Mesopotamia Show at the Getty Teaches History, with Style

Get Pazuzu on speed dial; Washington needs help with mass exorcisms.

I n Mesopotamia: Civilization Begins, the new exhibition at the Getty Villa, the Getty does indeed start at the very beginning. At a place in what we now call Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and between 3400 and 3000 b.c., urban life began as well as writing and sophisticated architecture. It’s an impressive show. It’s both gorgeous and coherent, and I’m finding this combination rarer and rarer. The scholarship is first-rate and conveyed clearly and accessibly in a catalogue that’s now a core reference. The Getty collaborated with the Louvre on the project. It’s one of only a handful of museums in America with the money, discipline, connections, and scholarly chops to make something of this depth and complexity happen.

The history of Mesopotamia tends to be missing except in the most donnish curricula, strange considering that the first historians were Mesopotamian, and, after all, it bears repeating, “Civilization begins.” What I knew before I saw the show is from the Old Testament. Eden, the Tower of Babel, and Nineveh are all in the ’hood. Babylon was the world’s New York, Paris, and Shanghai, as well as Sin City.

Panel with Striding Lion, from around 600 b.c., is the only work of art familiar to me. On lapis-blue fields, 120 ceramic panels flanked each wall of a processional way linking a complex of temples to the royal palace in Babylon. This one is from the Ishtar Gate. Mesopotamia displays in the first gallery along with a well-done timeline. Iraq has been in the news constantly for 30 years, but Americans know next to nothing about it or its history. Five thousand years’ worth of kings and kingdoms, listed on the timeline, are warning enough against stupid adventures in places about which we Americans are uninformed if not ignorant.

The exhibition is smartly and impressively organized through “firsts.” A gallery called First Cities helps us get our footing. Nimrod, Noah’s grandson and Genesis’s “mighty hunter before the Lord,” made Uruk a happening place 5,000 years ago. Now, this is long ago indeed, and cities such as Uruk, Babylon, and Nineveh have been invaded, trashed, buried, and salvaged a hundred times. I’m sure they all had their share of 1960s, Model City, let’s-bulldoze-everything, brainiac types, too. So, while there aren’t any shards, there are lots of smalls.

Sometimes, they’re exquisite. Tiny cylinder seals tend to survive over many centuries, as opposed to statues, which are almost always smashed in a million pieces and used as rubble. A carved stone cylinder, rolled on wet clay, created a durable clay seal for documents or containers conferring official status. Think a tax stamp on a liquor bottle, drawing from something from my low-down world. Kings and couriers wanted seals of the highest technical and aesthetic value. A seal with companions of the god Enki with water buffalos and an abstract river is an inch. We know from the king referenced on the seal that it’s from 2217 to 2193 b.c.

I also loved the fragments of bronze door decorations that would have run in bands along big wooden temple doors. War was a constant through every kingdom. These fragments show chariots, archers, and cavalry, a group of captives, and the happy king, depicted several times.

I’ve written about old English, American, and Dutch silver a few times over the years but the Vase of Enmetena, from around 2420 b.c., well, that’s antique on steroids. It’s 14 inches high and incised with a lion-headed eagle, bulls, and ibex, along with an inscription. An object of this kind had an infinitesimal chance at survival. Made of a precious metal, it would have been a prime candidate for the melting furnace.

The section called First Writing is my favorite since I’m a writer but also because I didn’t realize how handsome cuneiform is. Its wedge-shaped pictograph script is the earliest writing, starting in 3400 b.c. The images make for a tactile surface of rectangles, squares, and cones, some divided by deeply incised lines. Royal inscriptions, legal codes, maps, and contracts exist in the thousands. Tablet with a Hymn to King Shulgi of Ur looks like a monochrome Anselm Kiefer, or a Mark Tobey wall sculpture, if he did such fare.

A tablet from 1749 b.c. describes a student’s day. “I recited my tablet, ate my lunch, prepared my new tablet, wrote it, finished it, and then my exercise tablets were brought to me.” Note: no BLM rally, no struggle session, no break to pet puppies, and no psychotic tweeting. A how-to clay model of an animal liver teaches student diviners about reading omens. I’d like to borrow the incantation plaque repelling the dreaded demon Lamashtu, who gnawed on children. I hope to repurpose it to thwart COVID kooks wanting to keep schools closed for yet another year. Oh, and throw in Pazuzu, the exceedingly rare bronze demon used in the neo-Assyrian period, 934 to 610 b.c., in exorcism rituals. You see, bad as he was, he could repulse his big family of specialist demons. I’d pay Pazuzu overtime to schmatz all the demons operating in plain sight today.

