ART REVIEW : BAER COLLECTION: GOOD FRAMES OF REFERENCE

Remember the good old days when you could rattle around alone in an art museum, zigzagging and backtracking, or camping out in front of a work that captured your attention?

You still can--at UCLA’s Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, where an exhibition called “Master Drawings From Titian to Picasso” from the Curtis O. Baer collection is installed through Jan. 11.

Or at least you could on a recent weekday, when the only impediments to my solitary bliss were a man who stood transfixed before Jacob van Ruisdael’s drawing of a tumbledown cottage and a docent with three visitors in tow.

Even if traffic picks up, the confluence of holiday distractions and museum fatigue--resulting from an unprecedented level of activity on the local art scene--will probably keep the gallery relatively quiet for the duration of the show. So if you want to keep the faith, don’t tell your friends what you are about to read here; just take yourself to see 100 of the master drawings collected by German-American businessman Curtis O. Baer (1898-1976).

Whether your preference runs to Rubens, Rembrandt or Renoir, you’ll find something to help preserve your holiday cheer. There are incisive figure studies by Delacroix, expressive portraits by David, Kokoschka and Matisse and an imaginative illustration by Leger for Rimbaud’s poetry.

The closest the collection comes to embracing abstraction is in Kandinsky’s biomorphic “Flying Dragon” and in Brancusi’s studies of hands, which grew more streamlined and abstract when he carved them in marble. But the exhibition represents so many styles, schools and European nationalities from the 15th through the early 20th centuries that it seems absurd to fuss about what isn’t here. This assembly is, after all, a reflection of one person’s taste and resources, working in a severely limited market.

As a youth in Germany, Baer studied art history and bought his first drawing in Frankfurt. He came to the United States in 1940 and became a partner in a New York import-export business. Though he couldn’t pursue art history professionally, he enhanced his education informally as he continued to buy drawings in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He eventually gathered so many distinguished works and so much expertise that he served as a visiting professor at Vassar College and taught graduate seminars at New York University.

In a 1957 essay reprinted in the exhibition catalogue, Baer talks of his acquisitive methods in terms of love affairs and ringing bells. “We do not make a selection: We answer a call,” he says. By then, however, he had learned that first impressions could be “treacherous” and that “the ring of the bell often proves to be false.”

Over time he learned that his taste was fashioned to a large degree by experience with art, but he always rejoiced in leaving himself as open as possible to all master drawings that became available in a steadily diminishing market.

Baer’s collection, now maintained by his family, is an eclectic assortment containing little clusters of Venetian work, Dutch landscapes, early Degas drawings and modern Expressionism. If there is a unifying characteristic, it seems to be a gentleness that’s expressed in landscapes, drawings of animals and occasional character studies. Baer was more likely to buy an honest, tentative investigatory drawing than one that seemed grandiose or pretentious.

Most of the exhibited works were born of a light touch, which is not to say they lack conviction or courage. Amid the cozy rural scenes and sensitive treatments of the human form are Maarten van Heemskerck’s biting allegory, “The Triumph of Job,” a diabolical deathbed scene by Honore Daumier, and Max Beckmann’s “Birdplay,” in which three dimwitted women are entranced by a cacophonous chorus of big, ungainly birds that seem to mock them.

Running concurrently with the Baer exhibition, which was organized by the High Museum in Atlanta, are three other shows assembled by UCLA’s Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. “Old Master Drawings: The Feitelson Gift” features 30 works recently donated to UCLA by the Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg Feitelson Arts Foundation. Some pieces from this valuable bequest (exhibited more extensively last year at the Municipal Art Gallery) are shown alongside related works from the university’s collection.

“Selections From the Grunwald: Gifts of the UCLA Art Council” and “Grunwald Center: Recent Acquisitions, 1982-1986” round out the trio on the second floor, all continuing through Jan. 4.

The gallery will be closed for the holidays: Wednesday through Friday, and Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.