TWO PORTRAIT EXHIBITS: DIFFERENT STROKES : Male Dominance and Severity at the County Museum Are Replaced by Feminine Exclusivity and Expressive Abandon at Security Pacific

‘I’m afraid we’re pretty much the same thing, over and over,” says a potato-faced man as he surveys a portrait gallery of other potato-faced people in a recent New Yorker cartoon.

The woeful little fellow might reconsider if he saw two current offerings of portraits in Los Angeles. Both depict artists--and not the lumpy royalty portrayed in the cartoon--but the portraiture covers such a plethora of styles and attitudes that the old genre is all but obliterated.

“Artists by Themselves,” the County Museum of Art show of artists’ portraits from the National Academy of Design, seems to cover a full range of 19th- and 20th-Century portrait painting. Works progress from a score of somber, dark-suited, bearded men painted against murky backgrounds to James Wyeth’s luminous view of himself as a longhaired, bare-chested free spirit of the ‘60s.

From a demure Cecilia Beaux to a scruffy Burton Silverman, from an elegant Thomas Moran to a rotting Ivan Albright, from a painfully vulnerable Thomas Eakins to a weirdly vacuous George Tooker, the exhibition seems to reflect an endless variety of artists looking at themselves and other artists.

Seems to, on both counts, but the apparent breadth is relative.

For a far more startling study in contrasts, compare “Artists by Themselves” to “Self-Portraits by Women Artists,” downtown at Security Pacific’s Gallery at the Plaza. Here, the neat regularity of framed paintings is broken by outsize photographs, unstretched canvases, Xerox montages and tiny pencil drawings. Male dominance and severity at the County Museum of Art are replaced by feminine exclusivity and expressive abandon at Security Pacific. Isolated faces and penetrating gazes of realistic people are supplanted by floating bodies and blurry heads or narratives and symbolic abstractions.

The difference is more than a matter of date and gender. The National Academy of Design portraits were done to satisfy a diploma requirement, so they are sober, public images--at least in the early years. According to an 1839 regulation, artists elected as associates of the academy had to donate self-portraits or portraits of themselves painted by a friend.

About 1,300 of these paintings are now in the academy’s collection. When it came time to mounta survey exhibition of them, William H. Gerdts of the City University of New York did the primary winnowing and Michael Quick, curator of American art at the County Museum of Art, finally narrowed the field to 72 paintings.

For all the formal regularity of the early paintings, they are not “the same thing, over and over,” largely because they were done from the inside out. Variance of the prescribed format by altering the sitter’s position and lighting is less important than the feeling that these are not court portraits but restrained character studies done by an authority on the subject.

Around the turn of the century, the artists began to push out of portrait constraints imposed by the academy. All the paintings are sufficiently representational to be clear likenesses, but the dark, unelaborated busts slowly give way to lightened palettes and the influence of Impressionism, Expressionism and variations of Realism. The artists begin to pose in informal clothing with tools of the trade and often infuse their pictures with psychological overtones.

The rather haughty elegance of John Singer Sargent’s 1892 self-portrait hangs about midway in the survey, its greenish palette and fluid style breaking with tradition but representing only one supremely confident step on the road to dramatic change. Three years earlier, when William John Whittemore painted Charles C. Curran, he contrasted the striking, dark silhouette of an artist in a black bowler with a white sculpture of a female nude. Here, the composition is more interesting than the ostensible subject.

In the gallery of more recent portraits, an aesthetic and psychological upheaval breaks loose. Suddenly we are faced with expressions of apprehension and gloom, mean spirits and accusations. While Robert Brackman and Robert Philipp retreat into the fuzzy mysteries of their studios, a gang of harshly lighted guys in Western garb belligerently guard their turf. A worried Andrew Wyeth stalks through a field with his collar turned up against an impending storm. Edwin Walter Dickinson turns away from us--and from a geometric configuration scratched on a wall--while Raphael Soyer appears so painfully shy that he can hardly bear to meet his audience’s inspection.

The image of the artist as a troubled soul or as a recluse shoved out into the light unifies the disparate work with a spirit of unease and lends life to a potentially dreary show. Yet, there’s a stultifying air about this assembly of often excellent art. While illuminating a fascinating, ongoing chapter of American art, the paintings appear in the context of a stuffy club.

The contemporary women’s self-portraits at Security Pacific pick up where “Artists by Themselves” ends by leaping into a variety of mediums and letting all manner of self-examination hang out. Despite the female connection, this show reads as a gathering of a dozen individuals chosen for their distinctive points of view. The work suffers from self-consciousness but revels in the chance to explore multiple identities and bring the concept of portraiture up to date.

D. J. Hall inspects herself and social attitudes with unrelenting accuracy, but most others in the show retreat behind symbolism, changing identities or abstraction. While Joan Brown reveals her vulnerability in “Self-Portrait” and “Joan and Donald,” Marcia Marcus over-designs herself as a statuesque Athena and photographer Cindy Sherman attempts to lose herself as she dresses up in costumes and plays an endless variety of roles.

Applying the fluidity of her lithographic work to washy, unstretched canvases, Ruth Weisberg sets herself in a dreamy ambiance that moves back and forth through time. Brenda Goodman magically transforms herself into a long dress on a hanger, pierced by a streak of light leading to a pair of rabbit ears in a hat. Blythe Bohnen records herself as a moving being with a camera set at a slow shutter speed, then compares these blurry images to strokes of watercolor, painted on separate sheets. By far the least self-obsessed works in the exhibition, these abstractions turn the portrait into a means of exploring another sphere.

What’s most interesting about the eclectic grouping of artists at Security Pacific is not their individuality, or even specific works. It’s a change from women asking, “How do I look?” and “Who am I?” to “What is my place in history?” and “What can I be now?” They haven’t accepted the finality of the New York cartoon.

“Artists by Themselves” ends March 15. “Self-Portraits by Women Artists” runs through April 7.