Perhaps the most important lesson to take away from “Eternal Ancestors,” an astonishing, even historic exhibition of Central African reliquary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is that you are free to respond to its nearly 150 objects in any way you please.

The dominant intellectual thrust of this show is that the early admirers of this art, in the closing decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, had little or no understanding of the true religious and social functions of the artifacts that they greeted with either condescension or misguided exuberance.

But many people who come to see this art — an unparalleled and possibly unreplicable loan exhibition of the most striking artifacts of the Bantu-speaking peoples — will be drawn to it by an aesthetic appetite rather than an anthropological or religious one. They will approach the art as pure form, as though the bronze, wood, and mixed-media objects existed in a timeless void.

And many visitors, consciously or unconsciously, will see the art through the eyes of Picasso. They will appreciate — though not in so many words, of course — the authenticity that the art is widely felt to embody. At the same time, the art is apt to seem so delightfully modern that an unguarded viewer might find himself imagining that these anonymous artisans were imitating their European pupils or that, through a convergence of energy and attitude, they themselves were proto-Modernists. I mention all of these ways of looking at traditional African art because, in exhibitions of this sort — not that there are many as good as this — you can always count on someone to point out that these objects were not originally intended as art at all. And yet, it is entirely reasonable to view the art in formalist terms. Surely there is more to the art than that, but the purely formal aspects are quite enough.

In a formalist reading, the single most powerful impression made by these objects is their will to abstraction, and, through abstraction, their expression of force. Many civilizations, from the Lascaux cave painters to the stone carvers of the Cyclades and of Medieval France have, at one time or another, reduced the observable world to pure form. And Central African art has, in many superb sculptures from the 17th-century kingdom of Benin, also exhibited a flair for something approaching realism. But the varieties of abstraction, the willingness to transform retinal reality by pulling, flattening, or inflating it beyond recognition, have never been explored more fully than in the arts on view at the Met. In one standing male figure from Gabon, fashioned by a member of the Mbete people, kaolin, fiber, bone, iron, and glass beads are all decanted into a rough-hewn cylinder standing upon squat, plinth-like stumps and surmounted by a head whose eyes are formed by cowrie shells and whose teeth are a sequence of brass tacks. Other works evoke Picasso with even more intensity. One of these is a freestanding head formed mainly from wood and made by one of the Betsi, a member of the Fang group, also of Gabon. Unlike the previous work, this one expresses a mood that, in European terms, could be called Apollonian. It is restrained and cool in the way it stretches the head from the broad apex of the forehead down to the pointed pout of the mouth and up and back to the pointed summit of the skull.

Perhaps the most cubistic work of all — it resembles one of the heads in Picasso’s watershed “Demoiselles d’Avignon” of 1907 — is a Beete Mask of an antelope, or booang, from the Republic of Congo. Here, the eyes have been reduced to the narrowest of slits, the nose and mouth to a series of abbreviated planes, and the horns achieve a jagged symmetry of wrenched lines that never touch. It would be a fool’s errand to attempt to describe or even to catalog the seemingly endless varieties of abstracted form that the artists of Central Africa created, and in what appears to have been a very short space of time. Indeed, despite the widespread inclination to attribute a deep ancientness to the splendid works on view, most of what we see was created in the final years of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th. This is largely because the materials used were so perishable that — unless one took the utmost care — they would quickly vanish away in the humid air of equatorial Africa.

And though the artists who fashioned these works were indisputably animated by a profound instinct for form and a deep sense of visual beauty, they do not appear to have had a sense of the sovereign importance of the artistic act, as we in the West have today.

They merely created to please themselves and to serve their community. Whether they had any sense of themselves as artists, whether they had any notion of the rare beauty they had achieved, would make the subject of another fine exhibition at the Met.

There are, however, no doubts about that achievement. And if proof were needed, it could hardly come in more emphatic form than this new exhibition at the Met.

Until March 2 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).