CONTRASTING EXHIBITS WITH A COMMON THREAD

Connie Zehr is a real person, but her art is an elusive legend. She fills whole rooms with metaphoric sand landscapes, then destroys them when her exhibition is over. If you missed her sea of egg-topped sand mounds at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1972, her desertlike “Red Carpet” of sand and terra cotta at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975, or her “Sand and Steel” installation at Caltech in 1981, you missed them. Period.

You might catch a second-hand glimpse of them through slides or photographs, but you’ll never experience the vulnerable surfaces, the wondrous hush or the exquisitely gentle beauty of these temporal artworks. Or so we thought, until the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park scheduled a retrospective of Zehr’s vanished projects. “Connie Zehr Flash Back: 1967-1985, An Installation of Mnemonic Fragments” is booked in at the Muni through Feb. 24.

Zehr has re-created scaled-down versions of six major sand installations for the exhibition and created a new one on the floor of the gallery. Along one wall are a series of photographs of hermit-crab tracks, a group of solid clay shoes and other intriguing objects made for early installations, delicate graphite drawings of feathers on silk and a group of dyed silk circles that look rather like an accompanying series of color photographs of flower petals. A slide show in a back room provides a chronological overview of Zehr’s oeuvre .

The exhibition is an extraordinary assembly of memory-jogging fragments that perform their intended function. They present a full picture of a woman’s work that tends to be forgotten because it is rarely physically present. What is lost in fragmentation, size reduction or juxtapositions is made up for in surveying the range and development of Zehr’s unique sensibility. Her work appears seamless because it consistently distills or translates nature in terms of the artist’s personal experience and poetic vision.

There’s private information tucked away in these sandy vistas, but you don’t have to be privy to it to feel the organic forces undulating under their fragile surfaces. It’s interesting to find out that “Eggs”--a white sand carpet of gridded peaks topped by brown-shelled eggs--was made when the women’s movement was giving Zehr a sense of pride in being female. Interesting, but not necessary to interpret the piece’s metaphorical content or to simply experience it without a specific meaning.

“Eggs” is a pristine abstraction that suggests fertility with a quiet dignity. The piece can be seen as a carpet of breasts with egg nipples or as a series of little monuments to the miracle of creation. It can also be viewed as an organic and profoundly human version of Minimalism. Yet, all these concepts seem rather arbitrary when applied to an artist who follows her spirit, responds to nature and operates intuitively.

The six re-created sand pieces form a rectangular enclosure for the central new one. “Eggs” segues into “The Crosswalk,” a white carpet with a long, striped mound facing a clump of four rounded protrusions (originally done for the Brand Library Art Gallery in 1971). A work called “The Rock,” with a shifted stone nested between two sandy mounds (created for Cal State Los Angeles in 1972), leads into “Sand and Steel,” a composition of two mesas flattened by a steel rod and plate, an untouched peak and a white clay ball.

Zehr has said that “Sand and Steel” represents her uncomfortable experience with outside, obstructive forces, while “Sand and Glass” (done at the Claremont Graduate school in 1981) refers to self-inflicted impediments. Again, it’s fascinating to learn how an artist’s life has shaped her art, but details aren’t necessary to appreciation. Such knowledge only confirms that the art’s evocative strength comes from genuine feelings, worked through the discipline of a transient medium.

In the new installation, Zehr pays homage to her teen-age son and addresses her acute awareness of the adult crossroads that lie ahead for him. “Criss Cross” is a poignant piece--the only work done in black and the only one to make central use of handmade objects. In it, a boatlike chunk of feather rock rests against a swell of black sand. On top of the porous boulder lie a white clay mask-face, a reddish lump of terra cotta and a little carved wooden fish, painted silver. The objects represent head, heart and spirit.

This metaphoric ship with its fragile cargo heads for an opening between two strips of black Lucite laid flat on the sand. Though the straight, slick path is perpendicular to the rock, neither collision nor peaceful parting seems certain. Like most of life’s troubling situations, this one is fraught with variables. “Criss Cross” gives us no ship of fools, no Fellini-esque spectacle. The rock seems to float silently through a dreamy ambiance where danger is more real because it is not quite apparent.

“Criss Cross” seems to cycle back to the days when Zehr used hand-fashioned objects in her installations, but it also follows a continuum of her personal experience. And her source of inspiration for the form her work takes remains constant. It’s not surprising that an artist fascinated with desert rock formations and shifting sands would be captivated by the capillary action of dyes on fabric, as shown in the silk pieces. Nor do we hit a bump when we see clay ballet slippers and sand landscapes in the same gallery. Both refer to human presence.

Finally, we realize that Zehr’s vision of landscape seems complete because it encompasses more than traditional landscape; the figure is in it and so is the arranging process of still life, so she has pretty well covered art’s waterfront. She has also balanced an attitude of classical repose and intellectually-ordered perfection with the voluptuousness and emotional pull of romanticism.

She likes to say that she uses matter as fact and metaphor. In fact, she has figured out how to have it both ways--and made us the richer for it.

Sharing space with Zehr’s distinctly contemporary installations is a traditional looking historical show, “Old Master Drawings From the Feitelson Collection,” featuring 70 works collected by two revered artists, the late Lorser Feitelson and his wife Helen Lundeberg. On the face of it, this pairing might be construed as a judicious balance or a contrast staged to appeal to separate constituencies. But the two exhibitions have a significant common thread: both bare the souls of Southland artists.

While Zehr reveals herself as an artist--and person--of exterior vulnerability and interior toughness, the Feitelsons’ collection shows them to be modern artists who valuedfine drawing and people who cheerfully spent their meager income on artworks of quality. They had no thought of investment, except in the future of art. Since Lorser Feitelson’s death, the drawings have been part of a foundation geared to educational service.

UC Santa Barbara Prof. Alfred Moir and a small group of his students have catalogued the drawings, thus using them for study and sharing their findings with the public. The Feitelson collection was first exhibited at the university; it will remain on view at the Muni through Feb. 24.

Once we get past the fact that such a collection exists at all, we see that it doesn’t lend itself to categorization. Works cover the 16th through the 19th centuries and range from fluid doodles to laboriously finished renderings. Figures predominate, but themes encompass everything from religious and mythical scenarios to portraiture, figure studies and landscapes.

There’s passion in Daniele da Volterra’s “The Deception of Ixion,” depicting a mythical union, which produced a race of centaurs. Terror reigns in the Circle of Taddeo Zuccaro’s ink and wash drawing of “Firing of the Temple of Jerusalem.” Insightful character studies make crusty old men come to life in the work of Raymond Laface and Andrea de Leone. A gaggle of faces in the cross-hatched penwork of Mauro Gandolfi offers a full circle of ages.

Antonio Tempesta’s “Anthony Before Cleopatra” and a “Battle Scene” by an anonymous 17th-Century artist present theatrical action in high-contrast compositions. A deftly modeled “Saint Domitilla,” derivative from Cristofano Roncalli (called il Pomerancio) and portraying a luxuriously draped woman in an arched niche, is so silky it looks like a painting.

As you may have guessed from this short list, the Feitelson collection is not long on celebrated names, though the couple did manage to acquire works by such prominent figures as Tiepolo. The Feitelsons bought what they liked among things they could afford, mainly from what was available in Los Angeles. Their attitude is all the more admirable because they amassed quality among works of often shaky attribution and by people identified as Anonymous Lombard, imitator of . . . , derivative from . . . , or the Pseudo-Gherardi (an anonymous draftsman, presumably a 17th-Century Italian).

That takes courage or faith in your eye, two qualities the Feitelsons had in abundance.