ART REVIEWS : Everything New Is New Again

Art’s mission in these dark, conservative days is to boldly go where everybody’s been before. This tail-first plummet into the past has given us such fetid fruits as old new Expressionism, old new abstraction and old new copying of old old art. A couple of new new gallery exhibitions both confirm the tide and suggest it is not always a bad thing. Take a drive to Santa Monica and get a load of Anthony Caro’s new work at the James Corcoran Gallery. Nip back onto the Santa Monica Freeway and go up Robertson Boulevard to Asher/Faure for Gwynn Murrill.

In the ‘60s, Caro emerged as Britain’s leading abstract sculptor--presumably supplanting the venerable Henry Moore--with his dynamic but slightly flatulent arrangements of painted metal plates and meandering pipes. Caro, now 63, has yet to find his work replacing Moore’s on corporate plazas and museum greenswards, but a lot he cares. He has rediscovered the charms of a zaftig nude lolling about with nothing on but her colored glass beads, turban and tub.

His story is that he became enchanted with drawing the figure of a model named Concetta Branson while attending a workshop in New York State in 1983. He says he got such a kick out of it that he decided to model her in clay the next year, plunging into the figure for the first time since student days. Just for fun. That’s what he says. Sure, Tony. Sounds like a sneaky way for an abstract artist to infiltrate Post-Mod revivalism without kicking up a fuss.

Actually the baker’s dozen of cast bronzes (on view to Nov. 7) do tend to allay suspicion. They have the relaxed academic ease of exercises done by a master returned to the classroom for basic calisthenics. (Next thing you know Caro will be doing that TV commercial about Mastering the Fundamentals.) The figures run from about half to three-quarters life-size and are worked with energetic clay-hunk surfaces and lack of specific detail that recalls Rodin, Degas and Matisse.

But the thematic thread goes back further than that. It is the old Odalisque-in-the-Seraglio trick beloved of the 19th-Century Romantics. It’s the irresistible world where erotic imagination blends with sculptural form so that we are not quite sure where our prurient interest elevates to our aesthetic high. Ah, my beloved was naked excepting her glittering jewels. . . . Lux, calme et volupte. All that.

Except that Caro’s chunky model is far from a fashionable sex object and often presented in poses that play up the aesthetic. A masked figure recalls a drawing by Thomas Eakins, a supine harem girl’s headlessness evokes both Matisse and a classical fragment. Caro not only makes his masses visually gratifying, he has a good time alluding to the past. A seated, torquing figure is lush and baroque. The artist tips his hat to Degas in a figure reclining on a real cushion and another with a cloth turban.

Properly viewed, there is really little difference between Caro the abstract and Caro the figurative artist. Both are virtuosos with slight tendencies to professorial pomp. Besides, the show is a good lesson for fuddy-duddies who still think abstract artists can’t make “real” art.

When Gwynn Murrill turned up here in the ‘70s doing animal figures in laminated wood, center stage was occupied by the antiseptic charms of Minimalism. The times made her look like a woodsy sentimental designer, and to tell the truth, she had several lessons to learn. She did, and soon appeared to be an ancient Egyptian, African or Chinese sculptor reincarnated. Her generalized animal figures were like holy reliquaries containing the living spirits of the beasts they represented. They managed the compelling combination of mysterious dignity and spiritual animation found in Egyptian cats, Benin leopards, Han horses.

There is no quarreling with such uses of the history, especially these days when the past has gobbled up the future. Now Murrill is back (to Saturday), and while the work remains admirable at bottom, it may be headed down two blind alleys. She has taken to casting in bronze, which only makes us realize how much the warmth, grain and handworked quality of wood contributed to her pieces. Oh, her coyotes and a couple of spatting cats retain large doses of magic, and one feline reclining on a base with rich reliefs even reaches for a new level of enchantment. But brass seems to clog her forms and everything looks muffled and embalmed as if covered with some unpleasant gunk that puts a barrier between us and the work.

Maybe that is why a virtuoso cougar and a bird of prey on a branch that should extend her grasp remain beyond its reach. Maybe the material is what makes her human figures cycle back to some of her original problems. A Hawaiian mother and child look almost purposefully treacly, like the faux-heroic peasants of Francisco Zuniga. A couple of small robed figures that resemble punk Hawaiian warriors have the archaic sentimentality that used to crop up in a ‘50s artist like Morris Broderson.

There is an anything-goes side to Post-Modernism that allows artists to rationalize everything from rank commercialism to wallowing in shallow sentiment. The upside is that they can do what they want without being driven into the narrow cattle chute of critical fashion. The figurative works of Caro and Murrill share a kind of basic and unforced integrity that reminds us that most artists start out as kids who like to draw things and work with their hands.