MODERN WORKS FROM A NATION LONG GONE

Once one has hovered around the art scene for a couple of eons it becomes a jolly good trick to find fresh art that is not brand-new art. So much is shown and reproduced you nearly have to journey to grumpy museums in Eastern Bloc hinterlands to come across an unfamiliar frisson. Albanian Cubism. Bulgarian Vorticism. Our appetites have faded. Alas we’re all so jaded. . . .

We are the decadents of information overload. Wait. Whatzis? How can there be an exhibition of modern art from a country that disappeared centuries ago? But it says right here: “Flemish Expressionism: Representational Painting in the 20th Century” at the Newport Harbor Art Museum through Feb. 22.

Flanders. Fields where poppies grow. Fifteenth-Century Flemish primitives in musty art history classes--Jan Van Eyck, Hieronymous Bosch, Pieter Bruegel. They called them Primitives but they painted with magnifying-glass eyeballs. An early lesson in the frivolity of artspeak.

Flemish Baroque. Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck. The overblown made elegant. Artists as multilingual statesmen carrying out diplomatic missions with one hand and painting royal ceilings with the other (their sword at the ready in case of a good duel.) Artist as swashbuckler.

OK, we’ve got that straight, but how can there be Flemish Expressionism when Flanders disappeared in the partition after the Congress of Vienna or possibly the settlement of the War of the Roses if it ever was actually a country to start with? Better read the catalogue.

Oh, Belgium .

Why didn’t they say so? But if it’s Belgium, where is its most famous artist, Rene Magritte, and why isn’t it Tuesday?

The isolated Californian lounging in his cabana has to forgive himself if it takes a second to sort this all out. Of course. Belgium is divided into two regions. The area roughly south of Brussels is full of Walloons who speak French and are Romantic. The hunk to the north, well, that’s Flanders where Dutch predominates and the culture, they say, is Germanic.

Fortunately the two factions have not taken to sustained acts of bloodshed as in Northern Ireland or widely publicized threats of secession as in Quebec. But readers of some of the more exotic bits in the paper do recall recent political wrangles between the two factions that indicate ancient tensions and purposefully maintained differences in culture.

This is starting to sound like one of those exhibitions that roams the diplomatic channels and turns up in “Cultural Centers” trying to push a political message with ham-handed subtlety.

Wrong again. This is a real art show and a strong late-entry candidate for the year’s most interesting offbeat idea. It is the brainchild of Newport Harbor curator Paul Schimmel who likes exploring the significant fringes of modernism and is shaping up as a young man possessed of ideas--something of a rarity in the field.

The idea here is to find the obscured art of a little region often beleaguered by events and overshadowed by prepossessing neighbors and give it an airing to see what happens. What happens is absorbing in itself and the way it is conditioned because it is playing here in Lotusland. It is hard to imagine two places more unlike than Southern California and Northern Belgium, but there are disturbingly familiar echoes in catalogue essays.

The art. What about the art?

There are two dozen painters and draftsmen on hand spanning all of our century that has thus far transpired. Styles range through all familiar Expressionist variations from Art Nouveau to Neo-Ex. There are heavy infusions of surrounding European developments, especially Expressionism of the German kind, but it is to this art’s credit that nobody who pays decent attention would mix the two up for more than a moment. The world-stung social satire of Berlin’s New Realism is there in Frits Van den Berghe and Floris Jespers but they are different. They are nicer. All this art finds its own vibes within the larger continental context. Rik Wouters was pacing the turf between Cezanne and Matisse by 1913.

About the only performer on hand not obscure by chance or justice is James Ensor, the odd, reclusive Expressionist precursor who yet found his way into the world to influence not only fellow members of an art group called Les Vingt but the whole of subsequent international Expressionism. He painted horror scenes with the lyric lightness of a Bonnard. A dozen pictures on view are enough in themselves to reward the visitor. He painted sting-rays happily dead, skeletons in tuxedos and hags in widows’ weeds that recalls the old sobriquet of Belgium as “the witches caldron of Europe” on account of its excellent luck in serving as a battleground for so many other people’s wars.

Ensor painted like somebody in a land occupied by foreign invaders, somebody with a sulfurous private joke pretending to be crazy as a diversionary tactic. A lot of these guys paint like wise peasants playing it dumb and smirking as they misdirect the arrogant invader. Breugel’s antic earthiness lives along with Bosch’s fantastic delight in a world as insignificant and teeming as a wormy egg. Stern morality lightened by the smiling shrug of realism.

Peasant life and religion took over the work of Albert Servaes, Gustave Van de Woestyne and Constant Permeke and is really not absent from any of it. Thematically, it comes across as a rumination on the life of the peasant and worker who does hard manual labor in a ritual of religious redemption in the face of an implacably unkind and capricious nature. There is all of the patience, self-pity and humor of the old folk joke about the two horses, childhood sweethearts, who join in a suicide pact because they are to be separated. They throw themselves from a cliff. A peasant trudging below looks up and mutters, “Now they are throwing horses at me.”

Before that there was elegance. Peasant-style Flemish precursors like Hugo van der Goes and Hans Memling built a natural refinement into their genre painting. Art Nouveau artists like Fernand Khnopff and Leon Spilliaert make it into exquisite, dandified decadence. Khnopff breathed his heavy-jawed femmes fatales onto the paper as if made by puffs of cigarette smoke. Spilliaert paid his debt to Edvard Munch by attenuating neurotic horror into jingly purple-verse irony.

This is interesting stuff. Paul Delvaux never looked better than in soft, ballooning nudes from the late ‘20s. Everybody was adapting Picasso’s neo-conservative classical manner, but Delvaux added his own poetry. Edgar Tytgat’s melange of Chagall and Dufy cloys but brings up that inherent niceness that keeps surfacing. It’s purely distilled in later artists like Roger Raveel, Raoul De Keyser and Maurice Wyckaert with their bright, direct abstractions and landscapes, but it lurks in less obvious places. Even when Fred Bervoets is flailing about in heavy transavant-garde turgidity. Even when Pjeroo Roobjee sees all aspects of his “uncle’s” personality as parts of Hitler or Jan Burssens imitates Francis Bacon painting Rembrandt, there is something nice and self-effacing about this art. It appeals to that part of all of us that thinks how pleasant and kind and happy we would be if life would just stop aggravating us for 10 minutes.

There is also something universal to any geography that makes art but feels out of the center that shows up in these catalogue essays. They lapse into paroxysms of self-criticism. One guy says his homeland is architecturally the ugliest place on the planet. Another complains at length about the past provincialism of Flemish museums and the tendency of collectors to buy their art in big foreign centers and to not support their local artists.

It all sounds like self-lacerating grumbles we heard around Los Angeles for years, perhaps finally learning the best way to remain provincial is to act provincial.

There is nothing provincial about this show except its hand-wringing. It’s too hard on itself. It is a little honey of a show, revealing an ignored pocket of worthwhile art and an authentic contribution to modern scholarship.