ART : Juxtaposing Miro, De Staebler and Schnabel

Even though it was fine in the city and a free day at the Museum of Modern Art, there were few visitors in galleries devoted to a Miro drawing exhibition. Maybe that was because shows devoted to the art of Julian Schnabel and sculpture by Stephen De Staebler are being given pride of place. Especially Schnabel, who is trumpeted with big yellow and black banners flapping away on the museum’s stone facade.

Maybe it’s because one glance at the 150 or so Miros is enough to convince the inattentive that--as great an artist as he was--Miro couldn’t draw, even by the liberal standards of Modernism. All the same, there was one visitor in the gallery who appeared preternaturally interested.

Young guy in his 20s with curly brown hair and Yasser Arafat stubble, his virtual lack of shoulders was made up for by a largish beer belly wrapped in a Mylar racer’s jacket. He moved jerkily around the room on white jogging shoes that looked like they might encase the feet of Donald Duck.

He caromed from one work to the next according to some magnetic impulse that had nothing to do with the curator’s notion of the order in which the art ought to be viewed. He never seemed to look at anything from far enough away to see it all, but zoomed in for microscopic examination. Some people moved out when he headed their way, like startled cars with a Mercedes behind them. Others would sidle up behind him as he fixedly examined a sheet. He had such intensity that whatever he looked at became the most interesting thing in the gallery.

That anonymous guy was the most compelling thing in the museum that day, and it was right that Miros were the object of his manic attention. The great Catalan Surrealist drew his amoebic critters with a wispy, shy line that never describes volumetric form and is rarely felicitous in itself. Even so, you can’t quite not look at these drawings. For one thing, several are preparatory for familiar paintings like “Dutch Interior.” They make you realize that the final paintings seem so inevitable it never occurred to you they might have had a work-up.

For all their ponderous egotism and feather-headed flirtations with communism, the Paris Surrealists of the ‘20s--Breton, Masson, Giacometti and all--were out to recapture an artistic spontaneity they saw lost in the whole rational program of Western art since the Greeks. They were out to wake up the little kid who is bashed into silence by the demands of practical growing up and to revivify the universal myths we ignore in our nightly dreams.

Miro did that with more convincing innocence than any of them. His drawings turn up on scraps of paper, menus, music sheets and wherever. Their very physical state tells a story about a man who could grab any blank surface at hand to get down the patterns of his reverie.

Early works are marked with the guilelessness of a kid who says embarrassing things to company at the house without the slightest malice. He draws a scary snake or a paranoid head with no hint he knows how crazy they are. He makes a little sweet watercolor of a child giving a pedicure to an adult, quite unaware that the properly housebroken viewer will find it as embarrassing as watching monkeys pick fleas.

There’s an authentic lack of calculation about Miro that never goes away so you can trust him to really be up to something; even just drawing a sawtoothed line gives way to a fat loop. It’s like a choreographic notation about rhythm, simple and clear.

As time went on, Miro’s art got to be more and more about an adult’s idea of the art of a happy child. Or maybe Miro was just a particularly happy old man. By the ‘60s, little galactic scribbles in colored line have replaced the dark undertones of “Calvin and Hobbes” with the sweetness of “Dennis the Menace.” It’s not less authentic, just less interesting.

Henry James’ short story “The Artist of the Beautiful” concerns an obscure Florentine painter who has a sublime idea for the ultimate Madonna painting. He even has the perfect model, a limpidly gorgeous teen-ager who will lend the painting Easter-lily freshness. But the artist has been holding back, not executing the work, waiting for just the right time. After much hemming and hawing, he finally takes the narrator to visit the model. In his enthusiasm and determination to wait for just the divine moment of inspiration, the artist fails to notice she has become a flaccid, middle-aged frump.

