Creature feature

KEEPING up with the Joneses can be exhausting. The practice has been called “affluenza” -- the socially transmitted disease of doggedly pursuing the economic and cultural status held by the neighbors. And aside from fatigue, it can cause odd behavior.

To witness the delirium in action, a visit to “Oudry’s Painted Menagerie” is in order. The rather small, decidedly quirky exhibition recently opened at the J. Paul Getty Museum. It is built around 11 ornamental paintings of mostly exotic animals. Life-size portraits, they were painted with varying degrees of finish and flourish between 1739 and 1752 by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, a French artist most widely known for hunting scenes and for running the royal tapestry works at Beauvais and Gobelins.

The Joneses in this particular instance were the kings of France, those wacky, ermine-draped defenders of absolute monarchy who claimed to be on earthly assignment from God. Ten of the show’s big paintings depict birds, jungle cats and other creatures descended from (or added to) those in the elaborate menagerie built by Louis XIV on the grounds of his extravagant palace at Versailles, just outside Paris.

One painting represents a celebrity: Clara, a famous rhinoceros, brought from India to Rotterdam in 1741 and sent on a decade-long tour to the capitals of Europe, where Paris Hilton-style pandemonium ensued. Before Clara, a rhino had not been seen in Europe for nearly 200 years. The first one had been shipped to Lisbon in 1515 as a present for Portugal’s king, evidence of the wonders to be found on the costly voyages of global exploration, evangelism and pillage he was underwriting. That poor beast didn’t make the rounds of royal Europe like Clara did, but sketches and stories, written and oral, describing the extraordinary horned creature traveled far and wide.

Rulers have collected exotic animals since antiquity, at least since Egypt’s Queen Hatshepsut and China’s Emperor Wen Wang. An elaborate display of foreign animals expressed the reach of political power.

Moral imperative

Nature was also a demonstration of divine creativity, according to Louis’ pre-Enlightenment world-view. And since rulers ruled by divine right, celebrating and scrutinizing the splendor of God’s most unusual creations was a moral responsibility.

The imperative not only could be but should be embellished, burnished and decorated, as only the French Baroque and Rococo masters knew how. Louis’ royal zoo took the form of vast, wedge-shaped walled pens, planted with appropriate flora, which fanned out in a circle around a small chateau and an octagonal viewing pavilion in the center.

The pattern is like the rays of the sun, which was the king’s Apollonian emblem. (Think of it as the original intelligent design.) Work began on the menagerie when Louis was just 24 -- he lived to be nearly 77 -- and the opulence of architect Louis Le Vau’s scheme became the talk of Europe’s royal courts.

Enter the envious neighbors.

You might not have heard of the dukes of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, for the simple reason that the assorted Albrechts, Johanns and Ludwigs of Baltic northern Germany were among the many relatively poor aristocrats scattered all over Europe’s map. No matter how much they worshiped at the altar of French regal power and style, as Central and Eastern Europeans were wont to do, they simply could not afford to acquire beasts for a menagerie on the family estate. No one was likely to give a lowly duchy an African hyena or an Australian cassowary (a vicious relative of the ostrich) as a diplomatic token of influence.

And then there was the daunting cost of upkeep. What to do? What to do?

Duke Christian Ludwig II’s answer was quite modern: If you can’t afford an actual menagerie, build a virtual one.

In the early 1750s, the duke bought Oudry’s 10 painted portraits of Versailles menagerie animals -- plus Clara, who had visited that zoo in 1749. (He also bought two paintings of lynxes, now lost.) Louis XIV was long dead. Oudry had painted them for Louis XV’s surgeon, who planned to give the portraits to the new king. When the doctor suddenly died and the king expressed scant interest in the actual menagerie, Oudry offered the paintings to his eager German patrons.

All the life-size portraits show the animal in the foreground, as if on a shallow stage. Oudry’s decorative sensibility tied the beast to its setting through clever formal devices.

The twisting spirals of the blackbuck antelope’s horns rhyme with the undulations of the hill immediately behind him, as well as the distant mountaintops. The line of the lion’s bushy mane and ruff is echoed in the line of the cloud above it and in the leafy foliage of an adjacent tree.

Clara’s long jawline repeats in the horizon line just below it. The heavy fold of skin near her rump continues into the hill behind her.

Animal and landscape are locked together like puzzle pieces, with an emphasis on artful theatricality. Nature is made subordinate to culture, no matter how naturalistic Oudry’s carefully observed portraits certainly are. When Clara’s glinting eye meets yours -- something unlikely to happen in person -- with her ear similarly cocked in your direction, the artist is proposing deep connections between two sentient beings. But it’s clear in these portraits just who is in charge, and it’s not the leopards or the wild sheep.

A gigantic curiosity

Like many things virtual, Oudry’s painted menagerie is a bit dull artistically. The Clara painting is the finest portrait of a rhinoceros you are ever likely to encounter, for what that’s worth. But it is most engaging as a curiosity, just as the actual rhino was to an 18th century audience. Learning their story is more compelling than experiencing the canvas, which at the Getty is installed in front of bleachers.

That aesthetic dullness may explain why such a giant picture -- it’s 10 feet tall and nearly 15 feet wide -- was “lost” and out of public view for 150 years. (Getty conservator Mark Leonard expertly restored the marred work, which was flaking badly from being rolled up in storage; he restored the severely damaged lion painting too.) Clara and company are charming, but the portraits are not exactly Van Gogh’s postman or Titian’s “Man With a Glove.”

Except for one, that is -- a truly ravishing painting of a dead crane. Strung upside down by its feet and lashed to a rotting tree stump, its wings are splayed for our examination, its long neck and crimson head placed just so at our own feet. The intricacy of the composition is matched by the brilliance of Oudry’s color, which in the bird encompasses the entire gray scale. It goes from purest white to most luxurious black, with a stop at every tonality in between.

As sensory revelation and revelry, art and nature fuse. The crane might have its ancestry in religious scenes of martyrdom, like Caravaggio’s various crucifixions, but its secular force speaks to religion’s waning influence as 18th century subject matter.

Rhinomania

Oudry also had the advantage of not trying to capture a living animal, which is unlikely to strike a portrait pose. The “Dead Crane” stands out because it’s actually not a portrait but nature morte -- “dead nature,” as the French call a still-life. The painting, not just its subject, is a worldly invention.

The same is true of Albrecht Durer’s 1515 woodblock print of that Lisbon rhinoceros. It is in the exhibition’s final room, where an eccentric display of paintings, porcelain sculptures, a clock, prints, a beaded textile and other decorative objects shows how the two rhinoceroses captured the popular imagination.

Durer didn’t go to Lisbon and had never seen the animal; he worked from written descriptions. His rhino has an aristocrat’s military armor, a horn sprouting from its back and other funny anomalies.

A couple of centuries later, the brilliant craftsmen at the Meissen porcelain factory reproduced every fantastic flaw exactly, in a large figurine copied from the Durer print. Error becomes fact, as in a game of telephone -- and the weird sculpture ends up stealing Clara’s painted thunder.

christopher.knight@latimes.com

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‘Oudry’s Painted Menagerie’

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Closed Mondays.

Ends: Sept. 2

Price: Free

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