Inspired Visions of Inner Worlds at UCLA

“Visions of Inner Space: Gestural Painting in Modern American Art,” at UCLA’s Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, is not for people who ask, “What’s that supposed to be?” while looking at an abstract painting. The answer in this exhibition is that the paintings represent 15 American artists’ ideas of “inner space.” The literal-minded may then conclude that John Anderson’s inner reality is a dark cave hung with luminous webs, Peter Young’s spirit resembles mosaic kachinas, and Jimmy Ernst’s conception of bliss looks like shattered cities and forests.

The absurdity of this makes it obvious that the paintings are not graphic depictions of some vague, unseen territory. Instead, the artists are more or less soul mates who prefer an introverted art to one dictated by exterior appearances. They strive to know the unknowable and to give it form. They may consider painting to be a meditative act or, like Gordon Onslow Ford, support the notion of art as revelation that reaches its pinnacle when it delivers a “never-seen-before quality.”

According to a catalogue essay by art historian Merle Schipper, who co-curated the show with UCLA professor and artist Lee Mullican, most of the artists believe they are not entirely responsible for what goes down on the canvas. At least, they seek a sort of “oneness with the universe” through art; at most, a divine state that wires their spirits to their brushes. Though styles vary widely, one thing many of the artists have in common--from Mark Tobey to Richard Pousette-Dart and Peter Young--is a tendency to build up layers of pigment. Whether they are made of delicate traceries, squirted blobs or woven strips, the resulting complexities seem to stand for multilayered experience.

This is not New Age art, however. The artists’ musings will strike a familiar chord for anyone who ever had an encounter with Zen or took a college course in comparative religion. The work on display is also connected to the inner-directed work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and other Abstract Expressionists who represent American art’s break from regionalism and realism in the 1940s. Containing examples that go back 40 years or more and stretching through two generations of artists, the exhibition establishes the mystical point of view as a continuing one, while the catalogue traces roots to the Surrealists’ interest in chance, the unconscious and automatic writing.

But the connecting thread is extremely tenuous: There are no Pollocks or Rothkos (an absence noted with regret in the catalogue) and the show overreaches to the point of being a spotty survey. Furthermore, the quality of the paintings is often disappointing.

Given the weak examples on view, it takes quite a leap of faith to accept Onslow Ford’s spirals and star bursts, Richard Bowman’s pink vibrations and J. C. Wright’s spotted, jagged towers as spontaneous expressions of inspired vision. That’s too bad for, in a sense, this art is just coming out of the closet and needs all the buffering it can muster. Though most of the exhibited work is well known to aficionados, its “spiritual” aspect has been overlooked because of past emphasis on formalism and the suspicion surrounding art that can’t be explained very effectively.

Maurice Tuchman, curator of 20th-Century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, took on the whole, incredibly sticky ball of wax in a 1986 landmark exhibition called “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985.” UCLA’s current show might be seen as LACMA fallout, though it was organized as part of an exchange with India. (“Visions” will go to Delhi in return for “Neo-Tantra: Contemporary Indian Painting Inspired by Tradition,” which came to UCLA in conjunction with the 1985-’86 “Festival of India.”)

Now that “The Spiritual in Art” has broached the subject in such a big way, what we need are finely tuned explorations of more specific concepts: automatism, contemporary mystical symbolism, the influence of Zen on American art, the role of conscious effort in art that taps into the unconscious. “Visions of Inner Space” takes on none of them, nor a host of other topics that might prove illuminating. Instead it just wanders around in foggy terrain and even makes it hazier by including artists whose paintings don’t seem to fit the philosophy espoused here.

It’s difficult to take seriously the catalogue’s portrayal of Ed Moses as a simple observer who watches his paintings develop spontaneously. His work seems too consciously structured. No doubt a degree of automatism, if not just habit, takes over as he paints diagonal plaids year after year, but the loose gestures presently overlayed on surfaces don’t hide the basic grid. And that’s as it should be for an artist with a muscular sensibility who is also known for aggressive abutments of strong color and pattern.

That’s not to say that Moses is out of sympathy with Eastern philosophy, only that the art he makes is not a direct translation. Similar reservations go for Max Cole. We can easily believe that she approaches a trance-like state as she sets down hundreds of tiny lines that feather across wavering horizontal stripes, but her art has always seemed more concerned with the obsessive refinement (and satisfying imperfection) of the human touch than with mystical revelation.

And what’s Inez Johnston doing here? For years she has proved herself a fount of magical fantasies that take the form of strange personages and enchanted cities, but what does that have to do with “inner space”? Only a frame of reference that divides all art practitioners into those who invent their subjects and those who depend upon nature would put Johnston in “Visions.” She’s an inventor inspired by Paul Klee, but her muse takes her into concrete worlds and not resounding spaces.

Then there’s Emerson Woelffer, who apparently lays down his first stroke automatically in his recent work but predicates subsequent ones on that gesture. That seems reasonable for an artist who evolved with the Abstract Expressionists and shared their quest for a vision unconstrained by nature, but it doesn’t make him a painter of “inner space.”

Moses, Cole, Johnston and Woelffer are part of the second generation in “Visions.” The older artists or those more deeply rooted in the genre (including Mullican) have more in common. But except for Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, who are represented as the fathers of a West Coast alternative to Abstract Expressionism, they lack the clout of a Pollock or Rothko.

The Tobeys, though relatively small, really do resonate with light and space. It doesn’t seem ludicrous to suggest that mere oil on canvas can express mystical truth when we stare into these radiant paintings composed of multilayered, automatic “white writing.” And Graves’ birds in misty landscapes have the ring of archetypal, omniscent beings.

Had the historical aspect of the show been beefed up and the second generation more carefully chosen, “Visions” might have offered some insight into artists’ forays into “inner space.” But that would call for a revamped roster of artists and a clarified thesis.

As it stands, “Visions” stakes a firm foundation on the reputations of Tobey and Graves, holds its own fairly well through works by the Dynaton group (founded by Onslow Ford, Mullican and Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen), but then falls apart as it grasps for contemporary defenders of the faith. There seems to be a fundamental confusion between artists who tune in to themselves in order to paint and those who actually mean to re-create an inner vision.