The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 131

MONDAY, MARCH 3, 1997 F9oc LOS ANGELES TIMES Adding Insight to Works of a Venetian Master Mammoth Area Avoids Fallout From 'Volcano' Art review: Oil sketches that worked out ideas for frescoes enliven Tiepolo exhibition. By CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT TIMES ART CRITIC V. EW YORK-Giambattista I Tiepolo (1692-1770) has al- Iways seemed the textbook A'v. ranked 17th for the week and was seen by an estimated 18.3 million people. But with two volcanologists, as well as the Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, it was not popular, and criticisms against it on scientific grounds were even sharper than voiced by scientists against the film "Dante's Peak." David Hill, the U.S.

Geological Survey scientist in charge of monitoring volcanic activity near Mammoth Lakes, said "Fire on the Mountain" contained so many inaccuracies about volcanic situations that he found it "painful to watch." And Stanley Williams, a volcan-ologist at Arizona State University, said he refused to serve as a consultant on the film after he ascertained its producers "were more interested in creating excitement than in scientific fact." Donna Ebbs, who as Davis Entertainment's vice president of development dealt with the Mam-Please see MAMMOTH, F13 Television: Makers of the ABC movie change locale name after the ski resort objects. By KENNETH REICH TIMES STAFF WRITER The Mammoth Mountain Ski Area says it successfully objected to plans to use Mammoth Lakes as the name of the locale in the recent TV movie "Volcanoi Fire on the Mountain" after finding the script "offensive and exaggerated." After discussions between representatives of the ski area and producers at Davis Entertainment Co. of Century City, the name of the setting for the ABC film was changed to Angel Lakes, both parties confirmed. Despite going up against the smash hit "Schindler's List," the volcano movie did quite well with the TV audience on Feb. 23.

It if i V- Wanted: Extras for 'Primary Colors' on Tiepolo's witty creativity for a specific but dubious purpose. The aim is to rescue Tiepolo's artistic reputation from the doldrums in which it has pretty much languished for the past 200 years. To revive it, the museum points to his imaginativeness to make the startling claim that Tiepolo is a remarkably modern artist Yes, modern. This is surprising enough for a painter who was working at the height of his powers in the 1750s. When you consider also that Tiepolo's work has.

long been one representative of precisely the type of art and corresponding worldviewthat the political and artistic revolutions of the 19th century meant to sweep away, the claim becomes both audacious and bizarre. In fact, Tiepolo was no modern rebel out to upset the status quo. His clever art instead sought to conserve a passing order. In fact, a canonical Modern work such as Marcel Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)" (1915-23) can on one level be seen as a jaundiced satire that mocks just the sort of erotic oom-pah-pah machine that Tiepolo painted in "The Triumph of Zephyr and Flora." Tiepolo was the most famous Italian artist of the 18th century and among the most famous in all of Europe. Since then he's typically been regarded as the end of the line last in a great sequence of Italian painters originating in the early Renaissance, and last in a remarkable line of Venetians, which included his 16th century idols, Titian and Veronese.

Within a few decades of Tiepolo's death in 1770, his reputation had fallen far. Just think of events that occurred on subsequent familiar dates-like 1776 and 1789-and you'll see why critics began to regard him as a provincial exemplar of the decadent tastes of a fallen government. Those assessments don't hold up, but that doesn't mean Tiepolo doesn't remain the end of a line. His contemporaries recognized his peculiar genius and, interestingly, they too focused on the inventiveness that the Met now uses to spuriously claim his modernity. Merely reviving an awareness of a deft imagination today doesn't somehow shift Tiepolo from his secure position at the end of one line over to a vaunted place at the start of another.

Instead, praise Tiepolo for going out with a bang. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 5th Avenue at 82nd Street, New York, (212) 535-7710, through April 27. Closed Mondays. come. Aspirants are asked to dress casually.

The call will be on Saturday and Sunday. People whose last names start with A through should arrive by 10 a.m., through by 11 a.m., through by noon and through by 1 p.m. Information: (818) 777-8110. An open casting call for extras for the upcoming Universal Pictures movie "Primary. Colors," starring John Travolta, will be held next weekend at Universal Studios' Stage 23.

Men and women, ages 18 and up, both SAG and non-union, are wel definition of a celebrity artist. Famous for being famous, he's a painter whose name recognition far outstrips any sense of deep respect The Venetian master could turn a vast expanse of empty palazzo ceiling into an airy fantasy of glittering celestial figures, wafting on an invisible updraft into a periwinkle eternity, all to the giddy accompaniment of herds of fat pink cherubs and sylphidine trumpeters. And he could choreograph a composition in which a cast of hundreds came together in a heart-stopping crescendo, with a facility unmatched until Cecil B. DeMille parted the Red Sea. Some sense of what these frescoes are about can be had at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a large exhibition of 80 Tiepolo paintings is enlivened by a wonderful selection of modelli the magnificent oil sketches in which the artist worked out his initial ideas for frescoes (and altar-pieces).

