IDENTITY ISSUE : AN IDENTITY ISSUE IN WOMEN’S IMAGES

“Images of Women,” a conference at Scripps College on Thursday through Saturday, will bring 14 speakers to the Claremont campus to “consider the circumstances and challenges for women today.” The free public event, sponsored by the California Council for the Humanities, commemorates the 150th birthday of Ellen Browning Scripps, founder of the women’s college.

In anticipation of the richly varied celebration--featuring a talk by Coretta Scott King and a Dixieland concert by Chris Norris and the Golden Eagles Jazz Band--images of women already fill three galleries of the Claremont colleges with four exhibitions that continue through Oct. 20.

The largest and most commanding show is “Looking In, Looking Out: Contemporary Portraits by Women Artists” at Montgomery Art Gallery on the Pomona College campus (a few blocks southwest of Scripps). Organized by curator Mary MacNaughton, the exhibition contains paintings by D.J. Hall, Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin, Sylvia Shap, Jeanne Steffan, Joyce Treiman and Ruth Weisberg; drawings by Madden Harkness; sculpture by Barbara Spring and Alison Saar, and photography by Mihoko Yamagata.

The title, “Looking In, Looking Out,” recalls “Windows and Mirrors,” a controversial show of photography organized in 1978 for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But MacNaughton has something different in mind from MOMA curator John Szarkowski’s distinction between artists’ exploration of the world through “windows” and their self-expression through art that reflects themselves in “mirrors.”

Dealing primarily with artists who gaze inward, MacNaughton states her interest in the tradition of portraiture and how modern artists have departed from it by putting increasingly greater emphasis on “underlying truths” of their subjects. In a recent lecture on the show, she also presented the thesis that the informal contemporary portraits exhibited at Montgomery fit comfortably into modernism by virtue of their stylistic diversity and their self-absorption.

But instead of presenting her case didactically in the exhibition, she chose to display each artist’s work as a unit. This approach encourages a comparison of artists rather than an examination of more interesting issues, but it doesn’t obscure the fundamental question.

“Who are we?” is the query uniting all this disparate work.

“A perplexing blend of clashing values” might be the assessment of Mihoko Yamagata, who searches for her ethnic heritage in wistful photographs that juxtapose fragments of Japanese and American cultures.

“We are identified with our intellectual alliances and professional pursuits,” says Jeanne Steffan in loose but authoritative drawings that turn her male subject into a Greek vase or an Eqyptian figure, introducing him as an artist under the influence of those ancient cultures.

Ruth Weisberg might answer, “We are naked, lost souls desperately searching for a connection to history.” An eerie sense of estrangement pervades her pale, veiled paintings and prints. Generally too close to illustration and too obsessed with saying something significant to be authentically moving, Weisberg’s work nonetheless is in tune with the theme of self-examination. In a nude self-portrait, she might be the last person in the world--swept along on blue winds of alienation. But, instead of leaving us the latitude of subtle interpretations, we are implored to equate her with a Greek Kouros figure and thus wrap her in a mantle of reverence.

Joyce Treiman has no such pretensions. In typically prickly fashion, she simultaneously questions her place as an artist and pokes fun at herself by putting her image in lushly painted Impressionist canvases along with Degas, Cassatt, Monet and a send-up of the French “Dejeuner” pictures. All familiar from former exhibitions, these paintings represent Treiman at her most energetic, exploring her constant theme of anomie with such relish for absurdity that her dark humor looks optimistic.

Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin also sets herself into art historical context in two self-portraits that represent a startling development in her work. A sensitive observer of Southern California landscape, Rubin often restrains emotion to the point of reticence. A portrait of her husband, done several years ago, revealed an unsuspected depth of emotion. Now she looks at herself and finds two different people.

In a remarkably lifelike pencil drawing with a tiny Rembrandt image in the background, she is utterly without guile or artifice. This lean, plain, forthright young woman in a hooded sweat shirt looks as if she would no more tell a lie than curl her hair or wear lipstick. But in a Vermeer-inspired painting called “Self-Portrait in Red,” Rubin is sauve and elegantly turned out as a sort of 1920s period piece. All her edges are smoothed off; she’s a miracle of rounded forms, velvety surfaces and spooky, compressed light that puts one in mind of Georges de La Tour. This portrait may be too mannered to hold up as a great painting, but it’s absolutely compelling and an astonishing breakthrough for Rubin.

The inquiry persists in a group of dazzlingly real portraits of pairs of women by D.J. Hall, whose work has grown mellower and deeper as she continues to probe the values of a youth-and-glamour culture.

