ART REVIEW : JANSSEN’S COBRA COLLECTION ON EXHIBIT IN L. B.

Could it be that a backlash against collectors is coming on? Can a tidal wave of publicity about those who have the means and inclination to buy art be stopped? Is it possible to give perspicacious acquisitors their due without letting their personalities overshadow their art of choice?

“Portrait of a Collector: Stephane Janssen,” the latest exhibition at Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum, suggests that the answers to these pressing questions are no, no and no. The title gets right to the point of personality promotion. No word about what Janssen collects. If you don’t know him or his reputation, you haven’t a clue. And upon entering the gallery, what’s the first thing you see? Stefan de Jaeger’s Hockney-style Polaroid portraits of the collector and his entourage.

But before cynics storm off in disgust, let it be said that Janssen has made a difference to contemporary art. A longtime collector of work by the Cobra group of European Expressionists and their heirs, he was moved by an expressive attitude and has continued to nurture it for more than 20 years.

What first attracted him was an impassioned, gestural art that had its genesis in Surrealism and the aftermath of World War II. Though it appears wild--even venomous at times--Cobra art has nothing to do with poisonous snakes. The name is an acronym for Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, the cities where movement founders lived.

Advocating free expression unimpeded by the intellect, the group formed as a reaction to the 1948 conference of the International Center for the Documentation of the Art of the Avant-Garde. As citizens of formerly Nazi-occupied cities, Danish, Belgian and Dutch members of the experimental coalition objected to cultural dictates of all kinds, including leftist views which tended to dominate artists’ congresses of the day.

The Cobra manifesto called for “organic, experimental collaboration which will shun all sterile and dogmatic theories.” While criteria for Cobra membership were loose, affiliated artists shared an esteem for primitive, folkloric forms, children’s art and that of the mentally disturbed. Their preference shows in the sampling of about 40 paintings and sculptures at Long Beach.

“Fear,” a 1952 painting by the best known Cobra founder, Holland’s Karel Appel, depicts a primitive figure with a gaping mouth, saucer eyes and one hand raised as if to stifle a scream. Strange faces also emerge amid the drips and splats of Danish artist Asgar Jorn’s tumultuous art. Vividly colored works by Belgian artist Pierre Alechinsky, another Cobra founder, are comparatively pretty and fluid--with mysterious personages framed by little ink drawings of turbulent scenes--but they also suggest a threatening underworld or a troubled dream life.

Jean Dubuffet was not a member of the Cobra group but his involvement with untamed, non-professional expressions that he called Art Brut made him a fellow traveler. His 1961 vision of a heavily trafficked Montparnasse street is chock-full of grinning blobs who would be frightening if they didn’t exude a certain naive charm.

The contemporary works in the show are by artists who probably knew little or nothing of the Cobra group when they began to paint, but they have developed expressionist sensibilities more or less in line with the aesthetic that Janssen admires. Media star Jean-Michel Basquiat’s graffiti-esque work can run thin and decorative, but he taps into the myth of untrained genius and sometimes produces powerful images as well. Michael Hafftka proves his eye for the horrific in paintings of gruesome white figures in dark habitats.

As the antithesis of cool, geometric abstraction, Cobra paintings of the late ‘40s and ‘50s parallel American Abstract Expressionism. But while Willem de Kooning stands out as the only major Abstract Expressionist to retain the human image, the Cobra works at Long Beach nearly all embrace figurative content.

It may appear in rudimentary faces that ooze out of Appel’s and Jorn’s furiously painted early canvases or in Reinhoud’s weird bronze bird-men that stalk the gallery like spectral police. Though the two movements share an interest in the unconscious--an inheritance from Surrealists’ emphasis of dreams--Cobra artists betray an abiding fascination with disturbing, fantastic imagery that is foreign to most of their American counterparts.

If Abstract Expressionism can be oversimplified as a lofty portrayal of heroic agony, Cobra art can be called an earthy expression of human distress. For every cheerful outburst of child-like freedom--in Appel’s “Rooster” and Joe Fay’s foam constructions bearing cookie-cutter cats, palm trees and cars--there are several images of nightmarish impact.

The mix of art may take viewers by surprise because it places a variety of contemporary work in unfamiliar context. If the connections are somewhat artificial, the art hangs together by the sheer force of Janssen’s point of view.

A 50-year-old Belgian who now lives in Beverly Hills, Janssen was born too late to take up Cobra’s cause during the movement’s official span, from 1948 to 1951. But when he saw his first Cobra painting in 1957, it changed his life.

As a member of a wealthy, well-connected family of chemical industrialists, he had rubbed elbows with important artists and he bought his first painting at 16. His discovery of the Cobra group eventually led Janssen to leave the family business and open a gallery. He launched his first showcase, La Balance, in Brussels in 1965. It was followed three years later by Galerie Stephane Janssen, which lasted until 1976.

According to Janssen’s chatty account in the exhibition catalogue, his family was appalled that he had become “a shopkeeper.” And his business was not exactly a success. “I buy an incredible amount and sell very little,” he notes, adding that he collected 800 artworks from 1965 to 1975.

“Portrait of a Collector” (through March 8) comes to Southern California from the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark. So does its ill-chosen title. But once the actual content of the exhibition is known, it’s hard to blame a low-profile institution in a low-key country for celebrating someone who has done them a service.

As Louisiana Director Knud W. Jensen writes in the catalogue, the exhibition “proves that at least once in this century Denmark was the place where a movement was created that has left its mark on the history of the art in Europe.”

Janssen has enhanced Denmark’s sense of art historical pride by offering the exhibition to the Louisiana and by subsequently giving the museum 10 works from his collection. That’s generosity of an intelligent kind.