More Than Baubles : JEWELS OF FANTASY, <i> Edited by Deanna Farneti Cera (Harry N. Abrams: $95; 408 pp.)</i>

More and more often, museum exhibitions are accompanied by a catalogue that is not merely a checklist identifying the items in the show, a pamphlet or book modestly detailing their particulars. The trend is toward a super-tome--an extravaganza in itself--so lush with illustration and loquacious as to text, it rivals the very materials on which it’s based. “Jewels of Fantasy,” a comprehensive installation of costume jewelry on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through Jan. 2, is complemented by an even more lavish book of the same name. It’s not entirely naive to wonder which of the two productions is the real thing.

The exhibition, which displays a century’s worth of adornment for adornment’s sake in its infinite variety, is obviously primary. It even offers the illusion of tactile contact because you’re seeing the actual objects in three dimensions, though they are caged in glass. You’re confronting each creation--say, a subtly ravishing Rene Lalique necklace of stylized glass flowers--with your own physical, emotional and intellectual being at a given moment. A photographic reproduction, no matter how fine, can only simulate this direct and unique experience.

The drawback to the exhibition is that access to it is so limited. Its components are on display for a brief period in a specific place, which coincides with the location and agenda of only a small fraction of its would-be viewers. After its little moment of theatrical glory, the assemblage will be re-dispersed to its respective museums, places of sale and private owners. Needless to say, if you do manage to connect with the show, a small, subconscious part of your pleasure lies in knowing that you’re having momentary contact with something ephemeral.

Yet there is much to be said for the book. First of all, it’s “forever;” you can examine the jewels in good photographic reproduction today, tomorrow, 10 years from now or all of the above; the experience is infinitely, delectably repeatable. And, of course, the more and longer you look, the more you see and understand. The book is also easily accessible--assuming you can lift heavy weights and you’ve got $95 bucks. (Remember, too, that these lavish volumes are fast remaindered and that the paperbound edition is $50 cheaper.) The text offers far more detail than the exhibition’s wall copy and labels could possibly encompass, and this information is significant: Things are fine in and of themselves, but documentation gives them a deeper and wider life. In art, as in many other worlds, the original object is central; still, context remains important as well.

A final virtue of the book is unashamedly venial: It gratifies one’s greed. If you can’t possess the treasures in the exhibition, you can possess their echo, their shadow, their credentials. For a viewer who has been to the show, the book becomes a nostalgic talisman; for a person unable to attend, it can serve as a reasonable consolation.

All this reasoning is generic, however. It might apply to any art exhibition and the publication associated with it. In the specific case of “Jewels of Fantasy,” the book is significant because it treats costume jewelry with a scholarly seriousness and respect usually reserved for “higher” arts and crafts. Its editor, Deanna Farneti Cera, and five colleagues from several different countries have contributed long, solid essays on the major periods and places in which the genre has flourished, beginning at the turn of the last century.

The first useful thing the writers accomplish is to offer a thoughtful, wisely tentative definition of the genre they’re treating. They trace its development from ornaments intended to imitate the costly, finely wrought pieces that are created with precious gems and metals, through hand-crafted, one-of-a-kind or limited-edition “art jewelry” embodying the emerging design concepts of its time (Art Nouveau, Art Deco and so on) as well as newly developed materials (like the versatile plastic, Bakelite), and then to mass-produced items: cheap, disposable and, as a result, marvelously insouciant.

The authors carefully show how costume jewelry in its myriad manifestations expresses a nexus of concerns--aesthetic, historical, social, economic and technical. Indeed, so earnest are the writers about achieving this documentation, they tend to overlook the sheerly handsome and evocative qualities of the objects they describe--the inspiration attached to their making and, subsequently, to their appreciation. Never mind. The text is blessedly readable, for the most part plain spoken and filled (yet not overburdened) with pertinent facts. It functions well both as a reference tool and--despite the shifts in style and the overlapping inevitable in a collective work--as an absorbing ongoing narrative.

If there is a chapter to be preferred, it’s apt to be the one on the style of jewelry that appeals to your personal taste. I was most engaged by Cera’s own essay on America’s product mid-century--for the pieces’ wild grace, exuberance and wit. I’m also partial to the section on Germany’s Bauhaus style of the late 1920s and early ‘30s, which promotes the strong, severe beauty of functionalism, the streamlined fitting together of elements as if they were cogs in a divinely efficient machine.

Each chapter ends with a dossier on the manufacturers discussed and their hallmarks, indispensable information for the collector or scholar, particularly those newly venturing into the field. At the same time, the mini-histories of the firms and their leading designers lend the account of the industry a touching human dimension. Similarly, the book as a whole concludes with a glossary of terms and a technical guide that set you straight on matters you’d relegated to the vaguer domains of poetry. The explanations of the ins and outs of crystal and pearls, for example, are fascinating; they manage to be succinct and straightforward without destroying the mystery and magic of those luminous incarnations of ice and moonlight.

Still, the exhibition offers the most sensuous pleasure. In the American segment alone, the various manufacturers appear to be vying with one another to please and astonish you. Marcel Boucher is the lord of authoritative luxury, while Trifari offers ebullient gaudiness, an unquenchable vitality. The watery, moonstruck world of Eisenberg is all silver and outsize pearls, here and there accented with a pale gold wash like the weak sunlight of a wintry afternoon. Hobe speaks for lush exoticism, empresses and czarinas, the magnificent, half-barbaric influence of a Europe so far east it borders on Asia. By contrast, Miriam Haskell, all pointillist delicacy, is deliciously ladylike, making petit point floral compositions with filigreed wire and innumerable tiny simulated gems.

Despite the categories of time and place the show employs to orient you, it also urges you to cut across them. It’s enlightening, for example, to trace the myriad uses of glass and of plastics such as the ubiquitous and intriguingly chameleon-like Bakelite. You may be accustomed to such modest materials simulating diamonds, but what about turquoise, jade, peau d’ange coral (a milky pink, like the skin of Caucasian newborns), malachite, lapis lazuli and so on? At the same time you come to appreciate technical advances such as the elaborate and precise faceting of glass to resemble gems, as well as the shifts in taste necessary to allow the frank presentation of plastic as plastic with results that can confidently be counted as art.

But all of it--even the styles you’ve vowed to hate ever since you outgrew your youthful mania for them (Art Nouveau, for instance), even the raucous absurdity of the most recent creations--all of it seduces you after the first five minutes unless you’re immune to beauty, invention and frivolity. So, if you dwell in the City of Angels, why not see the show and treat yourself to the book as well? Life is brief and pleasure fleeting.