‘THE INTERPRETIVE LINK’ AT NEWPORT MUSEUM

We tend to think of European Surrealism as an art of weird but recognizable images of melting watches and nudes with drawers in their chests. American Abstract Expressionism, by contrast, is an art of splashed and skidding paint that seems the antithesis of Surrealism. In fact, it has long been understood that AE took its mind-set from Surrealist investigations of the subconscious and spontaneous art making. Now the Newport Harbor Art Museum has put together an exhibition illustrating the connection.

“The Interpretive Link: Abstract Surrealism Into Abstract Expressionism, Works on Paper, 1938-48” opens Thursday and continues to Sept. 14. It constitutes the first curatorial effort to explore, through drawings, the link between European Surrealism and the formative years of American Abstract Expressionism. Containing approximately 140 works, the exhibition features, among others, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, William Baziotes, Hans Hofmann, Yves Tanguy, Wilfredo Lam, Roberto Matta Echaurren and Jackson Pollock, artists whose works transformed Surrealist and Automatist traditions of the 1930s into ‘40s abstraction.

The curator, Paul Schimmel, develops his thesis by examining a number of artists’ early drip and web techniques used to express primordial and intuitive imagery originating in the unconscious. The consequence of pursuing such sensory perceptions, led to the gut-level, spontaneous action painting.

The exhibition will travel to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. An illustrated catalogue with essays by Schimmel and other art historians has been published by the Newport Harbor museum.

An organization dedicated to keeping records of the local art community will hold a program meeting Wednesday, 7-9 p.m. The Southern California Committee for Contemporary Art Documentation’s subcommittee for artist files and slide registries will meet in the Board Room of the County Museum of Art. The meeting will include a slide exchange and advise artists on the documentation of their work.

Non-members are asked to call Ray Reese (213) 206-1301 for admission to the meeting.

Among committee projects under way is a guidebook, “Art of Our Time in Southern California: A Guide to the Documentation of Contemporary Art,” compiled by William Cohen and soon to be published by Garland Press.

IN SANTA BARBARA: Continuing through July 20, at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, “Three Hundred Years of German Painting and Drawing.”

On view at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, through July 21, is an environmental installation by sculptor Maren Hassinger titled “Blanket of Branches.” Hassinger, a longtime resident of Los Angeles, recently moved to New York.

At UCSB’s Art Museum through Aug. 3, Garry Winogrand’s photo essay “Women Are Beautiful,” recently given to the museum by Justin and Vivian Eberman, New York. The 85 black-and-white prints by Winogrand (1928-1982), one of the most respected photographers in recent decades, are unusual in that the artist departs from his usual role as impersonal observer.

Concurrently at UCSB is “The Painted Room,” a cycle of landscape paintings by Bay Area artist Christopher Brown, originally shown at the Madison Art Center in Wisconsin.

The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts has recently purchased the last, largely unexplored cache of Thomas Eakins’ art objects and documentary material previously held in the Charles and Mary Bregler Collection. Part of the agreement between the Academy and Mary Bregler was a stipulation that the purchase price not be disclosed.

Art historians who are familiar with the life and works of Eakins have awaited the release of this material for almost 30 years. The Academy’s purchase encompasses Bregler’s entire Eakins collection and consists of more than 1,000 items--paintings, sculpture, drawings photographs and manuscripts by Eakins and his circle.

Thomas Eakins was born in Philadelphia and, except for a period of study in Europe from 1866 to 1870, lived in that city his entire life.

Upon his return from France, he started teaching at the Philadelphia Sketch Club. Two years later, the Pennsylvania Academy hired him as an assistant. In 1879, he became professor of drawing and painting at the Academy and three years later was appointed its director. Eakins’ insistence on teaching from the nude model led to his dismissal by the Academy in 1886. He continued to teach in Philadelphia and to exhibit in the Academy annuals. Charles Bregler (1868-1958) was a student and, in his later years, a friend of Eakins.

Following the death of Susan Macdowell Eakins in 1938, Bregler received authorization from the bank executors and Mrs. Eakins’ relatives to visit the Eakins home and rescue whatever had been left in the house. He came away with a sizable collection of paintings, drawings, sketches, sculptures, photographs and personal memorabilia, which he added to his collection of Eakins material acquired during the lifetime of the painter and his wife.

Some but not all of this material was seen by the eminent Eakins scholar Lloyd Goodrich when he prepared his monograph on the painter in 1933, but little of it was actually published. Once in Bregler’s hands, the collection was closely guarded. After his death in 1958, the material became virtually inaccessible.