REFINED ART OF GENTLEMAN WILLIAM BRICE

L.A’s endless good weather muffles seasonal change. When you return from the East in February the town looks like it’s been freshly painted because our wonderful light makes everything look eternally new. Those circumstances encourage the natives to believe that we are an island in time and therefore one is forever young and there are years aplenty for everything.

A grasp of those geo-psychological circumstances is basic to an understanding of the art of William Brice. It is being accorded a well-deserved retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary to Oct. 19. The first work in “William Brice: A Selection of Painting and Drawing,” dates from 1947, the most recent from this year and yet--except for certain crucial subtleties--it all might have been concocted somewhere between Long Island and the French Rivera between 1906 and 1950. The parts of it that do not appear to have been inspired by Matisse owe something to the spirit of Picasso with spice provided by Miro and Lipchitz.

That means it could only have been painted in Southern California. Wait. We speak here of the land of Disneyland, surfers, Valley Girls and Hollywood Boys. We evoke the incubator of inspired crackpots and the eternal ephemeral, of vibrant vulgarity and mechanical metaphysics. How can such a place be the unique source of a refined art that floats in a realm of timeless tasteful classic modernism like a white cat who lives in a museum?

It is because the mythic image this geography broadcasts to the world comes across on a signal that scrambles some of its message. L.A. never manages to convince anybody that it fosters urbane aristocracy, much less selfless dedication to higher ideals.

That is why William Brice is a hero to a lot of folks around here. He is our gentleman artist and now at age 65 has occupied the position for nearly 40 years. He is tall, lean, handsome, articulate and shy. For two decades he taught drawing and painting at UCLA where he infuriated the male students by inspiring all the girls to massive crushes but compensated by convincing them that their chosen field was at bottom a classy calling.

Brice, one might say, started life at the top of the tinsel and glitter game and ascended from there. He was the second child of the great comedienne Fanny Brice and the gambler Nicky Arnstein. (Thanks to Omar Sharif and Barbra Streisand, he is forever mantled in a mythic aura). Brice grew in a privileged ambiance that wafted between the luminaries of the Broadway stage (Odets, the Gershwins) and the galleries of great museums from the Met to the Louvre. By the time the family moved to Beverly Hills in 1937 Brice was already avid to be an artist.

Today he lives in a Richard Neutra house in Brentwood, has been married forever, has a grown son and a quiet, exceptionally honorable career.

Strolling the TC galleries housing Brice’s fruits crystallizes a number of thoughts. The work brings Richard Diebenkorn to mind not so much because of overt resemblances but because of a realization that the two artists share a sensibility that sees art as a long ruminination on singular themes. Both are artists of immensely cultivated taste and knowledge who have nonetheless avoided the hairier and more predatory reaches of the art world by pursuing their muse in California.

The work also sets one thinking of Andre Previn, a film composer and jazz musician who metamorphosed into a classical conductor. Brice’s work is rather like Previn’s in that it takes the elements of an art that was once jagged and rebellious and treats it like hallowed tradition. Stravinsky-style he composes even its dissonances symphonically.

All those associations suggest that Brice’s art represents something more than itself. It is the art of a certain sensibility, even a certain social class.

The earliest works on view are two small, carefully rendered still lifes of oval-shaped rocks in a shallow space. Then come the only works on view that look dated. Large 1950s compositions like “Parched Land” seem to be an uneasy attempt to reconcile landscape painting with the fracture of Cubism and the scale of Abstract Expressionism. The attempt is heroic but the work suffers from information overload. (Speaking of heroic, Brice was once more closely identified with the bravado figurative art of Rico Lebrun than anything in this show indicates. Either the phase was more insignificant than one recalls or it has been edited out.)

Anyway, the ‘60s found Brice painting figures in landscape that put one in mind of the Matisse of “La Danse.” Two large compositions of one and two figures, respectively, are typical. They are superbly drawn (as usual) and boldly colored but their space gets a little woozy. Brice has an ongoing problem with space. It’s the endemic modernist dilemma of flatness vs. depth but Brice seems almost to cultivate irresolution as an expressive device. Works of the past decade have grown massive in scale and seem to alternate between spare, gray exercises in elegant depression and upbeat works where Matisse’s suavity combines wryly with Stuart Davis’ zing. One untitled work that evokes an ancient slave market looks like Brice sending up his own work in subtle New Yorker magazine-style satire.

It is easy enough to imagine this whole show turning up, say, in Paris, and being completely dismissed as a provincial pastiche. Well, tant pis for them. You can’t dismiss Brice basically because he is an awfully good artist. But what is he saying?

His most typical composition is like a modernist rendition of a landscape full of classical ruins. Torsos, columns and battered temples lie round about. The way it reads in these Post-Modernist days is like an elegiac homage to a noble time gone past.

The paintings might be almost purely sublimated and historical were it not for the fact that their content also doubles as sexual symbolism. The torsos are also women and slitted rocks and domed towers are clearly phallic.

The paintings are immensely cultivated reflections on art and history, laced with private thoughts too secret or too indelicate to reveal except by indirection. This is very polite art but it is far from courtly. One of its most distinguishing and persistent qualities is the way it introduces a muffled Expressionist agony into the belle peinture of the Mediterranean. It is wafted with a sense of being a legitimate and civilized precursor to an unworthy offspring, Neo-Expressionism. There is a kind of serene suffering that goes on in this paradise.

In the old Fellini film “La Dolce Vita” the beleaguered hero admires a great gentleman who has everything--taste, modesty, brains, enough money, a beautiful family and a circle of brilliant artist friends. The hero is horrified and depressed when, like Richard Cory, the man who has everything kills himself.

There is nothing suicidal about Brice’s art but there is a refrain of aristocratic tragedy that is its most haunting theme.