OLD IS GOLD IN ‘SECOND SIGHT’ AT S.F. MUSEUM

“Make it old,” say the artists in “Second Sight” as they mine art history for inspiration.

In the international group show, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, English artist Edward Allington stacks up painted wooden boxes of plaster Sphinxes in a sculpture called “The Past Recycled: Metropolitan Egypt.” Italian Guilio Paolini reconstructs the myth of Nessus in an elegant white sculpture combining a plaster cast of a horse’s body, a rolled up drawing of Hercules and a trailing red drapery. American Earl Staley paints Bellerophon killing a Chimera from the back of Pegasus--all in super-charged complementaries applied with Expressionist bravado.

Such historical dredging is a familiar approach these days--resulting in Post-Modern architectural pastiches and paintings that mimic every conceivable style and reinterpret every available image--but it still seems contrary because it reverses the modernist credo.

“Make it new” was the clarion call of modern art around the turn of the century. The Italian Futurists trumpeted the new most outrageously as they demanded a wholesale burial of past culture. If we believe their manifesto, written in 1909 by poet Filippo Tammaso Marinetti, they were itching to burn libraries, flood museums, flatten cities and excise the “smelly gangrene” of the intelligentsia.

Cultural and educational institutions were mausoleums that stifled progress and creativity, according to the Futurists whose dissatisfaction was so rampant that they even castigated women and spaghetti. Their ravings have shocked many a dozing art history student out of a stupor, but this pack of dissidents was neither the first nor the only group to rebel against tradition.

The French Impressionists made their art new by abandoning dark studios, artificial lighting and academic strictures. Fauvist painters followed suit, only more so, as they assigned vivid, unnatural colors to their subjects. As for pictorial space, the Cubists turned it inside out by presenting multiple viewpoints simultaneously.

And so it went, right up to the ‘70s, until forward-looking art had been so persistently purified that it seemed invisible to those who couldn’t see the virtue of the Minimalists’ grids or the Conceptualists’ ideas.

The time had come for art to broaden its perspective and to address a widespread yearning for human content, but who would have thought that it would do an about face and march so relentlessly backward? Who would have predicted that we would see a major museum of modern art prominently featuring reruns of Nicholas Poussin’s and Piero della Francesca’s paintings?

Curator Graham W. J. Beal, who organized the show as the museum’s fourth biennial exhibition, sees the trend represented in “Second Sight” as a celebration of “artistic license”--a result of new freedom to use long forbidden sources. Indeed, but there’s much more than that going on here.

Consider, for instance, the repeated occurence of classical motifs and themes handled with a brooding or explosive emotionalism. In this peculiar mix of classical form and romantic attitude the artists seem to be romancing classicism rather than intellectualizing its rational perfection. Carlo Maria Mariani’s seductively adroit depiction of two godlike Greek artists painting each other oozes with narcissism. The models’ love for themselves is only equaled by their passion for self-glorifying art making.

M. Louise Stanley employs an Expressionist, cartoon-ish style that owes a little something to American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, but she is no less infatuated with classical themes than Mariani. She is a spike-haired pixie artist carried off by a muse in one painting. In another work, elaborately “framed” by a fake Pompeian setting, she is swept off her feet by her gorgeous male model as she reverses sexes in the Pygmalion story.

Consider also the wry humor in evidence here as artists try to reconcile their worship of the antique with contemporary reality. Roger Brown has no illusions about how historical forms and biblical subjects fit into popular culture. He stages a painted story of Adam and Eve in a theatrical setting with the doomed couple wearing back-lit fig leaves. And in one of the show’s most telling comments on the impossibility of reviving a hallowed past, he has constructed a squat Grecian “Galvanized Temple” using trash cans as Doric columns. As silvery-blue as a freshly coiffed matron, the temple puts some of the more pretentious work in perspective.

But no one is wiser in this regard than Mark Tansey. Working in a monochromatic, photojournalistic style, he merges his art historical borrowings with pointed criticism of art world hierarchies. In a vast canvas called “The Innocent Eye Test” he takes a lead from Paulus Potter’s “Young Bull” painting (1647), once regarded as the pinnacle of realism. But in Tansey’s work a real cow has been enlisted as a critic to judge a painting of fellow animals. Human experts somberly stand by awaiting the verdict.

Another strain of the exhibition--far subtler and sometimes confusing--is a rather mixed bag of work that weaves consciousness of the past into abstractions or into a sensibility that’s in tune with it but originally grew from other sources. These artists tend to be overwhelmed by showier colleagues, but they save the show from being too determinedly trendy. Michelle Stuart, for one, assembles mud-caked paper squares in gridded wall pieces that seem connected to the history of earthbound people, and not their artistic expressions.

Ann McCoy has long since enriched her natural history vocabulary with Egyptian architecture and symbolic personages and animals. Her bronze parades of Egyptian boats and gods seem contrived and precious, but her 14-foot-wide drawing, “Pyramid for Martin Hurson,” presents a fabulous dream world with absolute conviction.

Siah Armijani seems the oddest presence in the show. Apparently his intriguing wooden constructions of slanted stairs, dead-end ladders and hinged doors that don’t open are here because they were inspired by deceased philosophers and poets. Including Pat Steir’s painting, on the other hand, makes perfect sense. Her spirited, encyclopedic reconsideration of art history is a statement of faith in the continuity of painting that equates a discovery of history with discovery of the future.

Not too long ago part of the job of critics was to ferret out the plagiarists from the originators and to expose the former to ridicule. Now artistic robbery has become a badge of honor as well as the latest fashion. The exhibition catalogue proudly discloses that Christopher Le Brun’s Neo-Classical and Symbolist landscapes are “borrowed from Claude and Bocklin” and laced with passages from Turner and Delacroix. “Le Brun’s imagination is fed by the visions of others. In this he is of the moment,” Caroline Collier writes. Indeed, but whatever happened to the concept of originality?

It has been debased, along with modernism’s central myth that art can make a difference to society. But “Second Sight” isn’t quite the dismissal of modernist hope that it may appear to be.

I can’t tell you why Stephen McKenna would bother to paint a lurid version of Poussin’s “The Blind Orion with Eos and Artemis” with so little fresh thought, except to prove that he can do it. Or why Hermann Albert paints such corny pastiches. But they are exceptions. Most of the artists are engaged in attempt to incorporate the past into the present--in short, to make art new with the help of hindsight. Some of their products probably will look a little silly 10 or 20 years from now, but they certainly will represent a search for a new vocabulary that has ancestral connections.

It’s just too much trouble to paint as well as Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum does without thinking about the current context of historical sources. As he emulates Old Masters’ styles in figurative paintings of about equal parts magical light and eerie silence, he strikes a universal tone of human tragedy and a contemporary chord of alienation.

The team of Komar and Melamid also has its eyes on reality. Their collage-painting, “When I Was a Child Matzoh Reminded Me of a Braille Book,” is a chilling remembrance of Jewish trauma during the Nazi era. Switching to a fussy romantic style, the Soviet-born artists also spoof the Kremlin (and our view of it) by painting the white, turreted buildings as a sparkling fairy tale castle. It rises on an island that’s seen through a opening in dense shrubbery, revealed in turn behind a red drapery.

Such works prove that “Second Sight” is more than an exhibition of art-about-art or cynical “appropriation.” For better or worse--and both are in evidence here--the artists are trying like crazy to figure out what to paint or sculpt in a disenchanted age and how to make it relevant.