ART : Laguna Art Museum’s New Curator Wraps Essay on Photographic Newcomer in Fine French Linen

Read any Jacques Lacan lately?

Up on your Maurice Merleau-Ponty?

Both, it seems, have something to do with Jane Gottlieb, to judge by the Laguna Art Museum’s catalogue essay on her. She’s a photographer whose work appears at the museum through March 4 and, from the essay, she seems a newfound high priestess of the most esoteric art around. Weighing in with a first catalogue essay as the museum’s new curator, Michael McManus links Gottlieb’s name to so many artists and high-brow intellects that one is amazed the 41-year-old artist hasn’t already had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York--or at least the Modern Museum of Art in Santa Ana. In fact, this is her first solo show--in a museum or gallery. That’s not a point against her. Yet one wonders about the shimmery, analytical discussion that McManus wraps around her. His eight double-spaced pages include references about enough artists to fill an art history course--a remarkably eclectic one. The list includes Robert Irwin, James Turrell, David Salle, Eric Fischl, Henri Rousseau, Jean-Leon Gerome, Richard Diebenkorn, Larry Bell, Ed Moses, Robert Graham, Rene Magritte, Josef Albers, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, to name a few.

He refers to philosophers, psychologists and psychoanalysts, often summoning them to witness on behalf of a case for what Gottlieb is not, rather than what she is. After calling her a “significant addition to the development of West Coast photography,” he writes: She is not a programmatic artist like Robert Irwin or James Turrell who both knowingly grounded their work in the post-war phenomenological writings of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Ingarden. Nor does her iconography and composing strategy emerge from a familiarity with the reappraisal of Freudian psychoanalysis by Lacan, Deleuze and the rest of the Tel Quel crowd . . . “ The man who is perhaps the most respected fine art photography dealer in Los Angeles, G. Ray Hawkins, hadn’t heard of Lacan, Merleau-Ponty or Gilles Deleuze. Nor had Kevin E. Consey, director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, who has a graduate degree in art history. Times librarians said the three Frenchmen are, respectively, a psychoanalyst, a psychologist and a philosopher.

Tel Quel was a French literary review, avant-garde and now defunct. In 1983, its former editor, known for his completely unpunctuated theoretical writings, published a sexy novel, shocking his intellectually inbred colleagues because he’d written something everybody could understand. And scholarly Times librarians had a hard time quickly digging up the basics on Ingarden.

McManus’ essay would be fine if Laguna Beach were seeing a demographic influx of French intellectuals. But it isn’t, so the piece comes off as an attempt to bestow instant credibility on an artist who is just starting to make her way.

Somewhere amid all the verbiage is Jane Gottlieb, a former art director for advertising companies and movie studios.

“The first artist who influenced me was Van Gogh,” she said recently from her home in West Los Angeles. “There was a huge show of his work in 1956, when I was around 10, and I will never forget the impression it made on me. I always painted. My father bought art and my mother always painted.”

Having graduated from UCLA, majoring in art history and painting, she spent the late 1960s in New York as an advertising art director. Impressed by photographers she met in the ad business, Gottlieb moved away from the abstraction she’d favored in her painting and combed the city with her camera. Returning to Los Angeles in 1970, she was an art director for magazines and commercial photographer and, lately, has worked with her father in the real estate business.

The pictures on view at the Laguna are a mostly non-figurative blend of colorful paint and realistic photographs of buildings and gardens. The essay calls them “mandala-like landscapes.”

Webster’s describes a mandala as “a circular design containing concentric geometric forms . . . symbolizing the universe, totality, or wholeness in Hinduism and Buddhism.”

The essay fragment that rings truest is one saying, simply, that “unmediated sincerity is the hallmark of Jane Gottlieb’s ouevre. . . .”

In conversation, calling the Laguna show “my big break,” Gottlieb was the essence of sincerity.

To what degree was she influenced by the surrealism of the 1920s, post-structuralists, Kierkegaard, Mondrian and Malevich and the rest of the people from the high culture hall of fame evoked in her honor?

“I was influenced by some of them,” she said brightly, explaining that she once had a poster of art by French surrealist Rene Magritte on her bedroom wall and was friendly with Ed Moses, an abstract painter who lives in Venice.

Then she sighed. “Look, Michael seems like a nice guy. He read this piece to me and I told him it is very interesting and that I hadn’t seen myself this way. I did tell him there were a lot of references in there that I didn’t understand and he said he knew what he was doing and a lot of other people would understand.

“It was the first time in my life anybody’s written anything about me and I was flattered.”