La Cienega Area

When New York sculptor Ruben Nakian died the year before last at 89, he had become one of those sturdy timbers of modern American art, never quite the bearing wall David Smith was but never far from inclusion in some imaginary 10 Best list. A rare West Coast show of about 20 maquette-size bronzes and a couple of dozen prints reveals he was an artist who outlived fashion, finally fecund and baroque in an era that valued planklike plainness.

His sensibility belonged to the conservative end of Picasso’s generation, if not centuries earlier. Nakian adapted classical themes like Leda and the Swan or the Rape of Europa to express the explosive energy of the Abstract Expressionists. Nobody will have trouble recognizing the fauns and nymphs that prance and loll through these works any more than they will fail to see that the forms that make them up are essentially abstract. Limbs look like roots or clay swizzled between the palms. Compositions burst from their centers in an earthy celebration of Eros.

Once past the vaguely tedious authority built into bronze, you realize that Nakian was having an almost rococo good time here. There’s a lightness of spirit belying his monumental use of form that spills over into the prints and clarifies a playfulness already focused in his willingness to take time out from myth to do a trio of funny penguins. His drawing of big, zaftig women may recall the Amazons of Gaston Lachaise, but it’s that of a saucy Frenchman, a Marcel Vertes.

Today, these works look like artifacts from a past more generous and self-confident than art is today. There is something Arcadian in Nakian’s art that makes us both wistful and accepting of the idea that the past is unrepeatably over. (Mekler Gallery, 651 N. La Cienega Blvd., to March 31.)