ART REVIEW : Quiet Masters of American Modernism Get Their Due

While David Hockney is packing them in at the County Museum of Art, two early masters of American modernism are more quietly but no less significantly on view at the museum.

Maurice Prendergast, who has been called the first American Post-Impressionist, is seen at his gentlest in a selection of 55 monotypes depicting pretty, stylish turn-of-the-century girls in the streets of Paris and parks of Boston.

Charles Demuth, who is often bracketed with such American “Immaculates” as Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley, turns up in a rare full-dress retrospective originated last year at New York’s Whitney Museum. Demuth’s exhibition ranges from such classic paintings as “My Egypt” to his superb watercolors of pulpy fruits and flowers to no-less-ripe satirical images of vaudeville entertainers, gay sailors and limp aesthetes mirroring the chic demimonde of New York and Paris in the hectic dawn of this century.

Both members of the pair have to do with refinement and each might be seen as a distant spiritual ancestor of Hockney.

Prendergast, who died at 65 in 1924, was, like Hockney, an intimist who tamed the advanced art of his day into a charming, festive vision of ordinary life on a holiday Sunday. Both artists share a temperamental link to Pierre Bonnard.

Prendergast is remembered for his association with the New York-Philadelphia Ashcan School and as an organizer of the epochal Armory Exhibition of 1913, but he spent most of his life in Boston, with as many bedazzled trips to Paris as he could manage.

There was an innocent urbanity about his vision. When he looked at a gorgeously dressed gamine that Toulouse-Lautrec would have acidly labeled a hooker, he simply saw a pretty lady. When he went to Le Cirque, he didn’t see Picasso’s harlequin outcasts but the vision of a well-behaved child enchanted by delicate white horses and sweet, wan clowns.

His mature signature style weaves scenes from a tapestry of bright strokes--a kind of pointillist confetti--that labels the work early modern in rather the same way as Kandinsky’s early figurative sallies. These small monotypes--from Chicago’s Terra Museum and on view here to March 20--were done mainly in the ‘90s. They reflect both the early influence of James McNeill Whistler’s love of closely harmonized subdued tones and the effects of the medium. Monotypes are made by painting on glass or some other surface and then pressing a piece of paper on it to transfer the image. As Cecily Langdale points out in her catalogue, essay monotypes can actually result in two or three printings, not just one.

Anyway, the built-in mooshing of form and color that goes with monotypes makes these soft-edged and slightly overexposed. Their faded quality reminds us that Prendergast always painted cherished memories wafted away on the winds of time--reality as an evanescent cloud.

Charles Demuth was a sickly, handsome, quietly homosexual dandy who died in his hometown of Lancaster, Pa., in 1935 at 52, exiled by illness from the bright city lights he had loved. Like Hockney, he was a bit of a dilettante in his attraction to a wide variety of modernist styles that ranged from Cezannesque landscapes to anxious Expressionist satire to a colloquial version of Cubism that resulted in his one hit single, “I Saw the Figure Five in Gold,” which became a touchstone for the Pop movement in the ‘60s.

It did not come to Los Angeles and that’s too bad, but we barely miss it in focusing on the watercolors--certainly his crowning aesthetic achievement, and plenty of reason to see this important show before it closes here April 24.

Demuth’s run-of-the-oils tend to be labored and coyly melodramatic in symbolism. It is as if he was intimidated by the medium and tried too hard to say something important. In the watercolors he was relaxed, fastidious and masterful, moving easily from classicism to Cubism without ever seeming to force his voice. (In the oils he is like somebody working hard to speak a foreign language.)

Wonderful as they are, his liquid images of apples and eggplants, bananas and zinnias can seem remarkably emotionless. That is probably because they are. They are about sensations rather than emotions. They have the detached sexiness that can sneak up on you when your hair stylist brushes your neck with the clippers and you tingle all over. There is an almost puritanical resistance to allowing these images to do their thing. They caress a flower petal the way a lover caresses his lover’s velvet skin. They touch an apple and palpitate. Their form is not radical, but the way they bottle pure sensation like perfume must have seemed to the conventional subconscious of the day downright subversive.