ART REVIEW : A GLUT OF GALLERY EXHIBITS AT LACMA

Laws of physics will at some point stop the County Museum of Art from opening new galleries. For the moment, however, there seems to be no end to it: Witness last week’s unveiling of new rooms for prints, drawings and photography. Located in the Ahmanson Building, they are--as anybody familiar with the museum might guess--traditional in style, tan in color and functional in design. The drawings hang on the walls and the walls do not interfere.

Inaugural exhibitions include sheets from the permanent collection such as a treasured Van Gogh study of the postman Roulin, a special showing of American photographer Thomas Barrow and a selection of nearly 100 19th-Century French drawings from the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam on view through April 12. They come from a collection assembled in the 1920s and ‘30s by Franz Wilhelm Koenigs, a German business wizard with a passion for Old Master draftsmanship. He eventually became a Dutch citizen due to a distaste for Hitler. A short catalogue essay by drawings curator A.W.E.M. Meij makes an instructive read on the vicissitudes of collecting during those dangerous years in Europe.

During the financial crisis of the ‘30s, Koenigs was forced to hock the whole collection to a bank. It stayed in the museum until fears of a Nazi invasion became acute and the bank decided to ship it to America

for sale. Part of it--early German material--was bought for a museum Hitler wanted to establish in Linz, his home town. One can only imagine how Koenigs felt about that. Nineteenth-Century French examples were finally donated by Herr van Beuningen, whose name is on the museum.

At first, the drawings on view at the museum do not strike one as a drop-dead group. Actually, they don’t turn out to be a drop-dead group at the end either, but they enfold very fine things, and every work is of interest either because of fine patches or because they dapple light on the famous names who made them. You can’t be bored by a group that includes Toulouse-Lautrecs that glide from the virtuoso “Man on a Galloping Horse” to effortless satire like “Comedy After the Classics.”

Landscapes by Daubigny, Corot and Millet bespeak the comforting domestication of the French landscape. Even the geography is civilized around there. No wonder everything is infused with sensitivity, taste and reason’s restraint. An exception, like Gericault’s “Horse Attacked by a Lion,” is downright scary. Delacroix’s energy seems more imaginative than visceral. His once revered literary excesses like “Erlkonig” seem feverishly quaint today. And one wonders if the women of his time could possibly have been as dough-faced as he draws them here. Oh well, his lion is of a touching nobility toying with a tortoise. The operatic flourishes of Daumiers’ venal jurists call attention to their Dickensian comedy. Cezanne’s passion comes forth exactly because it is so firmly held back, lending gigantic strength to 14 works on view. Even imagining a school of French Expressionism is a contradiction in terms.

A couple of piquantly offbeat artists like the visionary printmaker Adolph Bresdin and the mystical Puvis de Chavannes (in a realistic mood) call attention to the catholicity of the general selection. J.A.D. Ingres is a hair off in three drawings, making us realize how much he depended on finding a line that was simultaneously decorative and descriptive.

Most of the Renoir’s are a triumph of charm over slipshod technique until a pen-and-ink of two girls proves he could make a scintillating surface.

Plenty here you want to stick under your coat. Degas’ “Female Dancer With a Fan” is a victory for simple observation, as is Manet’s red chalk snapshot of a standing youth. Millet used volume to remove all traces of sentimentality from “Peasant Girl Watching Her Cow.” Paul Signac drew Marseilles with the liveliness of musical notation and Seurat captured a city dusk with the aplomb of a man nervy enough to shoot photographs in the dark. He knew the black, at least, would be beautiful.

If you had to sum up the place and the period from this selection you could do worse than saying it was a time when candor overcame crippling cultural self-doubt.