By the time I got to First Kingdoms, the last section, I’d prepared a long to-smote list for Pazuzu, so I felt chipper. I’d so enjoyed the exhibition that I expected a splashy, rousing ending. There isn’t one. Small and, I will admit, spooky sculptures of King Gudea of Lagash date from around 2100 b.c. In their day, they had totemic significance. Wide-eyed and all-seeing, steady though squat, and broad-shouldered, Gudea became an emblem of good leadership over the centuries as later Mesopotamian kings sponsored excavations of their own. The sculptures of Gudea these digs uncovered were seen as precious antiquities when they were found.

A portrait head of Alexander the Great ends the show, technically. It’s one of the most beautifully modeled busts of Alexander to survive and was discovered in Alexandria. I found the quick transition from Gudea to Alexander, some 2,000 years later, jarring, as if waking from an intense dream. Enki, Gudea, cuneiform, and Pazuzu don’t seem to inform my world, and Alexander does. I’m not sure if loans weren’t available from the Louvre. The exhibition seems to end with a thud.

I’ll forgive the Getty of almost anything, though. Also on view, but in a separate wing of the villa, is a loan of about a dozen massive gypsum reliefs from the Palace of Ashurbanipal and other Assyrian kings. These loans come from the British Museum. From 900 to 600 b.c. the Assyrian Empire was a world power spreading from the Persian Gulf to what was once the Kingdom of Egypt. It embraced southeastern Turkey, part of the Caucasus, Cyprus, and Tyre, Samaria, and Jerusalem down to the Sinai.

These reliefs, once painted in vivid colors, are iconic, since most New England college and university museums have one or more. They’re life-size, so they give a sense of the scale of Assyrian palaces that’s missing in the Mesopotamia show. Many came from Nineveh. Depicted are protective spirits, bull hunts, battles, and everyday court life. I’m not sure why the two exhibitions weren’t at least put on the same floor. They’re separate, I know, but they complement each other.

I think the Getty does the most intelligent and attractive exhibitions. There’s always half a dozen or more to see, divided between the villa and the Getty Center in Brentwood. Two or three weren’t good at all. This surprises me.

The exhibit In Focus: Protest is a pious, scattered little thing, obviously a salad made from what’s found in the fridge and tossed fast. It proposes to show work “recording protests or demonstrations or bearing witness to daily injustices to make them better known.” A photograph of women campaigning for presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes in 1916 is there, and I wonder why. I’d say that bouncing Woodrow Wilson, the worst, most destructive president in our history, was a cause with urgency, but this is a campaign rally, not a protest. A photograph of a flying or tattered American flag by Robert Mapplethorpe is remotely on topic, as is Men’s Room, Memphis Railway Station, by Robert Frank from 1955.

In Context: New Acquisitions is another odd little show. It’s a gallery with four drawings, two blank walls, and no context. Rubens’s Study for Balthazar isn’t a new acquisition. The Getty bought it in 2017. It’s a strong oil sketch of a black man posing as Balthazar, one of the Three Magi. “The portrayal carries with it complicated stories about power, faith, and race in seventeenth-century Europe,” a short label says. Memo to the curator: That ain’t context. It’s a lazy, throwaway line.

Artists as Collectors sounded promising, but it’s a dud. The show’s 30 drawings from the Getty, among them Raphael’s Christ in Glory, from around 1519, and Van Dyck’s The Entombment, from 1617. The Raphael belonged to Thomas Lawrence, a big name, but, as in most of the show, “Why did Lawrence buy this?” isn’t tackled, since the show was clearly done either hastily or by an intern, and that’s a hard question. The Entombment belonged to Nicolaes Flinck, a Rotterdam collector who really wasn’t an artist. He sold his massive collection of drawings to the Duke of Devonshire.

The Getty owns half a dozen drawings from Flinck’s collection, all bought from the eleventh duke in 1984. Flinck and the Duke is a show. Artists as Collectors is a soupçon. Bearded Man Filling a Glass, by Georgio Vasari, belonged to Paul Sandby. “The exaggerated figures and treatment of light and shadow might have been topics of discussion at one of the many social gatherings Sandby is known to have had,” the label says. Or they might have talked about the weather, a cricket match, or the latest crappy summer exhibition at the Royal Academy.

