ART REVIEW : Sentimental Visions of the American Impressionists

Sweet-faced women gaze adoringly at their children or daydream in flower-filled nooks. Boats bob in harbors. Golden autumn settles over rolling hills. In public parks, spring has brought out bright banks of flowers and lush green grass.

The world of the so-called American Impressionists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is a blinkered and cozy place. While the French Impressionists created their flickering-brush-stroke technique to record specific visual phenomena, their Johnny-come-lately American counterparts generally used elements of the style to further sentimental visions of womanhood and local terrain.

A batch of these provincial images from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln has taken up temporary residence (to Aug. 14) at the Laguna Art Museum.

Although the 37 paintings, watercolors and pastels boast a few major names, on the whole the show offers saccharine visions of idealized women and children and timid, formulaic landscapes turned out by dutiful toilers in the field.

And with a few exceptions (such as Maurice Prendergast’s spongy-textured “Neponset Bay,” with its frieze of faceless women and girls), the well-known artists are unevenly represented by minor efforts or early work.

A Mary Cassatt from the late 1890s--when, under Degas’ influence, she was working in pastel--proves a pleasantly unexceptional sketch of an alert-looking young girl with a long neck. The Childe Hassam is a tiny watercolor, “Fifth Avenue, April Morning, 1917,” that gives just a taste of his festive flags-aflutter urban style.

Marsden Hartley, whose famously dark and bulky views of the Maine coast date from late in his life, was a 30-year-old tyro when he painted “Autumn Lake and Hills,” picking out a curious staggered pattern of small blue vertical strokes on a hill capped with a patch of snow like a bald spot.

Joseph Stella’s sunny “Mediterranean Landscape” was painted on a visit to his homeland before he got hooked on Futurism and Cubism and began turning out crisply stylized images of Manhattan landmarks.

To add confusion to the aesthetic doldrums, some of the painters in the exhibit aren’t even Impressionists.

Arthur B. Carles’ image of a French garden was primarily influenced by the liberated color choices of the Fauve painters. Arthur Davies, represented by a tiny image of slender tree trunks blooming in soft pools of green, was a dreamy Tonalist.

The skittering green leaves and flickering gray tree trunks in Robert Henri’s pastel drawing, “Light in the Woods,” are of a piece with other late work by the realist painter whose style owed its rapid touch to scrutiny of paintings by Velasquez and Manet.

And what Guy Pene du Bois’ bashful nude flapper is doing here, heaven only knows.

Too bad it didn’t occur to anyone to gussie up this muddle of styles and movements and degrees of talent by presenting it in a social context.

What was the mystique that turned middle- and upper-class women into such private, wistful creatures? How did the air of nostalgia embodied in these paintings mirror the progressive urbanization of American culture? How were the members of the painters’ group The Eight (some of whom are represented here) trying to reinvigorate the terminal gentility of American art?

There’s not a word on any of this, however, nor on the virtues of this chunk of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery collection that make it worthy of being plunked down so unceremoniously and unhelpfully in another museum.

Los Angeles artist Morris Broderson is essentially an illustrator, which is not a bad thing to be. But his paintings and watercolors of women and children from the past 20 years--at South Coast Plaza annex of the Laguna Art Museum through July 15--too often take the easy way out, substituting the standardized shell of an emotion or an observation for the genuine article.

When Broderson looks at a ballet dancer, whether it is Anna Pavlova in her “Dying Swan” costume or some nameless Giselle, he seems to see only the most obvious things: soulfully upturned eyes or long, boneless arms (arms which, in fact, make the viewer uneasy about the artist’s ability to articulate the human body).

Even in “Giselle With Hands Crossed and Sabre” from 1985, in which he singles out memorable components of the ballet (the Wilis’ crossed arms, the veil Giselle wears, the daisy she plucks to determine the course of her love life), the separate items are no more than a fan’s scrapbook memories, not a true meditation on the ballet.

Broderson’s other women are dreamy Madonnas with big, staring eyes and elaborate floral-patterned wardrobes. One magically extrudes a carpet of flowers from the neck of her dress. Another disappears into thin air like a flower child genie.

Deaf since birth, Broderson adds to some of his paintings sketches of hands “speaking” in sign language. But no matter how he chooses to communicate in these works, the message is hopelessly rose-tinted.