ART REVIEW : ‘EUROPEANS’ JIM DINE, A. SISKIND

There has always been a historical trickle of American artists whose work comes to look European. The first was certainly Benjamin West, a Pennsylvania boy who became the president of England’s Royal Academy in 1792. He looked like an exotic Yankee to the British and like a London fop to the folks back home.

There are dangers attached to attaining mid-Atlantic manners, but they have little effect on two of the latest candidates for the cosmopolitan pantheon. They are painter-printmaker Jim Dine and photographer Aaron Siskind, whose works are simultaneously on view at the County Museum of Art to Nov. 16.

The pairing is a coincidence. Nobody at the county museum planned, as far as I know, to set us thinking about the cosmopolitan aesthetic where, so to speak, the airport meets the railroad station.

Jim Dine, at 51, is a well-recognized veteran artist long associated with New York Pop art. He abides comfortably enough with Pop classicists like Johns and Rauschenberg and a closet intimist like Tom Wesselmann, but he was always mismatched to the part of Pop that stood for brash irony and social satire. Dine’s art is at once more autobiographical and more gentlemanly than the comic-strip and soup-can set.

The present show is intended as a demonstration of his mastery of printmaking. About 75 recent images quickly establish that he is indeed a virtuoso in the use of every technique from lithography to woodblock, from etching to the use of electric tools and the mixture thereof into hybrid images that frequently manage to avoid the dreaded curse of the print: the dead mechanical surface.

Technique, however, is taken for granted exactly in proportion to its excellence, so Dine’s aptitude promptly sets us free to think about other things.

This art has always had unusually good manners, which seems to be one component of the European spirit. We see familiar characteristics of Dine’s art afresh. It’s always had a large dose of macho , but its major symbol, a bathrobe, is softened and cuddly. It’s always had leanings to fetishism, but his depiction of tools is affectionate rather than kinky. Its physical juice has always leaned to throbbing hedonism, but sweetened by the symbol of a valentine heart.

Up to now, however, his courtliness, wry wit and flirtatious decadence did not make him seem European. The transition comes somewhere in the combination of less familiar motifs. He gives us particularly agonized images of French wallpaper and writhing house plants that are exactly in the spirit of Rimbaud or Mallarme trying to rediscover “exotic nature” on a drunken boat, imagined in the domesticated space of a Parisian hotel room. There is something unattractively trendy about Dine’s Neo-Expressionist revival series on the Venus di Milo, but he recoups in a set of tree trunks that look like the mythical Daphne trying to turn back into a human body. The motif recalls the oppressive struggle between the European artist and weighty history.

Add a series of self-portraits and portraits of Nancy Dine and you have the artist as a near-naturalized continental. These stunning images absorb humanist Existentialism from Redon’s metaphysic to Bonnard’s lyricism to Giacometti’s obsessiveness. They put one in mind of the sensibility of Ron Kitaj, an actual expatriate living in London.

The virtue of such art is its high intelligence, ethical commitment and modest individualism. Its dangers are the inbred eccentricity and anachronism that dog the endless wanderer.

Aaron Siskind’s photography does not first assert itself as European in feel but as almost purely exceptional in substance. He makes abstract photography and, at the age of 83, has done so for an astonishingly long time. The small group of recent images on view at the county museum prove him nearly unique in his ability to avoid the look of most abstract photography as a poor imitation of formalist painting made by borrowing “abstract” images in nature--peeling posters, blistering paint and the like.

Siskind is so deft of eye and hand that oozing lava or a pattern of holes in a stucco wall print up like independent creations, not ersatz painting. When he reminds one of other artists, they are--to his credit--painters rather than photographers. Significantly, the only American he brings to mind is Robert Motherwell, the most European of our Abstract Expressionists. For the rest, Siskind’s imagery suggests the likes of Italian Alberto Burri or the Spaniard Antonio Tapies. He joins them in delivering a sense of black brooding that is as mysterious and rooted in the past as a Lorca play. He also presents this suffering with a kind of gestural panache that can make us wonder at the Old World’s need for elegant self-dramatization.

1 line dines