‘Splendor’: An Aura of Clarity, Simplicity

There’s a significant piece of cultural news embedded in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new exhibition “Ritual and Splendor: Ancient Treasures From the Shumei Family Collection.” It’s a breathtaking, rare example of a holding selected with superbly refined taste, but it’s even more.

The 155 works on view encompass not only China and West Asia but Bactria, Greece, Rome and Islamic Iran. It’s a virtually unprecedented instance of a Japanese compendium that includes master art from primary civilizations outside the Far East.

Japanese museums have been notably tardy in acquiring such art so this collection--assembled in recent years--marks a symbolic new opening to fundamental aspects of Western history and culture.

A smaller selection of these works was seen earlier this year at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Its catalog serves the present presentation. After closing here the entire collection of some thousand objects will go on view late in 1997 in their permanent home, the new Miho Museum not far from Kyoto. The 83,000-square-foot structure was designed by the renowned architect I.M. Pei. The Shumei Family, not just incidentally, is not an ordinary domestic grouping. The name is a sobriquet for Shinji Shumeikai, which designates itself “a worldwide spiritual organization dedicated to the pursuit of truth, virtue and beauty.”

All this provides Los Angeles the opportunity to see a treasures extravaganza realized by applying Japanese culture’s traditionally exquisite, understated aesthetic sensibility to the West. As an experience it’s extraordinarily piquant and gratifying.

How often in the West, for example, does one encounter an exhibition where the first piece is an 8-inch-tall 7th century Greek bronze of a “Griffin Protome” that causes us to realize this tiny thing is worthy of acting as the curtain raiser for a blockbuster show?

Japanese art reveres refinement. Refinement, defined in the most material terms, occurs when an object is worked with painstaking care over a long period to get it exactly right. The natural result of such action is that the object gets smaller.

The exhibition demonstrates repeatedly that smaller can be better. The Egyptian section opens with two 12th dynasty painted wood statues of a walking man. Stylistically they are almost identical except one is life-size, the other about 14 inches tall. The compacted form of the small one makes it more memorable. Its delicacy appeals to our sense of parental protectiveness. Its utter lack of intimidation is comforting.

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Speaking of intimidation, pieces in sections on Bactria and early Iran are clearly related to one of history’s scariest arts, that of ancient Assyria. Its monumental reliefs of winged bulls and warriors in the Louvre make Big Brother seem downright cuddly.

Here the same motifs are used on golden goblets, delicate as foil. They lose nothing in expressive clout, except a certain pomposity. Most ancient art grew from a mind-set radically different from that of today’s just-a-regular-guy-who-wants-to-get-along demeanor. Much ancient art intended to openly demonstrate superiority in physical strength, authority and wealth.

A couple of Iranian silver drinking horns end in miniature sculpted images, one of a snarling lynx, the other a caracal cat attacking a fowl. The animals are pointedly depicted as symbols of ferociously ruthless, raw power.

In addition to being more up front about man’s animal character, ancient art had absolutely no inclination to make silly distinctions between decorative, fine and applied arts. The Japanese have wisely followed this kind of aesthetic openness and applied it here with brilliant result. Virtually every piece, such as a particularly splendid Chinese wine vessel from the Shang Dynasty or a stunning big Iranian carpet, is simultaneously a ritual object-of-use and a work of high art.

The selection also demonstrates an early multiethnic interpenetration of these old civilizations through trade along the silk route. Throughout one runs across, say, an Iranian silver vase whose nude dancing female figures recall Indian art or an Islamic ceramic whose painting style appears Japanese.

For all this, the experience of “Ritual and Splendor” has a pleasant aura of clarity and simplicity. This is due, no doubt, to a combination of the selected objects and their deft installation by designer Bernard Kester.

The impression is benignly misleading. The exhibition was some six years in the making and required the collaboration of LACMA’s chief of conservation, Pieter Meyers, and three curators, Nancy Thomas, J. Keith Wilson and Linda Komaroff, among a small battalion of assistants.

The larger lesson here is that anything can be art, and the only way to sort out what is is along the currently unfashionable lines of intrinsic quality.

* “Ritual and Splendor: Ancient Treasures From the Shumei Family Collection,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.; through Feb. 9, closed Mondays, (213) 857-6000.