ART REVIEW : ANGUIANO EXHIBITION AT EAST L.A. COLLEGE

Mexican muralist Raul Anguiano is being reintroduced to Southern California on his 70th birthday in an exhibition at East Los Angeles College. Though his work has been featured in solo shows here and his “Creation of Man” mural occupies a prominent place in Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology, his name is far less familiar than those of his contemporaries--Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros.

The exhibition at the college’s Vincent Price Gallery, through Friday, suggests that Anguiano’s relative obscurity is less a matter of competence than of originality.

In a crowded exhibition that scrambles chronology, mediums and subjects, Anguiano’s strengths appear to be his talent for volumetric drawing and his affinity for Indian people. He romanticizes them to the degree that he makes them monumental, self-contained and handsome, but romance rarely dissolves in sentimentality.

Anguiano is at the top of his form in recent drawings and lithographs depicting stylized women. Using a loose, sure line, he generously encircles forms so that they seem to expand from the inside to fill rounded contours. In these cropped compositions, one woman bends over a potter’s wheel, another holds her face in her hands and another sweeps her long hair into a wing-like configuration. They are heroic figures who exude inner power and external beauty.

A 1984 painting called “The Mason” reads as social-realist propaganda, but most other canvases portray the quiet dignity of earthy people in earthy colors. A 1957 painting and a 1978 tapestry take the theme of a funeral procession from a soulful interpretation of people carrying a casket on their shoulders to a reductive design depicting the backs of three sorrowing figures.

Anguiano’s drawings, paintings and prints present a sculptural sensibility, but the few bronze sculptures on view lack the clarity of his two-dimensional pieces. Ultimately, though, it’s unfair to judge the work of a muralist on the basis of a mixed bag of small, portable artworks.

Angelenos are offered another view of Anguiano’s art at 7 p.m. Tuesday, when he will give a free public lecture on “My Contemporaries and My Career” in Room 1200, Rolfe Hall, UCLA.