For years, Stephen De Staebler’s ceramic sculpture has taken an enticingly peripheral role in Bay Area art. His most familiar work is a pair of life-size seated figures that seem to have been pried away from an ancient Egyptian temple. They sit timelessly isolated, made up of stacked blocks eroded by the centuries. Glimpses revealed a workable and well-made variation on the Existential sculpture of Giacometti and a real part of the Bay Area figurative art of the ‘50s--that combination of advanced thinking and humanism that fueled the North Beach poets and painters like Diebenkorn, Park and Bischoff.

Now at last De Staebler, 54, turns up in a substantial survey organized by Lynn Gamwell for Saddleback College and the Laguna Beach Art Museum and on view here to April 17. Most works are from the ‘80s, but the show rattles around in time from Egypt’s Old Kingdom to postwar Paris and beatnik San Francisco. It jerks you back to wearing black turtlenecks and playing bad chess in coffeehouses while waiting for the latest Ingmar Bergman film.

There are two or three nice moves in this art, limited but nice. It is always richly textured in its erosion. Seated figures have a grave aura of dignity. A set of one-legged, one-winged victory figures have great sculptural uplift, like tornadoes waving tattered flags.

But the work doesn’t seem to want to exist anywhere in time. It may be significant that Donald Kuspit’s intelligent catalogue essay concentrates on the Jungian qualities of De Staebler’s work rather than trying to place it in the historical context of Bay Area art. This sculpture wants to exist in some never-never land of an imagined ancient Egypt or foppish late Rome, but it drips with connections to our times, from hints of Baudelairian decadence to De Kooning “Woman” paintings, Parisian monster sculpture to bits of Robert Cremean, Manuel Neri and Joan Brown.

It’s very attenuated stuff, with the victory figures balanced on the toes of skinny feet. They’re monumental in size but jewel-like in scale. They don’t look like the noble ruins of queens and goddesses; they look like the artificial, cosmetic-tinted rubble of fashion mannequins who turned to stone while prancing down the runway.

If this art had showed up when it should have, it might be easier to track. As it is, it emerges as a brand-new period piece that dramatizes the worst contradiction in its genre. It is decadence scolding decadence.

When Julian Schnabel’s retrospective visited New York’s Whitney Museum last year, there were those who said it was a vindication of this leader of a new genre of celebrity artist who had proved as popular with fashionable collectors and crowd-hungry museums as he was scorned by critics and outraged members of the disinterested public.

At first go, the Whitney showing seemed to reveal a remarkable sensibility akin to that of a troubled streetwise Brooklyn gang kid who had somehow discovered mythic history residing in the attic of his own mind and disgorged it on immense stained tarps or in great fields of broken crockery. The fantasy seemed to center in some Mediterranean crossroads where Saracen met Moor and Catholic kings struggled for supremacy while detritus of the ancient world washed up on the beach. By the very way Schnabel makes his art, all of that was brought to bear on the romance of New York graffiti artists or the Sharks and the Jets battling in “West Side Story.”

If in the end Schnabel’s windy exaggeration and schlocky ineptitude nullified that odd fascination, one had a sense that at least all the fuss had been about something--an almost tragic disjunction between the originality of Schnabel’s vision and his inability to express it convincingly.

The San Francisco showing (to April 3) is enough to make you think you were wrong the first time. Some works have been replaced, but it looks like the actual installation is what allows the art to do itself in. Mural-size tarps hung close together dramatize how little there is on them or in them. Huge crockery paintings one against the other look like pure compensatory shtick. The net effect is one of a massive case of indigestion that expresses itself by clouds of gas billowing from all orifices.

Maybe there’s nothing to be learned from the coincidental juxtaposition of a wispy show by a modern master, a late start by a local hero and a pompous roadshow by a New York operator. Maybe there is. Miro represents a time when art let in new air by rejecting history for risky expressive freedom. De Staebler and Schnabel have a consciousness of history in common. As Modernism grew older, it reshouldered the burden dropped by the avant-garde and lugged it wearily toward the pinnacled pit of a new academy.