LITHOGRAPHY, THE PAINTER’S ACCOMPLICE

One of the underrecognized strengths of the San Diego Museum of Art is its collection of various works on paper. But that’s not hard to fathom considering the premium placed by most art institutions on big, turnstile-spinning shows of painting, sculpture and artifacts of broad appeal.

It’s a little surprising, then, to note how appealing the museum’s current exhibition of “Twentieth Century American Lithographs” seems, especially since only 30 works are on display (through March 3) in an unassuming, unprettied corner nook. All of them are from the museum’s permanent collection, and curator Martin E. Petersen has carefully arranged them to quickly illuminate the history of American lithography and, especially, the two master printers, Bolton Brown and George C. Miller, who assisted some important painters in transforming a minor medium into a major art form.

The history lesson, and the show’s full-scale display of a lithographer’s studio that caps the presentation, serves a neat purpose. It makes clear how fluidly a painter can switch media, explore a new avenue of expression, and leave a good deal of the outcome to chance--or at least to the talents of a printer. Lithographs derive from grease drawings on thick slabs of limestone, chemically fixed and printed with infinite variability. It took printers of the caliber of Brown and Miller to do justice to the visions of painters like George Wesley Bellows, Childe Hassam and Thomas Hart Benton.

Brown and Bellows pulled most of the major prints during lithography’s earliest days, in the first decades of this century. Modest works by James McNeill Whistler are at the outset of this exhibit, but quickly we’re confronted by the familiar, knockout imagery of George Wesley Bellows’ “A Stag at Sharkey’s” (1917). This dense, dynamic depiction of a boxing match has been cited among the most important American lithographs (the SDMA’s print is “No. 16”) and it’s easy to see why, for there’s a painterly depth of texture--and a rightness of subject matter--that is enhanced by the black-and-white format.

Childe Hassam’s 1918 depiction of a Colonial church is also monochromatic but nonetheless exudes a shimmering, impressionistic lyricism. And Charles Sheeler’s 1921 “Delmonico Building”--another “important” lithograph--is as spaciously architectural as the New York it captures.

Crossing the show’s threshold into the Depression-era lithographs, one finds Rockwell Kent’s iconography of dispossessed yet heroic Americans--”Resting” (1929), “And Now Where” (1936)--and Fletcher Martin’s portrayal of a longshoremen’s brawl (“Trouble in Frisco”) that bears a debt to Bellows’ “Sharkey’s.”

But Thomas Hart Benton’s 1939 “Departure of the Joads”--a scene inspired by John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and commissioned by 20th Century-Fox in the promotion of the film version--is about as painterly as American lithography gets. One’s eyes immediately sense a poignant, full-color Steinbeck sunset and good-earthiness in Benton’s rich, rounded black-and-white arrangement of figures against sky and landscape. Sharing the wall with this--and overshadowed by it--is Jackson Pollock’s “Stacking Hay,” a 1936 effort vaguely in the style of Benton. From across the Atlantic, Frederico Castellon’s 1938 “Rendezvous in Spanish Landscape” is vividly yet starkly surreal.

From that era, the modern art world was quick to institutionalize the lithographic process, but as the display leads us into the ‘50s and ‘60s, it’s the energy and sense of discovery of the earlier works that resonate the most. Richard Diebenkorn’s 1961 untitled print--an angular, enfolded nude--may as well have been drawn on paper. Can it be that the mysteries of the lithographic process have been all but refined away? What was a peculiar challenge at the turn of the century has been met--perhaps to a fault.