Creativity can take many forms

Eccentricity is a wonderful thing. If you doubt it, go straight to the Getty Villa.

A new exhibition of ancient Athenian vases, the first full-scale special exhibition mounted since the nation’s only museum of classical antiquities opened in lavishly refurbished quarters in January, homes in on the idiosyncratic and the odd. It is not an exercise in oddity for oddity’s sake. Instead, this meaty, often surprising and finally satisfying show has an important point to make: Art’s history is never as neat, tidy or direct as it sometimes seems to be.

For example, in an Attic workshop at some moment between about 375 and 350 BC, an artisan whose name is lost to us today decided to make a long-necked bottle to hold oil. The common vase type, called a lekythos, is one a visitor regularly encounters in museum collections.

This one is about 10 inches tall. The slender vessel stands on a low round base with concave sides. A single, flat handle curves out from the neck to meet the shoulder where the vase’s body flares. The surface decoration, made from the familiar method of letting the reddish clay show through the shiny black slip-glaze, is composed of a showy array of palmettes.

And did I mention the big lopsided blob with wings protruding from the shoulder of the bottle?

From the back this lekythos looks like a run-of-the-mill piece of ancient pottery -- except for that strange wad of stuff stuck on the side. Move around to the front, however, and the mystery is solved.

The blob is an Eros, a youthful, winged love-god, his arms spread wide to hold a flowing mantle. Here the boy flies in over the right shoulder of Aphrodite. She’s a seated three-dimensional figure with one hand on an opened jewelry chest and the other resting on a second Eros, who stands ramrod straight at her side with an incense burner between them.

Oil, incense, love gods -- you get the idea.

The bodies of the goddess and the two Erotes are chalky white. Their elaborate coiffures and assorted rosette decorations are dull mustard yellow. Traces of red, violet, pink and pale blue can be picked out here and there, suggesting this 2,300-year-old vase has faded a bit. A deep blue scalloped panel at Aphrodite’s feet is no doubt a stylized representation of the ocean wave from which she was born.

It’s not unusual for a Greek vase to have two distinctly different sides -- a front and a back, often separated by handles, or an inside and an outside painted with different scenes. But this one sticks a profusely painted terra cotta figurine onto a traditional red-figured black bottle, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do.

Apparently a luxury item, according the show’s first-rate catalog, its date coincides with “a decline in the quality of standard red-figure” pottery. In other words, the hybrid is one craftsman’s inventive, perhaps experimental, certainly technically accomplished attempt to juice the product line and compete in a flagging market. Whoever the mystery-maker was, he was trying things out.

The result is clever, somewhat awkward yet certainly lively. The Getty exhibition, deftly organized by independent scholar and curator Beth Cohen, is filled with variations on this sort of work, which might collectively be called hybrid forms. Rather than subject, style, era or locale, inventiveness is the show’s bracing leitmotif.

“The Colors of Clay: Special Techniques in Athenian Vases” brings together 105 Attic vessels made over nearly a 250-year span, between about 580 and 340 BC. With clearly written and discretely placed labels, a very helpful animated video demonstrating ancient vase-making techniques and a wide array of objects, it will greatly expand your horizons on Greek pottery.

The show begins with a quick introduction to the two types most people know. Black-figure vases are made by decorating a terra cotta pot with black-gloss silhouettes, detailed with incised lines, which contrast with the orange clay of the vessel’s body. Red-figure vases, invented in Athens around the last quarter of the 6th century BC, reverse the forms. Red figures are left in uncolored clay while the ground around them is painted with the black gloss. (The slip is made from mixing powdered clay pigments with water, and an elaborate process of firing makes it all come together.) Figurative details can be painted, giving the artist great control and more range than in the older black-figure style. That versatility made red-figure the dominant mode for the next couple of centuries.

The first vase in the first gallery is a famous jar from Boston that splits the difference between black and red. A black-figure depiction of Hercules driving a massive bull to a sacrifice is rendered with brusque, stylized, muscular verve. Walk around to the other side of the large amphora -- it’s almost 2 feet tall -- and there is the identical scene, this time in red-figure painting. Details differ, but the images are essentially the same. Now, however, Hercules and the bull display a delicate, even refined naturalism. It isn’t that this naturalist style is better than the black-figure side. It just functions differently. The red-figure draws you in close, creating an intimacy that is even more commanding than the blunt, bold depiction on the reverse.

This amphora -- and another magnificent one from Madrid actually signed by the potter -- speaks in two visual languages at once. Hence the term “bilingual vase.” Hybridity, which is encountered today in lots of the best contemporary art, is effectively introduced as the compelling subject of the ancient show.

What unfolds throughout the remaining rooms is a wide variety of inventive techniques. Coral-red gloss is added to unpainted areas of clay, completely changing the look of the surface. (A label suggests that when used inside a drinking cup, it would also make the color of diluted wine much richer.) Another technique, named for Dutch scholar Jan Six, layers multicolored glazes on a black background.

A popular white background glaze functioned the way canvas does for painters today. The neutral field accommodates a wide range of stylistic and chromatic applications.

Outlined figures function like drawings do. The inside of one cup shows a satyr scrambling down a rock to get to a snoozing maiden, tumbling through sinuous space in a marvel of dazzling draftsmanship.

Kerch-style vases are an elaborate variation on red-figure pottery, named for the modern city on the far side of the Black Sea, near Scythia, where most of them have been found. They show how far-flung the Athenian export business was. Surfaces of Kerch-style and other vases are occasionally embellished with raised areas of clay, suggestive more of forged metal than pottery, and gilding was often added.

Most of the gold, being fragile, was lost over the centuries. (The mustard yellow hair on the Aphrodite statuette was probably gilded.) But its use underscores how ostentatious Athenian vases could be. The Aphrodite vessel is a type known as a plastic vase -- not because of any putative relationship to Tupperware but because it combined molded, hand-built and wheel-thrown forms. Plastic vases are a scholarly specialty of former Getty antiquities curator Marion True, who initiated this exhibition and contributed to the catalog.

Plastic vases are also often hybrid in the extreme. Among these are some of the show’s highlights. They include an exquisite flask formed from a triad of cockleshells. A cup with two gruff, bearded masks attached is attributed to Euphronios, the famous vase painter who turned to making pottery late in life. A sculpted Amazon on horseback holds aloft a red-figure cup, itself decorated with rhyming mounted warriors. And a raucous wine cup with a base-handle in the shape of male genitals gives new meaning to the concept of a stag party.

Perhaps the most moving work in the exhibition is a stemless cup with delicate, wishbone-shaped handles. It was one of 10 vessels found in 1890 in a tomb north of the Acropolis. Called the Sotades Tomb, it was named for the potter who signed four of the vases. The pots, immediately dispersed to European private and public collections, are reunited here for the first time in a century.

The walls of the stemless cup are extremely thin. Given the delicate wishbone handles and its painted white ground, the vessel seems as fragile as an eggshell.

A diminutive red-figure painting in the center shows a young mother, perhaps the woman for whom the tomb was built. She is seated in profile and leaning back. The mother faces a chubby baby in a highchair, also shown in profile, reaching out in her direction. Between departed mother and tiny infant, the black glaze of the background turns the space into a vast, dark chasm, never to be crossed. The humble little vignette is a heartbreaking image of eternal loss -- of the unbridgeable gulf between the simple gestures of daily life and the finality of death. This magnificent cup alone is reason enough to see the absorbing show.

*

‘The Colors of Clay’

Where: The Getty Villa, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Mondays, closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays

Ends: Sept. 4

Price: Free, but advance, timed tickets are required

Contact: (310) 440-7300; www.getty.edu