Treiman’s Memories of Familiar Faces

Suiting up for Joyce Treiman’s survey exhibition at USC’s Fisher Gallery (to Feb. 27) is like getting ready to go to the 30th anniversary of your old buddy’s wedding or job or beloved pastime. (Hooray, three decades of sailing to Catalina, pickling kiwi, manning the suicide prevention hot line.) You knot your tie in the mirror, contemplating wrinkles, bags, pouches and silver strands accumulated since you celebrated the 10th, 20th and the 25th. If you squint, you still look OK.

It will be a sentimental affair replete with familiar faces, old jokes and muzzy memories, cozy but not catatonic, engaging but not galvanic.

Sure enough, the old gang clings to the gallery walls. The slightly satanic guy in a white suit and Establishment-hip haircut still stands in the living room yelling at somebody off stage while a worried redhead and three local characters look on. Harold Pinter staged by Thomas Eakins.

The blowsy cowpoke with shaggy chaps still beams boozily, upstaging Indian chief, riverboat gambler, gold miners half hiding a little redheaded girl (beloved of Charlie Brown) looking sulky wearing a chief’s headdress. Pirandello staged by Frederick Remington.

The redhead stands looking forlorn and fetching in finery from her mother’s time, a rose and the hat of Rembrandt’s son Titus. One author in search of a character.

The redhead, as you might have guessed, is Treiman herself in a couple of the endless incarnations of the fantasies she’s had while painting for 30 years in her garage in the Pacific Palisades. She shows up as leggy showgirl, tomboy flapper, cowpoke, pajamaed invalid and the companion of great artists from Monet and Bonnard to Tiepolo. Omnipresent in her own work, she is too frank to seem exhibitionistic and at bottom too consistent to seem flaky.

Somehow she is always the street-wise Raggedy Ann waif, canny and vulnerable, defiant and kind, a gamin invented by Giulietta Massina or Edith Piaf. Meantime she has become certainly the best-known long-haul realist painter to tough it through the legitimate revolutions and silly tides that have washed California’s art beach in her time.

But her art, crucially, does not look like anybody’s idea of contemporary California art. It does not give back California its idea of the Bay Area as sensuous and meditative the way Diebenkorn’s early work did. It does not reflect the self-satirical glamour of the L.A. Hockney bats out with such urbanity. It has nothing to do with either the detachment of Photo-Realism or the self-consciousness of Neo-Realism. It is an art dedicated to preserving classic realist painting without getting stuffy about it.

Treiman’s art dodges time and place. Its nearest artistic ancestors come from the 19th Century. It does not pay a realist’s homage to, say, Jackson Pollock the way Robert Arneson recently did (even though Treiman has made forays into abstract painting as this show shows). The most modern artists she doffs her hat to are Eakins, Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard. She paints, to the delight of her dedicated admirers, like an Old Master. “Standing Man” of 1969 looks like a portrait by Gerard Terborch, with its black suit and severe outline. “Nude Out West” of last year is the most recent painting in the show. It hangs a montage of cowboys, Indians, plucky girls and a buffalo on a curved cubist grid that looks like it was done by Robert Delaunay. Terrific buffalo. Treiman has a real affinity for animal painting. In the middle she’s lettered: “Can You See Anything?” Well, not the nude except in bits and pieces.

The way Treiman’s art is modern is in its attitude. It is placeless like weary travelers on concrete airport ramps imagining they are home by the fire. More than half the works exist in dark, domestic-interior back-East light as if she’d brought a Chicago winter sun with her when she moved out here, closed all the curtains and painted as if she were in Cleveland or Philadelphia in a big old mahogany-paneled house visited by middle-class arty and intellectual friends--a kind of upper bohemian university academic bunch she limns with affection and humor, casting them as wranglers, con men, seductresses and monsters.

The surprise of this survey is the way it dramatizes Treiman’s art as the product of a kind of cultural diaspora. It’s about cold-weather people who come to Los Angeles and never quite get used to it. In October they get out their tweeds and start staying in the house listening to Beethoven and reading Goethe while everybody else is still at the beach.

People in Treiman’s paintings are all a bit out of whack. They have clunky, earthy feet but they can’t get in touch with gravity and often seem about to levitate. In the ‘60s there was an expressionist Angst in pictures like “The Secret” and “The Birthday Party” that hint at James McGarrell or Francis Bacon mixed with big infusions of the mannered enigmas of the 16th Century. Even though the people are on the same stage they are like specters existing in different places caught half-visible in a transporter beam in Treiman’s living room.

Her art changes within the glowing, earthy confines of her dedication to fine solid painting but it never loses the sense of uprootedness, the slight embarrassment of the genteel refugee, the immigrant who looks like an American but is unsure of his English, the wandering Jew, the cheeky waif hiding unsureness behind stubborn cockiness. There are chunks of E. L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime.”

It would be fair to read the major tide of Treiman’s art as a long process of getting used to L.A. light. Over years her palette gradually brightens. This is a big deal for a painter because form has to be handled very differently going from full light to half then from half to darkness. In the mid-’70s she got stuck in the middle, and paintings like “The Big Sargent” go flat and ropy because there are no deep shadows. By ’77 she had it right in wonderful, feathery garden paintings. It is California light but--significantly--displaced to the south of France in pictures with titles like “Rose, Bonnard and Artist Twice.”

Treiman is superbly responsive to what is in front of her. Her people are portraits, her places real, but everything is transposed to the terrain where her imagery comes to rest in the history of art and autobiographical fantasy. “Out West” still comes to her from paintings of the Hudson River school and a girlish fascination with hairy cowpokes on horseback. In the end the light in the paintings depends on the emotional light within the artist. Recent ruminations on death like “The Parting” and “Thanatopsis” where she sits with a skeleton in an apocalyptic landscape take their light from an ever-deepening mood that is wise enough to be both profound and playful.

The anniversary party changes from a nostalgic occasion to a realization that even high artistic virtuosity is but the handmaid of the spirit and that it is still possible to say something significant about the human spirit while painting in the garage and eating toasted tuna sandwiches for lunch.