EVERGOOD THE REALIST

Post-Modernism is an epochal historical change. It looks at the world through the rear-view mirror, hoping the past will make sense of the present. A principal result of this retrospective attitude is a revival of everything considered peripheral, marginal, tangential or contradictory to the modernist view that has reigned during the lifetime of every adult now on the planet.

Modernism shaped our vision of the present but it also molded the past, saying, for example, that an old master like El Greco was still interesting but that the Carracci brothers were only grist for historians, that the French Romantics remained pertinent while their contemporaries of the Academy were historical dinosaurs.

Modernism finally shaped history into an orthodoxy neatly hung in a white room, a closed issue except for those evermore refined products that would extend its ideas for Mandarin scholastics who liked to interpret the significance of blank paintings of differing sizes. Since nature continues to abhor a vacuum it was inevitable that the windows of the white attic would be forced open to let the dust in.

As a result, the culture is undergoing a massive review where all the ignored fruits of posterity are re-evaluated. Is there anything of value back there that we missed? One aspect of this universal revisionism has been a new look at modern figurative art that was set in the shadows by abstraction. We have seen, for example, exhibitions of works by legendary but largely ignored artists like David Alfaro Siquieros, Diego Rivera and--currently at the Plaza de La Raza--Frida Kahlo. Obviously these are artists linked to the Mexican revolution and the great mural renaissance that followed and supported it.

The aesthetic profile they represented, however, was not confined to Mexico. It sprawled from Weimar Germany to the sidewalks of New York and might collectively be seen as an art spawned by social unrest.

A new exhibition at UCLA’s Wight Gallery (to March 22) kindles faded memories of American Social Realism that evolved out of the Great Depression and focuses on an artist never terribly well-known even in his heyday, Philip Evergood.

Who? Philip Evergood, who died in 1973, is the kind of artist who receives respectful mention and one reproduction in general textbooks. Encyclopedic collections of American art like that of the National Museum in Washington keep an Evergood or two on view, but even a careful student can go a lifetime without getting a good look at this odd oeuvre.

UCLA affords the opportunity in nearly 100 paintings and drawings originally put together by Evergood scholar Kendall Taylor for Bucknell University under the appropriately sticky title “Never Separate From the Heart.” A reportedly chunky catalogue will not be available until mid-March.

Evergood recalls artists of the period from the Mexicans to the American Regionalists and fellow Social Realists like Jack Levine, William Gropper and Ben Shahn who appears to have influenced Evergood significantly. All practiced art soaked in political ideology. Evergood, after studies in England and France, settled in New York where he joined leftist organizations like the Pierre Degeyter and John Reed Clubs. He belonged to the WPA, supported the American Artists Congress and participated in sit-in demonstrations at WPA headquarters protesting mass lay-offs.

Evergood’s style is an utterly weird combination of academic precision, gross exaggeration and cultivated naivete typical of the idiosyncratic realism of the time. Maybe the best thing this art does is to give us a vicarious feel of what it was like back then. The slangy heavy-handedness of much of it is as lugubrious and touching as songs like “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” The escapist silliness that laces through the very same work recalls nonsense songs like “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” The ensemble can be funky and irritating, but then times were hard.

Evergood liked to depict dumpy figures with oversize heads, cherry lips and prominent teeth. His women often look like broken dolls with Minnie Mouse feet in clunky high heels. This art is all for the little man, but it makes sure that the good guys are such blunted urban peasants they require the sympathy of the superior intellect. There is a terrible well-meaning contempt lurking here. It is innocently patronizing, like the work of an adolescent editorial cartoonist.

Social allegories like “The New Lazarus” of 1927 are so complex they cancel out all their own meanings except a tangle of paranoia and self-righteousness. Evergood ever lacked the scope and organizational skills that allowed the Mexican muralists to deal believably with great social themes. When Evergood tried it, as in “Herman Baron Among the Proletariat,” the results look petty and muddled.

The sensibility broadcast out of this work is that of a complex guy trying to do the right thing in the Socialist fashion of his epoch but frequently screwing it up because its heroics were beyond the grasp of his temperament.

Evergood is at his best with anecdotes and mild social satire. “Evening Reading” of 1934 shows an arty bohemian couple sprawled on a bed pursuing the time-honored intellectual ploy of carrying out a seduction under the guise of sharing a book. Real gentleness wafts through Evergood’s art linking him temperamentally to the Soyer brothers. He painted an admiring portrait of them as wide-eyed innocents. Unlike them, Evergood could rarely let his sweetness show, cloaking it in honeyed sarcasm or a dogged complexity that is the visual equivalent of a garbled soapbox rant. His image of a poor black sitting in the gutter while pretty white girls flit in and out of a dime store manages to be both heavy-handed and vague.

Occasionally, thank goodness, Evergood was able to sort out his masochistic ambivalence. In “The Miners” he captured a wonderful torqued gesture of two men digging in a claustrophobic shaft that has some of the painterly richness of a Soutine. “The Wheels of Victory” of 1944 shows a soldier guarding a bridge next to some railroad men and a locomotive. Its psychological objectivity and tipped, tunneling space is as good as an early Max Beckmann.

The section of the exhibition called “Women and Society” represents Evergood’s last phase. His palette took on a rococo lightness, and symbolic satires like “Threshold to Success” an unparalleled foolishness. Fortunately he was also able at last to release a sweet, lyrical side that loved freshness and simplicity. There is real affection in his ‘50s portraits of the Kleinholz family and “Juju and Her Dog Coppelia.” The masterpiece of the period is “American Shrimp Girl” with its chunky heroine and pink feathery atmosphere.

There seems little reason to revise Evergood’s place in history after this Post-Mod review. Posterity seems to have gotten him right the first time. He does, however, cast some forward light on current Neo-Expressionism which, in some ways, his work resembles.

Evergood reminds us that art can authentically reflect a particular locale or time and still wind up as a quaint period piece. That status is not chopped liver, but it is limited in a way that, say, Edward Hopper is not. Evergood reminds us there is never an ideologically correct position in art. Artists who jump on a bandwagon they can’t repaint according to their own temperament--even if they do so sincerely--will produce art that rings false. Art is only about self-expression after it’s about self-discovery.