ART : State’s Artists Reveal More of Themselves as the Years Go By

“The Artists of California: a Group Portrait in Mixed Media,” at the Laguna Art Museum to July 24, is a motley assortment of 80 portraits and self-portraits of the famous and the obscure, spanning the late 19th Century to the present.

Organized by the Oakland Museum, the exhibit includes paintings, watercolors, sculpture, photographs and drawings in which artists scrutinize the contours of their own and their comrades’ faces and attempt to imbue them with the idiosyncratic psychologies of the people inside.

For the most part--since California hasn’t produced any Rembrandts--the arresting, insightful images are those that step beyond the presentational quality of formal portraiture and use stylistic tricks or additional imagery to capture a fleeting, casual image or to reveal an artist’s mental state.

Most of the early images in the show are as deeply revelatory as a prepared statement. Artists wear suits and ties and assume stately poses, as if in imitation of their prosperous Gilded Age patrons. Only in an off-duty sketch do quirks of personality intrude: landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, who grandly adds his autograph, portrays himself in a little scribble as a pair of legs emerging from behind an easel.

Slightly later portraits spin off the Romantic view of the artist as a dreamy, poetic creature.

Xavier Martinez, a key California Tonalist painter, saw himself as a moody fellow with a jutting forelock, drooping mustache and sulky chin. In a sculpture by Leo Lentelli, he cuts a raffish figure, with his forward-sloping walk and untended shock of hair. Genre painter William Hahn chose to portray his friend, marine artist William Coulter, soulfully serenading a lady in white on a flower-trellised porch.

While the men of this era tended to preen, pout or present themselves as wise elder statesmen, female figures projected determination and lack of pretense. Lucia K. Mathews portrayed herself as a serious worker, eyebrows arched in concentration as she attacked her canvas. Photographer Annie Brigman, whose work celebrates the nude body in nature, is seen bending solicitously over a terrarium in a photo-portrait by Francis Bruguiere.

In the 1920s, a group of Oakland-based landscape painters known as the Society of Six worked in a bright, impressionistic style that carried over to their portraits and self-portraits.

August Gay’s stubby brush strokes captured an alfresco scene of fellow Society member Seldon Gile bending his bulky body over a tiny barbecue grill. Bernard von Eichman bravely sacrificed the real contours of his face to a patchwork of arbitrary swipes of color.

During the Depression, a serene gaze and a workingman’s cap identified social realist Eugene Neuhaus as a hearty member of the proletariat. John Langely Howard painted himself in a blue-eyed daydream over the body of his infant son in a baby Jesus pose. Young Helen Lundeberg announced her calm classicist’s vision with a cool profile of herself against a charcoal-and-dusty-pink mountain background.

The era also yielded Paul Taylor’s shot of his wife, documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, perched on the roof of a car with her camera, and master caricaturist Antonio Sotomayer’s leering, bulbous image of muralist Diego Rivera’s face. Sotomayer is also right on the mark with his amusing view of Ralph Stackpole--sculptor of immense and high-minded stone pieces--furrowing his brow as he balances on a wall to sandblast a huge head whose Aztec features weep monumental tears.

In our time, the art of portraiture has become much wilder and woollier.

Mel Ramos’ “David’s Duo” impudently presents himself and his wife nude, with big wings, on an Empire period chaise--a remake of Jacques Louis David’s painting “Cupid and Psyche.”

A Sam Francis self-portrait is a huge head speckled with multicolored paint that evokes the artist’s style rather than details of his physiognomy. Wayne Thiebaud’s brush gave his head the appearance of an immovable, deeply lined object with unevenly sized ears inserted into a stiff shirt under unseen harsh lights.

In “Opening, Closing,” William Wiley presents himself in his familiar dunce-hatted “Mr. Unnatural” guise. The drawing includes a rambling handwritten monologue about the frustrations an artist experiences while attending his own gallery opening (“One woman said, ‘I don’t know about the art, but where can I get some of those socks?”)

Photographer Judy Dater snapped Imogen Cunningham, California’s gnomish grande dame of “straight” photography, looking like an elderly Little Red Riding Hood as she sights a young nude model in the woods.

One of the most striking images is Robert Bechtle’s 1966 painting “French Doors,” a view through a pair of French doors that stand slightly ajar, letting in the evening air. One large pane of glass reveals the tall, bearded figure of painter Robert Bechtle, then in his 30s. His arm bends in mid-gesture, fingers clenched, as if he is in the middle of making a point to a seated woman in yellow. Behind the other door stands a shorter, older version of the artist, his arm positioned in the same way under a blurred light.

Combining the voyeuristic tease of a view into the artist’s dining room with a personal meditation on age and the persistence of a characteristic gesture, this painting suggests how much the art of self-portraiture has gained by pushing past the polite remnants of tradition into newly irreverent and probing avenues.

“The Artists of California: a Group Portrait in Mixed Media” continues at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach, through July 24. Museum open daily except Monday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Information: (714) 494-8971.