These aren’t picky points. The Getty’s got the finest curators in the world and an immensely rich drawings and photographs collection. They’ve been working from home for a year and a half, free of the stress of commutes, choosing which shoes to wear in the morning, and seeing colleagues they don’t like, or at least not in the flesh. You’d think we’d see delight after delight, stimulated not by leisure but by the time to think big thoughts without distracting hassles.

The Getty can certainly do it. The Expanded Landscape, for instance, is a striking show of big-format contemporary landscape photography, and by “big,” I mean things like Greg Crewdson’s creepy, 57-by-88-inch color print of the Housatonic River as it runs through Lee in Massachusetts, about 50 miles from my home.

Edith Wharton lived in Lenox, but Ethan Frome lived in Lee, or Starkfield, or in a little livin’ hell, in Wharton’s take. Crewdson does her one better, giving Lee a look that a Goth would love. There’s one arresting photograph from Ori Gersht’s White Noise portfolio from 1999. He’s an Israeli artist. White Noise is a series of fuzzy, monochromatic photographs taken from a train moving in the winter from Belzec to Auschwitz in Poland. Expanded Landscapes took care and discernment to do, not lots of time. The Getty’s photography curators are the best in the country.

The Getty has done many incarnations of one-object exhibitions focusing on work from its decorative-arts collection. I’ve seen many of them, and I always think, “This one’s the best.” A single luxurious French armchair from the 1770s is the subject of Silk and Swan Feathers. The chair survives virtually unaltered, with its original painted wood, vibrant crimson-silk floral upholstery, and wide seat accommodating what must have been a big aristocratic derrière. I assume that, after almost 250 years, new geese were enlisted for the feathers filling the deep, copious cushions.

The object is X-rayed, with the show taking us step by step through how craftsmen made this luxury item. Over the years, the Getty’s curators and conservation experts have given this treatment, both forensic and art-historical, to a bronze from Pompeii, a chandelier, a Renaissance cabinet, illuminated manuscripts, and frames.

The Getty’s shows tend to be boutique in size and feeling. It’s rare for Getty shows, from the permanent collection or from loans, to have more than 50 objects. Subjects tend to be niche, in the best way, such as Peasants in Pastel: Millet and the Pastel Revival, or Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India, or a show on Paolo Veneziano, the late-medieval Venetian artist, which is there now. Pablo Veneziano: Art and Devotion in Fourteenth Century Venice exhibits about 15 objects from the 1350s through the 1360s, borrowed from here and Europe. Like almost all Getty shows, it’s anchored by an object the museum owns. This gives immediate context and purpose.

Its exhibition philosophy is drawn from the Clark Art Institute’s, in some ways an inspiration for the Getty, at least in the 1990s and 2000s. I know this because I worked at the Clark then. The Getty had just opened its big new home. We were constantly exchanging ideas and visits.

Getty shows star artists we may not know such as Veneziano, or it may showcase artists we think we know well, like Rembrandt, and give us a slice of the artist’s career that surprises us. Andrea del Sarto is famous. But how his workshop functioned is a new, intriguing story. Jean-Louis David is renowned for his work during the French Revolution but not for his late portraits. The Getty does some retrospectives — its big Jean-Léon Gérôme show was the stuff of dreams — and lots of photography shows.

The Getty’s photography collection and its exhibitions give the place a hip, modern vibe. Shows on Herb Ritts, Sally Mann, Sam Wagstaff’s collection, and an upcoming Imogen Cunningham are certainly attractive to a younger crowd, but photography is only the latest medium for visualizing our world and ourselves. It’s of a piece with image-making over 5,000 years.

A nice, comfortable size, a balanced program, not an object wasted, lucid, new scholarship, surprise, and the highest production values define its loan shows. Many of the curators come from the Clark, so they’ve been acculturated. The Getty’s shows are almost always tight. I’ve seen rambling shows at the Clark and too many shows of gratuitous treasures there in the past ten years, though it seems to have returned to the formula that made it the museum-wide standard and the Getty’s model.

I’ve seen lots of shows at the Met that are conceits, such as the Cosimo I de’ Medici show I reviewed, or lightweight tootles like the Alice Neel show. This is a New York phenomenon right now, and I’m sure it will be a university and college art-museum tact now that they’re finally opening after a year and a half in hibernation. I can’t imagine the Getty using art to decorate a soapbox or to blast dumb pop catchwords at us such as “systemic racism” and “the patriarchy” and call them art history. That said, we’ve seen so much in the last year that seemed beyond the pale, beyond the scope of human imagination, and beyond even science fiction.