ART REVIEWS : Heino Work Is Crown Jewel of Laguna Museum Shows

The Laguna Art Museum is chock full these days, with exhibits ranging from vintage canvases by Southern California artists charting uncertain pathways through modernism to large contemporary works the museum rarely shows. But visitors need venture no further than the lobby to see the jewel in the crown.

There, in a pocket-size show of his recent work, Steven R. Heino of Los Angeles displays a knack for sliding shapes and textures together in a spiffy, neo-Constructivist style. Even more impressively, he wraps the style around big, stimulating topics.

His most ambitious work, a 10-foot-long wall piece called “Cure of Folly,” alludes to the Renaissance image of a ship of fools set adrift on an uncertain voyage.

On a wooden support inlaid with wavelike arcs of linoleum, he cannily positions hull and prowlike shapes of two and three dimensions, made of metal, old painted wood and other materials. A metal shape in the upper right corner might be a fanciful dunce cap.

The allusion to ships and fools has a cool, contemporary off-handedness. The joy of the piece comes from rich formal vistas Heino has mapped out, territories entirely dependent on the rhythms of shapes and pristine and weathered surfaces.

Another large piece, “Third World Bed,” is a big, ripple-surfaced wood “bed” that doubles as the ocean. On this rigid body of water, drifting ships bear upright and toppling chairs papered with advertisements and other clippings with nautical motifs (Cutty Sark, Old Ironsides).

The title suggests that behind its cool, post-Modernist veneer, the piece is about global triage: decisions made by the superpowers about which nations will be “saved” and which will be allowed to founder. The cliche, “You’ve made your bed, and now you have to lie on it” comes to mind.

And the notion of chairs--open and unprotected, so easily sliding from the ships into the water--sums up a frightening vulnerability, a callousness on the part of some greater force.

Other Heino sculptures are tall, skinny figures built from pieced-together bits of wood and other materials. Despite the stylish patterning and interlocking shapes, each of these “effigies,” as Heino calls them, comes across as an introspective, skeletal Everyman.

The artist carries out the same theme in a lone print (his first), a cagey layering of four-color offset lithography and silk-screening.

A look at the “Ruth Stoever Fleming Collection of Southern California Art” comes across mostly as a trip down memory lane. The exhibit reassembles the winning paintings from annual juried exhibitions supported by the Newport-Mesa Unified School District in 1946-66. During those years, Fleming, the school librarian, turned a fledgling senior class project--the purchase of a painting to give to the school--into a respected competition, with prize money donated by the Chamber of Commerce.

The exhibit catalogue says Fleming deliberately chose jurors who represented different points on the conservative-to-adventurous spectrum. But it is sometimes difficult to see how these artists, critics and curators could have found more tepidly conservative works to celebrate.

Unwittingly, the main thrust of the show is to remind viewers what an artistic backwater Southern California used to be.

In the ‘40s, people painted the seashore and the mountains in styles weakly descended from the Impressionists. In the ‘50s (with some even blander exceptions) fledgling Southland artists went darkly, expressionistically psychological, or dabbled with spineless latter-day Cubism. In the early ‘60s, a prettified abstract Expressionism was the belated order of the day. Here and there, however, a work glimmers with more-than-routine interest.

In 1953, Jack Zajac, 24, was honored for “Papaya Vendor.” A sunny painting of a monumental woman motionless among a display of deep green fruit, the work has a good deal more presence than other winning entries from the era. A few years later, Zajac would become better known for sculpture in a romantic-surrealist style influenced by classical models.

Frederick Hammersley’s “Opposing Likes,” a 1963 winner, features bicolored vertical bands interrupted by a row of circles that vary in color, like unworldly stop lights, from red to black to white to pale gray.

Hammersley, along with John McLaughlin, Lorser Feitelson and Karl Benjamin, was one of the so-called abstract classicists. The hard-edged style, which evolved in the late ‘40s, established a sophisticated painting niche in Southern California. Wishing to isolate perceptual qualities of color and shape and (particularly in McLaughlin’s case) to embody the Eastern concept of the “void,” these artists developed independently of their far better-known hard-edge colleagues painting in New York.

