WILSHIRE CENTER

A melancholy breeze wafts through Ruth Weisberg’s art, ruffling the hair of somber women in an ink drawing called “Exile,” filling theatrical players with sadness in works based on the commedia dell’arte, and generally giving her oeuvre a deathly dreaminess. With their transparent overlaps and fade outs, Weisberg’s pale lithographs and washy drawings seem to be essentially about the passage of time and the persistence of memory.

An old woman in a dance studio appears to reflect upon her youth. A young artist stands stiffly between her drafting table and the bombed-out Synagogue of Danzig. Though only a few pieces in Weisberg’s current exhibition of prints and drawings overtly address the Holocaust, all of her work seems colored by that unthinkable tragedy, and the people so diligently portrayed are crusty shells with all the juice drained out of them. This leads to art that often seems emotionally vacuous, but the tone is more like shell-shock. Her people are adrift in their thoughts and strangely divorced from--or robbed of--their history.

This view of the world is sadly one-dimensional and, despite her extraordinary skill and dedication, Weisberg’s graphic art has become predictable. Amid this show of mostly familiar images are a couple of welcome surprises: black-and-white photographs that successfully evoke fleeting time and ethereal substance. (Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., to Oct. 19.)