In the Koch exhibit, there's a lot to love
Yes, the show is self-indulgent. It's also incredibly rewarding.
Call me a contrarian, but I have to admit I'm a fan of ''Things I Love: The Many Collections of William I. Koch" at the Museum of Fine Arts.
From the reviews, I was all prepared to hate a show that seemed to be about acquisition rather than appreciation. The judgments were ready: This show is like the American Repertory Theatre doing Neil Simon. This is like the Metropolitan Opera doing Andrew Lloyd Webber. This is like the Opera House trying to sell its name to Citizens Bank. (Whoops, that actually happened, didn't it?)
This is like . . . really very good.
Not that there isn't stuff to sniff at. The first things you notice are the two boats from the America's Cup race that Koch won in 1992, keeping strange company with the MFA's Western sculpture ''Appeal to the Great Spirit" by Cyrus Edwin Dallin on the museum's lawn. The sign accompanying the yachts makes the MFA sound like the Harvard Business School: ''Applying his tripartite philosophy of 'teamwork, technology and talent,' Koch made racing history in 18 months, with an innovative boat design, state-of-the-art technology, and a dedicated crew."
But once inside, it didn't take long to realize that almost all the works in the exhibit were things I loved, too. I grew up entranced by Errol Flynn movies and Horatio Hornblower novels; it was going to be the seafarin' life for me. Too bad I never learned to swim.
The lore of the high seas is the first thing you notice in the show. Hanging in a hallway near its entrance, Thomas Hemy's large canvas depicting men at war, ''The Shannon and the Chesapeake, Close Quarters," shivered me timbers, while other paintings caught both the adventure and the serenity of life on the high seas. Not the greatest art in the world, but not a bad beginning.
The main rooms of the exhibit in the Torf Gallery were what made a believer out of me. I've long thought that the non-Impressionist Americans of the 19th and 20th centuries produced some of the most underappreciated art there is. What a pleasure, then, to be greeted by Grant Wood's ''
In the middle of the first gallery is Pablo Picasso's primitivist ''The Drinkers Under the Bowers," made of glazed tiles, surrounded by Greco-Roman works that inspired Picasso, as well as bottles from Koch's wine collection, the likes of which probably also inspired the painter. Picasso liked his wine, and I do, too. Was I put off? No. Was I thirsty? Yes.
Picasso has some impressive European friends with him, guys by the name of Monet, Degas, Renoir, Modigliani, Dali, Magritte, Arp, Utrillo, Dufy, Chagall, Braque, and Miro. By now I'm thinking, ''How terrible is this, being able to get up close to these modernist masterpieces, particularly if one is Modigliani's simple but sensational 'Reclining Nude,' looking almost cartoonish one second and completely realistic the next?"
The Remington room offers other rewards. Neither Frederic Remington nor the filmmaker he inspired, John Ford, are my favorite artists in the world. The mythological West they extol hides hideous, ''Deadwood"-style barbarism.
Nevertheless, there's something undeniably riveting, like Richard Wagner gone cowboy, about Remington's paintings. And Koch's collection of Remington paintings and sculptures is breathtaking. Works by Remington's compatriot Charles Marion Russell, also in the collection, look amateurish by comparison. And the Remingtons aren't all cowboys and Indians. His ''Evening on a Canadian Lake," with two men and a dog in a canoe, is full of quiet warmth and beauty.
And I love the exhibition's whimsy -- the ship figureheads and the hilarious Fernando Botero sculptures that ring the exhibit, outside and inside the building. The Colombian artist's bloated ''Roman Soldier," ''Woman Smoking a Cigarette," and ''Man on Horseback," along with the ''Family" whose members are down from Koch's house on Cape Cod, are laugh-out-loud funny.
The scale of the exhibit, compared with some of the megashows that have been at the MFA, also allows time to cruise through the permanent collection afterward and find other Homers and Fitz Henry Lanes that complement Koch's collection so well. By contrast, I found the MFA's Ansel Adams exhibition exhausting and repetitious.
I'm obviously not an art expert, but I know what I like. And ''Things I Love" is one of them.
Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com. 