Among other more recent works, Keith Crown’s bright, blurry “Death of Summer” demonstrates a sensitive, unfussy (though in 1963, rather old-fashioned) use of watercolor, and Guy Williams’ untitled essay in line and flat color, a 1966 winner, suggested good things to come from an artist still in his mid-30s.

One painting that might easily have been overlooked--”Ibizi 56,” a low-key semi-abstract pier scene, rendered in shades of brown--is noteworthy because it came from the brush of Robert Irwin. One of California’s major artists, Irwin gave up painting in the late ‘60s to produce a series of aluminum or cast acrylic discs that, when properly lighted, are essentially meditations on optical phenomena. Still later, his work evolved into dematerialized orchestrations of light.

When he won the prize for “Ibizi 56” in 1957, Irwin was 29 and at the threshold of his career (it was the year of his first one-man exhibition, at Felix Landau Gallery in Los Angeles). In hindsight, his thoughtful, low-key evocation of the action of light on architectural forms in this painting seems a kind of dress rehearsal for the monochromatic abstractions he would be doing a few years later--and, by extension, for the mature work with which his name is now identified.

The long road between this early and later work makes the viewer wonder whether there were not other painters, justly honored later in their careers, whose work was either not submitted or not chosen for these juried exhibitions. Where were the young John Altoons, the Charles Garabedians, the Ed Moseses--the artists who helped to build the contemporary reputation of Southern California art? That mystery is not revealed by this show.

Although “The Big Picture” brings together 14 of the largest works in the Laguna museum’s collection, most of the pieces on view fall short of the epic dimensions we have come to expect from big-scale contemporary art. More important, just a few of these paintings and mixed-media pieces seem to have been worth the trouble of unearthing them from storage.

Other than larger-than-usual size, little unites these works, dating mostly from the 1970s and ‘80s, which the museum has bought or acquired via donations from artists and collectors.

Joachim Smith’s “Four Pacific Sunsets: The Seasons” of 1971 is looking very sharp these days. Shaped like long, stretched-out diamonds, the four canvases glow variously in pink, orange, purple and yellow, each with multicolor pastel slices that intensify the optical effect.

It is a pity, however, that the sunsets are obliged to wind their way around a small partitioned gallery rather than holding their own along one spacious wall in skinny bursts of hot-colored splendor.

Larry Gipe’s “Painting No. 1 (Territory Series)” offers a view of the Colosseum in drippy red and black on wrinkled, goopy-looking paper mounted on board. The word TERRITORY looms at the bottom of the piece.

Lacking the authority of Gipe’s industrial paintings, it nonetheless gives the flavor of the young Los Angeles artist’s personal mixture of irony and romanticism.

An untitled Norton Wisdom painting from 1974, scored and textured in deep brown with dull metallic green areas suggesting a dimly glowing path and doorway, has a resonant, meditative quality.

Most of the other pieces are at best intriguing experiments incompletely resolved and at worst blandly formulaic examples of an artist coasting until stronger ideas take hold.

James Ford’s “Excerpt (Title 35)” from 1982 mates a large, tilted swath of bathroom tiles in vaguely Mondrian-like color patterns with a big piece of wood jigsawed like an artist’s palette and a sliver of white wood molding.

A two-canvas Frank Dixon painting from 1985--a curious choice for a museum purchase because it is not one of his better works--features a squatting nude with a red, masklike face and streaming hair who curls one arm in an apelike gesture and extends the other one into empty space.

James Strombotne, represented by two earlier paintings in the Fleming Collection exhibit, reappears with a more familiar style in “Reflections on the Assassination of RFK, June 7, 1968,” a histrionic, hot-off-the-press medley of the Stars and Stripes and images of Robert and Ethel Kennedy.

Other work in the exhibit is by Patrick Hogan, Robert Ackerman, Joel Bass, June Mock, Walter Askin, Clark Walding, Don Lagerberg and Ming Murray.

“Steven R. Heino” continues through Nov. 13, “The Ruth Stoever Fleming Collection” through Nov. 6 and “The Big Picture” through Aug. 28 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesdays through Sundays. Admission: $2 general, $1 for students and seniors. Information: (714) 494-6531.