In the rear gallery Barbara Spring shows a roomful of carved wooden figures, cats and furniture, called “Willy Visits His Mother.” Willy is a big, strapping hulk of uncommunicative manhood; his dumpy mother slumps so far down in her chair that she threatens to slide off and turn into a throw rug. The installation so oozes with inbred boredom that it might have been inspired by a Booth cartoon in the New Yorker.

Nearby, Sylvia Shap isolates subjects off-center on solid-color backgrounds and gives clues to their character through their attitudes, clothing and physical imperfections. Art critic Robert Hughes appears garrulous and blowzy, while Shap herself is so determindedly chipper that she seems uptight and apprehensive.

Flattery, of course, is not the point of portraits that search for identity through psychological and emotional content. Alison Saar finds it in primitive-looking icons of painted metal and various found objects, invested with secret hiding places and magical powers.

That leaves Madden Harkness, perhaps the most slippery artist in the exhibition. Her handsome drawings of shadowy figures and faces emerging from blackness don’t reveal themselves as personalities but question their very existence.

The variety of styles, mediums and attitudes in “Looking In, Looking Out” are knotted together with a thread of alienation, one of the most persistent themes of the modern era. If it seems ironic that the spectacle is not ultimately depressing, it’s because the process of examination is so intriguing and occasionally sweetened with humor. You can weary of self-obsession but you can’t abandon hope when confronted with so many absorbing questions.

Lang Gallery at Scripps concurrently offers solo shows of paintings by Susan Hertel and Sarah Swenson. They continue the self-examination but in such divergent ways that the two exhibitions present a peculiar contrast between relaxation and tension.

Hertel is the relaxed one, so out of touch with the latest art-world trends that you have to accept her work at face value or dismiss it. Thoroughly content with her solitary life in New Mexico among horses, dogs and cats, Hertel paints landscapes and domestic interiors that almost dissolve in the unkempt bliss of unmade beds and loyal animals.

She gives a Southwestern flavor to the intimist tradition of Vuillard and Bonnard in paintings that prove she loves the patterns of Indian rugs and floral spreads as much as the emptiness of the desert. Loosely brushing such subjects, she accords them lots of nebulous space--as if interiors flowed into exteriors.

There are serious things wrong with these paintings: Hertel’s color doesn’t venture far beyond the tones of plain brown wrappers, her avoidance of facial features looks awkward and her tipped-up, Bonnard-like space sometimes runs dry and overly languid. But she knows how to express a life-is-good attitude that feels authentic. Even a white “Blizzard” triptych seems warm and friendly.

Swenson, on the other hand, is tied up in knots over her concern with “Rites,” a concept inspired by the fresco cycle in the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. You have to read a brochure to understand her motivation and even then it’s not at all clear how she moved from mythical characters to the “Rites” we see enacted by delicately painted contemporary women in 14 canvases. (She will account for some of this on Thursday at 2 p.m., in a symposium at the Scripps Humanities Building Auditorium.)

This puzzling array of loosely clad women who do such ordinary things as spread their arms, set down their feet or cradle their babies only seem strange because their luminous forms are theatrically isolated on black backgrounds. Swenson seems to be elevating simple, domestic activities to a magical state of importance--perhaps deifying them--but so many links are missing that questions get in the away of appreciating her extraordinary painting.

“First World Women Artists,” a small show in Scripps’ Clark Humanities Museum, shifts the focus of self-discovery to worldwide consciousness by displaying a radically varied array of works by 10 artists from Africa, Asia, North and South America and the Caribbean. The point here is that artists classified--and often dismissed--as “non-Western” or “third-world” are as deserving of attention as their Western counterparts.

No one can argue with that assertion, but the show is too determindedly eclectic and uneven in quality to draw other conclusions from it.

Images of women predominate, in decorative, mixed-media “Goddess” panels by Dora de Larios (United States), a glowing lithographic portrait of Whoopi Goldberg as Celie in “The Color Purple” by Elizabeth Catlett (Mexico) and wonderful little portrait-books by Aida Mancillas-Doyle (United States). But we also find Chinese ink drawings of nature by Lu Wu-Chiu, expressionistic papier-mache plants by Wendy Nanan (of Trinidad and Tabago) and a batik depiction of “Hunters” by Nigerian artist Nike Olaniyi.

All we can do is wait for a more substantial exhibition to illuminate the thesis of “First World Women Artists.”

‘Who are we?’ is the query uniting all the disparate work in

‘Looking In, Looking Out: Contemporary Portraits by Women Artists’