Culture : Lisbon Moves to Europe’s Center Stage for Arts Festival : * Music, Angolan sculpture, archeology, theater and Bosch paintings are featured in the yearlong event.

In a museum on a hill, audacious sculpture of dark wood and crafted bronze abides with fertility masks, implements of tribal celebration, ornaments, thrones for native kings and crucifixes of an imported religion.

It is a pioneer show of African art, and it has come a long way from Angola to Lisbon. About as far, metaphorically, as Lisbon has come to Europe.

The Portuguese capital, long isolated both physically and culturally on the western rim of the Continent, is European Capital of Culture for 1994, by decree of its partners in the European Union who are helping to pay for the celebration.

Victor Constancio, the festival director, calls Lisbon ’94 “a landmark cultural statement of the Portuguese within the context of Europe.”

The festival brings a yearlong bounty of art, music, drama and exhibitions to Lisbon. And it brings a welcome focus on Portugal, which has rejoined mainstream Europe over the past two decades, after centuries of isolation. Pedro Santana Lopez, the government’s culture secretary, estimates that Portuguese museums will draw a million visitors this year.

An early fruit of the cultural harvest is the critically acclaimed show of Angolan sculpture at the newly reopened National Ethnographic Museum.

“It is the first time a show has shown different aspects of Angolan culture from all six regions of the country,” said the museum’s Rita Sa Marques. “This is our way of drawing attention to Angola and of asking how such killing there is possible. Where are the people who made these beautiful things?”

Angola, convulsed by a seemingly endless civil war, was once a Portuguese colony. The museum’s own Angola collection, assembled across colonial centuries by missionaries and explorers, is the basis for a multimedia show that also includes a 9th-Century wooden animal head on loan from Belgium, the oldest known wood carving from central Africa.

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The ethnography museum, which had been closed for years, is one of a number of Lisbon venues on which the cultural year has breathed new life.

The Coliseu national theater has been redone as the hall for a World’s Great Orchestras series that is bringing ensembles from Tokyo, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Strasbourg, London and other cities. The Sao Carlos national opera house has had its face lifted for performances ranging from “Carmen” to “The Damnation of Faust.”

The Belem Cultural Center, built near the city’s Moorish-Gothic cathedral for Portugal’s 1992 debut in the European Union’s rotating presidency, is another fixture of Lisbon ’94. The old Tivoli movie house downtown has been overhauled as the venue of a film festival showing 100 notable movies in as many days.

The National Archeology Museum is featuring a visit to subterranean Lisbon, the tale of an ancient city that has clung to the banks of the Tagus River from Roman times through invasions by Visigoths and Moors to a 1775 killer earthquake that drowned a major part of it.

On stage, Lisbon ’94 brings a varied menu: from works by Portuguese playwrights to Pirandello; from classical Greek theater--”The Oresteia” by Aeschylus--to “Angels in America,” written by American Tony Kushner.

The festival’s premier art exhibition, running Wednesday through Aug. 15 at the restored-for-the-festival National Museum of Ancient Art, is an adventure in imagination. “The Temptations of Bosch or the Eternal Recurrence” will focus on a triptych by 16th-Century Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch entitled “The Temptations of St. Anthony.”

“Bosch was a precursor of surrealism, as the painting makes plain. The exhibition will look at voyages through imagination of other artists from the 16th to the 20th Century,” said show organizer Paulo Pereira. “Many other painters have also dabbled with the strange and the marvelous.”

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The triptych, a Lisbon standby for more than a century, will be shown in conjunction with mostly borrowed works of other artists who also demonstrate what organizers call “an imaginary heritage that chooses neither time nor era to express itself through art.” Thus will the likes of engravers Durer, Duvet and William Blake, and artists Goya, Moreau, Rosseau and Dali share the stage with Bosch.

In another contribution to the festa , Lisbon’s refurbished contemporary arts museum reopens next month, renamed the Chiado Museum, for a show of naturalist works of the 1940s. Contemporary art will be the focus of a show called “The Day After Tomorrow,” a line borrowed from Portuguese poet Alvaro de Campos: “Today I want to prepare myself to think tomorrow about the day after . . .”

Intended as an antidote to end-of-millennium pessimism, the show, opening Sept. 20, will include works by contemporary Portuguese and international artists, including American James Turrell, said organizer Isabel Carlos.

The festival, which has won strong local response despite organizational glitches and vexing ticket distribution problems, has also awakened strong private counterpoint to public sponsorship of the arts.

Lisbon’s first musical, “Bloody Cocaine,” is playing to full houses at the lovingly restored downtown Politeama Theater, which showed porn movies not long ago.

“Lisbon is the show’s protagonist,” said impresario Felipe La Feria. “It is the story of Lisbon in the ‘20s as microcosm of the clash of cultures in Europe in the years after World War I.”

With music by English-schooled, 22-year-old Portuguese composer Nuno Feist, the show opens in Maxim’s, a nightclub that is transformed sadly into a soulless office of the Propaganda Ministry as post-World War II exuberance surrenders to decades of dictatorship in Portugal.

“As much as what’s on, this year is important because of the chance it has offered to revamp the museums and theaters of Lisbon. Now, it’s a question of building on the new contacts and public to keep momentum,” said Ruth Rosengarten, an Israeli artist and critic who lives and paints in the new Lisbon.