BLANKET STATEMENTS : AMISH WAYS BECOME CLEAR IN 2 EXHIBITS HIGHLIGHTING PRIVATE FOLK.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

In the beginning, Susan Einstein didn't know much about the Amish.

And what little she did know was mostly cliches - the Amish as God's chosen people or, at the other extreme, the Amish as grim-faced bumpkins.

``I knew the things that most people know,'' Einstein says, ``that they use horse and buggies and they dress weird. I think I knew that they lived in Pennsylvania.''

That was back in the early 1980s, before Einstein spent four years on the fringes of an Amish community in rural Lagrange County, Ind.

Eleven years later, her views of her ex-neighbors are richer and more ambivalent. Gone is the romanticized image of noble farmers speaking an antique German dialect and leading a pure, ``Brigadoon''-like existence.

In its place is a detailed group snapshot of a people whose rustic humor, homespun individualism and egalitarian outlook were as impressive as they were unexpected to the 49-year-old free-lance photographer.

At the same time she embraced these traits, Einstein found that many aspects of the Amish worldview clashed with her bookish, Jewish upbringing on the Westside of Los Angeles.

``My feelings to this day are very split,'' sums up Einstein, formerly the staff photographer for UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History. ``There was a lot about them I really liked and respected, and a lot I didn't like. They have a negative view of education and they're pretty narrow-minded about a lot of things.''

For the next 3-1/2 months, the public can share Einstein's unusual perspective on a community that has kept its back turned on America for the better part of three centuries.

``Views of an Amish Community: Photographs by Susan Einstein'' is one of two exhibitions at the Fowler Museum that offer a rare, privileged glimpse of a notoriously private clan.

The second show also may hold new discoveries for those whose impressions of Amish culture were shaped by Hollywood constructions like ``Witness'' and ``Kingpin.''

``A Quiet Spirit: Amish Quilts From the Collection of Cindy Tietze and Stuart Hodosh'' offers 50 examples - many of them strikingly beautiful - of a time-honored Amish folk art as preserved by two longtime L.A.-based collectors.

Characterized by remarkably bold, complementary colors and dizzying geometric riffs, these quilts celebrate a communal spirit that lately has been revived, most notably, in the massive AIDS memorial quilt. Though based on traditional patterns, and typically between 50 and 70 years old, many have the vitality of modern abstract paintings.

To outsiders, that vibrancy contrasts sharply with the community's buttoned-up, two-tone appearance. Descended from an ascetic sect of Swiss-French-German Protestants, Amish settlers in America sought freedom from persecution amid the fertile fields of the Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states.

Now scattered across 22 states and the Canadian province of Ontario, the 150,000 Amish hold the rest of North America, generically known as ``the English,'' in deep suspicion. They've adapted by sticking fast to their core values of obedience to God, self-restraint and simplicity, while rejecting whatever smacks of modern convenience - TVs, phones, cars, computers.

It took Einstein months to gain the trust that allowed her to penetrate that veil, and to overcome the taboo that forbids the creation of graven images.

Even after four years, she never lost the sense of being a visitor, an artist-anthropologist like her idol, Walker Evans, whose lens chronicled the Depression-era South.

The 50 photographs on display go a long way toward humanizing Einstein's subjects, especially children. Here, a group of young girls laugh as they hang from a playground ride. There, a teen-age boy leans against his prized Chevy, an indulgence permitted Amish youth during the period of controlled rebellion known as ``rumspringa'' - the ``running-around time.''

``People think that they're stern and humorless,'' says Einstein. ``Quite to the contrary, they have these wonderful, simple and country-esque senses of humor, like they tell really cornball jokes.''

Other photographs, depicting such scenes as a group of tables set for a wedding reception or a ritual barn-raising, show the communal glue that still unites the culture.

Despite her frustrations, Einstein says, she'd welcome the chance for a return visit someday.

``I don't think there's a day that goes by that I don't see something or filter something through that experience. Everything about it either had a good side or a negative side. I think it broadened me incredibly in the way I look at the world.''

THE FACTS

What: ``A Quiet Spirit: Amish Quilts From the Collection of Cindy Tietze and Stuart Hodosh'' and ``Views of an Amish Community: Photographs by Susan Einstein.''

Where: UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History, on the campus just west of Royce Hall.

Hours: Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 8 p.m. Thursdays; through Feb. 16.

Admission: $5 adults; $3 seniors, non-UCLA students, UCLA faculty/staff and Alumni Association members; $1 UCLA students; free to museum members and visitors 17 and under; free to everyone on Thursdays.

Information: Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

5 Photos

Photo: (1) Fifty of Susan Einstein's photographs of the Amish are on display at UCLA's Fowler Museum. She spent four years photographing members of the sect in Indiana.

(2--3--Color) The ``Star of Bethlehem''-patterned quilt, left, and the ``Broken Star'' pattern, above, are two Amish quilts from the collection of Cindy Tietze and Stuart Hodosh.

(4--Color) This crib quilt with a ``Hole in the Barn Door'' pattern by Frannie Miller is on display at UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

(5--Color) This cotton quilt with a ``Double Wedding Ring'' pattern and Chinese border was made by an anonymous Pennsylvania artist around 1940.