Score One for the Underdog

Don’t tell Peter Fusco the art world’s old joke about sculpture’s lowly status. A veteran curator who established the J. Paul Getty Museum’s European sculpture department in 1984--after a 10-year tenure at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--and has coordinated the Getty’s current, critically acclaimed exhibition “Adriaen de Vries: Imperial Sculptor,” he knows all too well that sculpture is often defined as “something you bump into when you step back to look at a painting.”

He even quotes the standard put-down in his introduction to “Masterpieces of the J. Paul Getty Museum: European Sculpture,” published last year as part of a series of books on the museum’s collections. But then, instead of disputing the problem, he explains it.

The public is more accustomed to learning from the flat planes of printed pages, photographs, television, film and computer screens than from three-dimensional objects, the 54-year-old curator said in an interview at the Getty Center, reiterating ideas he has pondered throughout his career. As for scholars, art history is taught with slides, which represent paintings more accurately than sculpture, in courses that generally emphasize painting.

Making matters worse, sculpture poses physical obstacles for collectors. Although relatively affordable, sculpture tends to be unwieldy and require a lot of space. “It is clearly more difficult to hang a sculpture than a painting over your sofa,” Fusco said.

There’s nothing new in this. Three-dimensional objects are supreme in classical Greek art, because that’s the material that has survived. But, dating back to the Renaissance, scholarly debates over the relative merits of sculpture and painting have usually been decided in favor of the latter, Fusco said. And attitudes haven’t changed much since 1846, when French critic Charles Baudelaire wrote the essay “Why Sculpture Is Boring.”

But despite these frustrations, toiling in a neglected field has certain advantages. “There’s less competition,” Fusco said brightly, referring both to the marketplace and scholarship. “And there is so much more to do in sculpture. Look at the De Vries show.”

Many people have been doing exactly that since December, when the exhibition of the Dutch master’s work opened at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The show appeared at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm during the summer, then moved to Los Angeles, the only U.S. venue, where it will be on view at the Getty through Jan. 9.

“Adriaen de Vries” has been so well received that Fusco has been thrust into the limelight--not exactly his usual position. Unaccustomed as he is to being photographed for news media, he asked The Times’ photographer to take a picture of his favorite object--a magnifying glass that looks like an eye when a metal handle is folded over the lens--instead of a portrait. “I think I have a good eye, so that seems appropriate,” Fusco said, only half joking.

The exhibition of about 40 sculptures and related prints and drawings effectively introduces a forgotten Dutch sculptor who lived from 1556 to 1626. De Vries created spectacularly complicated bronzes, but political upheaval--coupled with the fact that he was, after all, a mere sculptor--has kept him in the shadows of art history.

“Here is an artist who was the court artist in 1600, when the center of the Christian world was Prague,” Fusco said. “He worked for Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor who had his court in Prague. But during the Thirty Years’ War, Queen Christina of Sweden went through northern Europe, took every piece of sculpture by De Vries she could get her hands on and sent them to Stockholm.

“As a result of that, there was no sculpture by De Vries in any of the Grand Tour cities. From the late 1630s on, artists, collectors, would-be art historians and tourists who went to Paris, Rome, Florence and Naples didn’t see his work. Nobody went to Stockholm to study the history of European sculpture, so his work was ignored. But he advanced the Baroque style before Bernini, in bronze instead of marble.”

Recognition of De Vries’ accomplishments has risen during the past few years because of exhibitions focusing on his patrons, Fusco said. “It’s only when scholars went to see these shows, which had to include works by De Vries, that we began to say, ‘Who is this guy? He’s amazing. I’ve got to go to Stockholm, where they’ve got 80 bronzes by him sitting in their gardens.’ ”

Organizing the exhibition with curators Frits Scholten of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Gorel Cavalli-Bjorkman of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Peggy Fogelman of the Getty as well as Getty conservators bolstered his knowledge of the artist, Fusco said. But his De Vries education actually began long before the show was planned, with two acquisitions.

The Getty acquired its first De Vries, “Rearing Horse,” in 1986. The 19 1/4-inch-tall bronze was looted from Rudolf II’s collection by Swedish troops, then passed through several private collections in Europe. In 1984, the sculpture was sold at auction in Paris for a little more than $1 million. The purchaser, a Zurich dealer, sold it to the Getty at an undisclosed price two years later.

The second De Vries to enter the Getty’s collection, “Juggling Man,” went on the auction block late in 1989. The 30 1/4-inch-tall bronze figure had been consigned to a sale of ordinary garden sculpture in Sussex, England, at an estimated value of $2,000 to $3,000, but it was spotted by an expert and transferred to Sotheby’s London. The Getty’s acquisition funds were tied up at the time, so London dealer Cyril Humphris bought the sculpture--paying $10.7 million, a record price for sculpture--and sold it to the Getty the following year.

Both works are in the De Vries show, but John Walsh, director of the Getty Museum, said the significance of the exhibition extends well beyond Brentwood.

“I’m so grateful for any sculpture show, and there are so few,” Walsh said. “I remember Peter’s great 19th century sculpture show many years ago at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was a turn in the road. It provided a broad view of art you had never paid attention to. Suddenly the artists came alive and their work was interesting.

“Now with De Vries, here we are again. Even in the Netherlands, people know the names of 50 Dutch painters but not their greatest sculptor. He isn’t just a neglected genius; he’s a neglected phenomenon.”