In one, a classically exquisite Apollo encircled by a sunburst sheds his radiant light upon a luxurious gathering of exotically garbed ambassadors from four continents. In another a splendid apotheosis is performed by a rich Venetian family, identifiable by precise portraits of every man, woman and child. In a third a lustrous Virgin Mary rides atop the Holy House of Loreto as it miraculously flies through the air on a voyage of salvation from Nazareth to Italy, like a more serene Dorothy Gale on her way to an unimaginable Oz. Now, that entertainment. The modelli at the Met constitute the most affecting portion of the show.

One room pairs sketches with the actual corresponding altarpieces, allowing for revealing comparisons between planned and finished pictures. When you get to the sketches for absent ceiling frescoes, you've been subtly pre-' pared to crank up your imagination. And imagination's role in Tie-polo's art turns out to be the show's principal point Met curators Keith Christiansen and Andrea Bayer emphasize his imaginative inventiveness, in which standard subjects from Christianity and classical mythology were given surprisingly resourceful renditions, often laced with wit and irony. "Two Thumbs Up!" SISKEl I EBERT nil iitni iinii Huaeo del Settecenlo Venezuno "The Triumph of Zephyr and Flora," an oil on canvas ceiling painting in the Met exhibition, was done before Giambattista Tiepolo turned 40. fin HARD EIGHT RbhLfl RlB-tr inity DOrMerrofnedia Entertainment Gto9HSI COSTA MEM PASADENA W0001AK0 KILLS ttwrnlin BEVERLY HILLS towaidl Academy AMC nomenade 16 nrjiHuT WESTW000 PkiIk Ciesi 13101474-7866 Oill307HSIS7U 10 IS ftavetly Cemet Cinepln 13101 777-fllM 17! Sou Cmsi Plan leiDI 79S3547 18181883 2AMC 0j if 1 00 '3 15 30TISIQ(K 1714)546 2711 shadow and glistening light This ceiling composition is an astonishing erotic machine a pulsing image of delirious sexual fecundity rising to a breathlessly exhausting pitch.

The marriage between two powerful Venetian families that Tiepolo was hired to celebrate clearly involved a careful breeding effort, designed to produce potent offspring. (In case you're wondering, the planned pollination didn't work out. Hubby died shortly after the marriage, leaving a childless widow.) Inventive certainly describes "The Triumph of Zephyr and Flora." But the museum is focusing Take the exquisite "The Triumph of Zephyr and Flora," an oil on canvas ceiling painting executed before Tiepolo was yet 40. A kind of pictorial nuptial song, painted for the wedding of two children of patrician families, it depicts in convincingly foreshortened form the union of Zephyr, Greek god of the west wind, and a voluptuous Flora, Roman goddess of flowers. The dragonfly-winged Zephyr hovers in space, holding aloft a victorious crown of flowers, while the zaftig Flora is hoisted aloft on the back of an ever-so-slightly straining cupid.

The two demigods and a half-dozen attending putti are arrayed in an infinity of blue sky along a buoyantly Baroque spiral of clouds, which rhythmi- i cally darts in and out of deep ri HiiMm irimHf0'(, iv. lL i 'i tw 4 Iju'V BALDWIN HII1S MAGIC THEATRES AT CRENSHAW PLAZA 213290-5900 DAILY 11:10 AM 1:15 4:10 7:00 9:15 PM CENTURY CITY AMC CENTURY 14 310553-8900 DAILY 5:55 8:20 10:45 PM 4 HOURS FREE VALIDATED PARKING WITH TICKET PURCHASE "Mesmerizing! lulia Ormond Radiates A 1 .1" PeKtTroen, ROILING STONE Triumphantly Sensual!" Midud MM, NEW YORK POST vooi intelligence! A Min Nair Film Peter Twen. ROLLING STONE Prentl4innirB8TiB5n OMV. NO PASSES ACCEPTED KM THIS EMMEMEin CHECK THEATRE DHMC TOMES OA CAU KM SHOWTWES SOUTH COAST PLAZA EDWARDS TOWN CENTER 714751-4184 'IKAMASUTRA A TALE OF LOVE i jj nam na? A. "Two Thumbs Up!" BEVERLY HILLS Beverly Center Cineplex 13101 m-EIlM 1 72 -SISKKI.

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