorating playfulness.

Consisting of approximately 115 drawings made between 1760 and 1830 by about 60 artists from France, Italy, England, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden, this wide-ranging exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents a flexible, refreshing and progressive definition of neoclassicism.

Its title tips us off to its insightful, sensibly balanced approach to a slippery, often contradictory style. Today, all that is agreed upon about neoclassicism is that it followed the theatrical excesses of baroque and rococo art and preceded the tortured individualism of romanticism. It embraced--at different times, in various places and by competing schools--wildly diverse characteristics.

“Visions of Antiquity” smartly insists that all modern depictions of classical themes are dreamed-up images of what ancient Greece and Rome might have been like.

With an abundance of first-rate material, some of which has never before been exhibited in this country, the show demonstrates that every version of neoclassicism expresses a fantasy about the far-off past. Invented only to serve the needs of the present, its pictures don’t deliver objective truths or factually accurate representations.

Curators Victor Carlson of LACMA and Richard Campbell of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts flesh out their persuasive interpretation of neoclassicism by presenting an engaging and accessible sampling of its multifaceted aspects.

Sublimated sexuality--amplified by cerebral restraint--suffuses many pictures. Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s sensuous depictions of Psyche, Adonis, Venus and anonymous studio models are exemplary. Anton Raphael Mengs’ tender depiction of a male nude, and Antonio Canova’s touching study of young women also stand out.

Noble simplicity, sedate grandeur and harmonious composition dominate Friedrich Heinrich Fuger’s intimate picture of Socrates instructing a prostitute. Etienne-Barthelemy Garnier’s pen-and-ink wash of the philosopher leading his naked pupil Alcibiades away from the bed of a woman--and the vice, corruption and pleasure it symbolizes--valorizes control and withdrawal. Francois-Andre Vincent’s stiff renderings of august statesmen likewise emphasize emotional detachment and chaste intellectualism.

In sharp contrast, Jean-August-Dominique Ingres’ large charcoal and chalk drawing of the blind Belisarius and his swooning youthful guide throbs with unrepressed erotic energy. Its consummate expressiveness, however, pales in comparison to Henry Fuseli’s crazily overstated--and nearly cartoonish--image of Hercules clubbing flesh-eating horses to death.

Although these works do not fit into the stereotypical definition of neoclassicism, they make sense within Carlson’s and Campbell’s thorough historical overview.

The work of Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, which has been described as an “erotisme de frigidare,” efficiently summarizes the elasticity of neoclassicism. His eight drawings include an intense, romantic portrait, a crisp contour illustration, a ferocious, colorful study of decapitation, wispy washes of floating figures in see-through robes, meaty explorations of human musculature and refined renditions of classical harmony and balance.

The exhibition’s seemingly simple fusion of interpretive free-play with classical rationality, clarity and truth packs a powerful punch because neoclassicism has, in the recent past, been thought of as a singular and authentic revival of ancient ideals. “Visions of Antiquity” lays bare the stingy conservatism of much neoclassical practice, providing a well-rounded revision and emphasis on art’s indebtedness to deception, manipulation and trickery.

“Visions of Antiquity” broadens our understanding of neoclassicism by negotiating an intelligent balance between the philosophies of two 19th-Century thinkers, German antiquarian and aesthete Johann Joachim Winckelmann and a lesser-known Scotsman, James Macpherson.

Winckelmann was a brilliant theorist whose numerous essays in the 1860s and ‘70s greatly influenced a generation of neoclassicists. His idealization of Greece served as a manifesto for artists who sought to imitate its supreme achievements.

Macpherson was a writer who published an epic recounting the exploits of Fingal and Ossian, Nordic warrior-kings from the 3rd Century. Supposedly based on fragments of verse he gathered in the Scottish Highlands, it was later revealed that he fabricated the whole story. His carnal, amoral and violent tales were a source of inspiration for many Northern artists. They fueled the “Sturm und Drang” movement and provided a stark, dark counterpoint to Winckelmann’s purified vision of antiquity, in which nude youths frolicked in clear sunlight.

Since Winckelmann never visited Greece, the source for the art on which he based all his aesthetic pronouncements and prescriptions, his more academically respected writings are as susceptible to charges of fraudulence as Macpherson’s. “Visions of Antiquity” claims that each approach is equally valid, and that both are riddled with the fantasies of their authors.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Sept . 19. Closed Mondays.