CITY SPIRIT: N.Y. COMES TO LOYOLA

Long an obscure outpost of little interest and less energy, Loyola Marymount University’s Leband Art Gallery has pulled itself up by the bootstraps of American art history into a respectable position.

While exhibiting works by senior artists of the unsung, underrated or forgotten variety, Loyola has developed a distinctive point of view, a rare attribute in these days of pervasive confusion. About once a year we can now count on the gallery to dredge up a sparkling show from dust bins and closets of recent art history.

The gallery’s program began with a coup: a 1983 exhibition of expressionistic portraits by the indomitable Alice Neel, who died the following year. Isabel Bishop’s gentle urban scenes, presented in 1985, revived memories of another worthy veteran. Now Rafael Soyer, an 87-year-old survivor of American art’s humanist tradition, is featured among 45 other representational artists in “The Spirit of the City: American Urban Paintings, Prints and Drawings, 1900-1952,” through April 7.

“The City” is New York, or at least predominantly so, and “The Spirit” is rich with sensory experiences. You can almost pinch the juicy flesh of Reginald Marsh’s “Young Woman Walking” and feel the solitude of a tiny man walking the streets in Edward Hopper’s “Night Shadows.” You can nearly smell the chlorinated water in George Bellows’ lithograph of businessmen bathing in a YMCA pool and hear the clatter of Fritz Eichenberg’s caricatured “Subway” woodcut, overcrowded with the sagging bodies of bone-tired commuters.

The exhibition is an old-fashioned roundup of sensations familiar to everyone who has ever lived in or visited a metropolis. But it’s also a memory piece, recalling the exhilaration of unspoiled youth in the city, the devastation of the Great Depression and the conviction of artists who believed that the way to express life was to depict all manner of people living it.

“To paint the visible world through oneself was the thing,” Soyer writes in the catalogue, and that’s exactly what’s going on here. What was visible depended upon the observer; the cumulative result of their vision is a clash of forces that seems absolutely true to the complexity of cities.

One can see the show as a study of opposites: Guy Pene du Bois’ wealthy sophisticate compared to Minna Citron’s depressed domestic, the press of sweaty flesh in crowd scenes contrasted with the isolation of Hopper’s and Soyer’s solitary people, the majesty of soaring buildings against the frumpiness of their residents, the clamor of the streets next to the stillness of a cellar, the pathos of the unemployed relieved by the humor of corpulent people and fish observing each other in an aquarium.

One of the most interesting things about the show (organized by Ellen Ekedal and Susan Barnes Robinson) is that it conveys its message so clearly without a single masterpiece of the period. Most of the artists are represented by less than their best work and the exhibition is patched together with a few paintings that stand out like colorful flowers amid a field of smaller graphics. Yet the effect is a full experience of the period and the works are engaging, both collectively and individually.

Beyond its stated theme, “The Spirit of City” also recalls the last stand of American provincialism--before the international “triumph” of Abstract Expressionism. And, although some of the art looks quaint or nostalgic, the exhibition argues the case of artists so long out of fashion that they can be reconsidered with a measure of objectivity.

Many of them are deceased; the living are generally resigned to the fluctuations of their reputations. Soyer, who contributed several artworks to the show, wrote an introduction for the catalogue and recently delivered a public lecture at Loyola, says, “I have been lucky. Although I don’t belong to my time, people do respect me.” He has been so long out of step with reigning styles that he often adopts Ingres’ stance, asking, “If I don’t like the art of my century, must I belong to it?”

Soyer, a diminutive man with a pesky hearing aid and a very sharp memory, told The Times that this is a difficult period for artists because “they are not called upon” to perform important functions, as when Jacques-Louis David painted “The Coronation of Napolean.”

“Artists are not absolutely needed in technical times,” he said. “And if we are not needed, we are not strong. Young artists don’t know what to do with themselves. They are on their own while one ‘ism’ follows another.

“It’s very strange that there are more museums, more galleries, more artists, more books with jazzed-up illustrations than ever.” He sees a world proliferating with “great structures filled up with paintings that do not interest me.”

Art stopped for Soyer with Rembrandt, Manet, Degas, Cezanne and Courbet. He has no love for Picasso, Matisse, Braque and other “demigods of today.” Among his countrymen, he considers Thomas Eakins “the great American artist,” but he has profound respect for the work of like-minded colleagues and, in Los Angeles, for painter Joyce Treiman.

“For better or worse, I paint the way I like,” Soyer said. “It would have been the easiest thing in the world for me to become an Abstract Expressionist, but I wanted my art to say something about our time. When I was young, I painted my family as immigrants,” archetypes of the era and bewildered by foreign surroundings. One of three artists (with brothers Moses and Isaac) in a Russian family that encouraged competitive self-expression, Soyer “grew into art naturally,” first in Philadelphia and later in New York City.

“Later, in the ‘30s, I concentrated on the unemployed doing nothing, strikers and people just sitting on benches,” he continued. “Now I paint young women (not professional models) who are having trouble establishing relationships. They are not very happy.”

Throughout his work, there’s an aura of estrangement and loneliness, which Soyer acknowledges. “I’m very pessimistic about the art world today,” said Soyer , who remembers a time when artists could be well known or even famous without being celebrities. “We had something to say. Some artists still try very hard, but they don’t get a hearing.”

“The Spirit of the City,” then, wins Soyer’s approval. “A lot of knowledge and research and love of art went into it, and it does give the idea of New York City,” he said. “It’s a very fine, very unusual exhibition.”