Walsh, a scholar of Dutch 17th century painting, said he himself knows very little about Dutch sculpture. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, but it’s not unusual. “Sculpture lost out to painting in the 19th century, particularly with the rise of Impressionism,” he said.

“What’s happening here with De Vries is a re-balancing of the scale, as well as showing us things that we aren’t used to looking at. It may cause us to walk a little slower in the park,” Walsh said, referring to public sculpture that often goes unnoticed.

Fusco’s work has been relatively unheralded as well, but he is well known in international artistic circles and is a fixture of Southern California’s art scene. His professional development and longevity in Los Angeles could not have been predicted, however.

“Until I came here in 1974, I had never lived in one place for more than three years in a row,” Fusco said. “My father worked for General Foods Corp. when they were expanding. His job was opening new offices, so they would send him out to White Haven, Tenn., or San Francisco, then bring him back to the headquarters in White Plains, N.Y., for a year, then send him out again. Finally, he became a manager of the plant in Detroit, so I spent my last three years of high school in Farmington, Mich.”

Interested only in “playing basketball and chasing girls,” Fusco went to Williams College and hated it because he felt like “a hick from the Midwest.” After his freshman year, he injured his back and spent the summer on a couch while recovering from a spinal fusion. “That changed my life,” he said. “Out of sheer boredom, I started drawing, learned to play the guitar and studied French.”

He spent his junior year in Paris, where he took drawing lessons at the Academie Julian and visited the Louvre. “I realized after a year that my drawing had not improved a single bit. I was a terrible artist,” he said. Back at Williams, he began to study art history with Lane Faison Jr., a “phenomenal teacher and upbringer of young men who had this knack of giving you a pat on the back or a kick in the butt when you needed it.”

Faison helped Fusco get a graduate fellowship in art history at Brown University. After two years there, Fusco transferred to the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. His interest in sculpture blossomed in New York, where he worked for sculpture dealer Michael Hall and did an internship in the sculpture department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

*

Fusco met his future wife, art historian Laurie Smith Fusco, at the institute. She accompanied him on a three-year fellowship that allowed them to spend the first two years in Paris and Rome and the final year at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

“Then we had to become grown-ups and apply for jobs, so we both applied for anything and everything,” Fusco said. Laurie was offered a teaching position at USC, so Peter persuaded Kenneth Donahue, then director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to create a position for him. (After two years at USC, Laurie worked at the Getty Museum for 18 years, first as head of photo archives and later as director of education.)

“Ken was a paintings specialist, but he was incredibly supportive of me in building a sculpture collection there,” Peter Fusco said. “Then [Earl A.] Rusty Powell came in as director, and he was terrific. I was at LACMA for 10 years and during that time, on average, we acquired a sculpture a month. I had no acquisition funds, but [LACMA trustees] Franklin Murphy, Anna Bing Arnold and Mia [Camilla] Frost adopted me. They took on sculpture as a project because they realized--partly because of my preaching--that European sculpture is ignored by most American museums.”

Crediting Fusco with assembling an important collection of sculpture at LACMA, Powell said the curator “bought very, very well” but also raised the visibility of the field. “I was sorry to lose him to the Getty,” said Powell, who left LACMA in 1992 to direct the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

When Fusco arrived, LACMA’s sculpture holding consisted mainly of medieval pieces donated by William Randolph Hearst and Rodin works given by B. Gerald Cantor. “I filled in between,” Fusco said. “I was most interested in Renaissance bronzes, but they are so expensive and complicated that it’s hard to raise money for them, so I wound up building a collection of 18th century terra cottas and 19th century sculpture, other than Rodin.”

*

In 1984, Walsh hired Fusco to establish a department of sculpture at the Getty. “Since I wasn’t able to build a collection of Renaissance sculpture at LACMA, and that is my passion, that’s what I have concentrated on at the Getty,” Fusco said.

Now, with its greatest strength in Renaissance and Baroque bronzes, the museum’s holding of European sculpture covers the late 15th to the early 20th centuries, and represents a wide variety of media: plaster, terra cotta, wood, ivory, alabaster, marble, silver and gold, in addition to bronze.

The bulk of the budget has gone into the oldest and rarest pieces: “We have spent more money on Renaissance sculpture than on Baroque, more on Baroque than Rococo, more on Rococo than Neoclassical, and more on Neoclassical than 19th century because that stuff is still out there and more likely to be available in the future.”

Building two sculpture collections in Los Angeles amounts to much more than amassing objects, Fusco said. “The process of acquisition poses questions that can be difficult to answer, so it’s a learning experience for the curator who passes that experience on to the public.”

Bringing the De Vries exhibition to the Getty also has been very satisfying, he said. “I feel incredibly lucky to be in a place that can spend serious money to do a monographic exhibition on a sculptor that our trustees and most historians had never heard of, but who in my opinion is the most neglected sculptor in the history of Western art.”

With an exhibition of works by 18th century French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon on the books for 2003 and several smaller projects in planning stages, Fusco is also looking ahead: “The De Vries show is the first of many things that I hope will make us the presence in America for allowing people to learn about European sculpture--as well as European painting, which they learn about everywhere.”

*

“Adriaen de Vries: Imperial Sculptor,” the Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood. Ends Jan. 9. Parking reservations required. (310) 440-7300.