Boston Athenaeum at 200: a fascinating hodgepodge

One of the creepiest oddities you may ever see in a museum exhibition is a thin book included in "Acquired Tastes: 200 Years of Collecting for the Boston Athenaeum," a marvelous hodgepodge of a show celebrating the bicentennial of Boston's first library and art museum. The book looks innocent enough, but read the museum label and you discover that its apparently fine, pale leather binding is actually made of human skin -- not just anyone's skin, but that of its author, a professional thief named James Allen who, before dying in captivity in 1837, requested that his confessions be bound in this macabre fashion.

Nothing else in the exhibition is as shocking as Allen's book, but the show is nevertheless a fascinating, unsystematic compendium of more than 140 artworks, books, and artifacts accumulated by the library since its founding in 1807 . The exhibition was organized by Stanley Cushing , the Athenaeum's curator of rare books, and David Dearinger , its curator of paintings and sculpture.

Edification in the spirit of the French Enlightenment was the Athenaeum's mission at the start, and a feeling of high-mindedness fills the air. Many painted and sculpted portraits idealize eminent citizens. Among notable representations are plaster busts of Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette once owned by Thomas Jefferson . They were cast from originals by the great French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon .

Gilbert Stuart's portraits of James Perkins , one of the Athenaeum's founders, and of William Smith Shaw , the institution's first librarian, are beautifully painted if not otherwise terrifically exciting. But of all the show's portraits, the most remarkable is a miniature marble bust of William Lawrence , a Massachusetts businessman and philanthropist. Made by an unknown artist around 1844, it is a reduced version of a work made by a sculptor named Henry Dexter . The head is only about the size of a cue ball and its features are blurrily softened; it has a ghostly, almost surrealistic presence.

Neo-Classical idealism in art was the inspirational rule in the Athenaeum's early years. The collection includes finely made marble copies of antique works like the Venus de'Medici and a head of the Apollo Belvedere . Also in the Neo-Classical mode is a life-size nude Venus carved from marble in 1837-40 by Horatio Greenough , a native Bostonian who lived and worked with great success in Rome.

Greenough's snowy Venus is a coolly voluptuous figure and the carved relief built into its pedestal illustrating the Judg ment of Paris, though slightly primitive, has a wonderfully delicate eroticism. The catalog quotes part of a letter by the artist in which he says of his Venus, "I have endeavored to make a naked female figure perfectly pure," which is pretty funny considering how sexy she is.

An exception to the restraint of most of the exhibition's art is a massive painting by Benjamin West illustrating a scene from "King Lear." With its brawny, wildly gesturing figures and its stormy, nocturnal atmosphere, it exudes an explosive theatricality unlike anything else in the exhibition.

Another impressively expansive work is a history painting by John Trumbull . "The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar " depicts the moment of victory in a battle between British and Spanish forces. Painted in vivid detail and with great finesse on a canvas over 9 feet across, it was considered, according to the exhibition catalog, "one of the most important institutional acquisitions of a contemporary American painting of the day" when the Athenaeum bought it in 1828.

The Athenaeum's initially ambitious commitment to collecting and exhibiting fine art waned after the 1850s and dropped off precipitously with the founding of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1876 . Athenaeum trustees gave a good part of its collection to the MFA -- including West's "Lear," which the MFA now owns, and Trumbull's "Sortie," which was eventually sold to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art -- to make more room for its own primary interest in collecting books. The Ath e naeum remains a haven for bibliophiles, but what it now has to offer by way of art from the late 19th and 20th centuries is meager.

A painted sketch of a bearded man shows off the amazing, nonchalant facility of its creator, John Singer Sargent , and a wonderfully lively, thickly painted bouquet of flowers by the idiosyncratic modernist Florine Stettheimer adds an unexpectedly bright, lighthearted note to the otherwise solemn surroundings. Allan Rohan Crite's "Leon and Harriet," a painting of a couple out walking on a winter day in Boston from 1941, is a moving example of his project of portraying African-Americans as admirably ordinary members of the middle class.

The major movements in modern art -- Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism -- are absent from the exhibition, and notwithstanding the acquisition of recent photographs by Shelburne Thurber and Abelardo Morell , one gets the feeling that history -- or art history, at least -- has passed the Athenaeum by over the past century.

Where you do have a more immediate sense of contact with the complexities and grit of real world history is in objects other than traditional artworks, like the book bound by its author's skin and an 1856 daguerreotype portrait of John Brown, in whose ferocious visage you might sense intimations of the bloody violence of the coming Civil War.

A 17th-century map of the coast of New England; a copy of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" from the library of George Washington; a textbook for Native American children written in the Dakota language; a printed version of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln; a panoramic photograph of Boston in ruins after the great fire of 1872: These and dozens more artifacts document a conflicted and sometimes tragic real world from which the Athenaeum's art has provided over the years a refuge of transcendental refinement.

Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.