ART : Illustrating Weisberg’s Weakness

If only Ruth Weisberg had chosen to go into films--not as an actress, but as a power behind the camera, conjuring up poignant or sensuous moments with actors in a landscape and a battery of lights and lenses.

But the artist, who teaches at USC, chose instead to make paintings, drawings and prints--a selection of which is on view through Jan. 8 at the Laguna Art Museum. Throughout a 20-year period, Weisberg has doggedly continued to present her passions and introspections in a conservative, rigidly programmatic style uncomfortably close to illustration.

There is nothing inherently wrong with illustration. But an illustration is a handmaiden to a text. Never intended to stand completely on its own, it necessarily sacrifices some of the mystery and ambiguity of art.

In place of actual texts, Weisberg’s work illustrates “universal human themes,” as the exhibit catalogue piously explains. These themes are primarily keyed to the Jewish experience as seen from a low-key feminist perspective: not hostile to the ways of a male-dominated world but sort of pensively introspective.

The problem with the work is the wide-eyed literalness of Weisberg’s approach. Every figure has a specific particular identity or a rather ponderous symbolic meaning, and once such matters are accounted for, there is little else for the viewer to chew on.

For all the honest feeling behind them, Weisberg’s major pictorial device--juxtaposing figures from different moments of history, or the same figure at different stages in life--generally looks hollow and stagy. All too often it come across as kitsch. One begins to wonder whether the artist has been living her life in some earnest circle of well-wishers who overindulge her fancies.

Chicago-born to cultured, liberal parents, Weisberg fell in with a simpatico crowd at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (the source of this traveling mini-retrospective) during the early ‘60s. After time out for art study in Italy, she returned to Ann Arbor to earn a master’s degree and then stayed in the area to teach.

Some members of her circle of scholars, artists and political radicals appear in her 1968 painting, “Community.” As if posing for a poster advertising the virtues of Old-Line Leftist Behavior, they gesticulate, stand lost in thought or help carry a black man who is incapacitated for some reason.

The specifically Jewish themes in Weisberg’s work date from 1969 (shortly before her move to California), when she came across her dead grandmother’s personal reminiscences of her Jewish community in Russia. In a set of etchings, the artist created a memorial to shtetl life and the emotions involved in its abandonment. One of these images is a hulking, ramshackle cottage with a transparent portrait of a sad-looking older woman in a shawl superimposed on top of it.

Viewers get a dose of Weisberg’s touchie-feelie approach to human psychology in “Aura of Becoming,” from 1982, a painting of individuals in various states of undress, encircled with yellow-rose auras and distanced from each other like separate islands of self-absorption.

More recently, Weisberg has embarked on large-scale projects that mingle her artistic and personal interests. Her 11-part “A Circle of Life” painting cycle of the mid-’80s is described in the catalogue as an “autobiographical recasting of the Renaissance concept of The Ages of Man and of (Norwegian painter Edvard) Munch’s ‘Frieze of Life.’ ”

Only three of the large paintings are included in the exhibit. One is “Pentimento,” which shows the slender, barefoot artist as a nearly transparent figure walking in a landscape, on which she casts what appears to be the shadow of a fat nude woman. Masaccio’s Adam and Eve figures from “The Expulsion from Paradise” huddle in the lower right corner.

Catalogue essayist Thalia Gouma-Peterson’s explanation of the work involves a comparison of the artist’s body to Eve’s and such hazy-sounding issues as “confront(ing) the reality of (one’s) body.” We’re hip-deep in feminist terrain here, apparently, and the viewer who doesn’t accept the program might as well move on.

Women and girls do populate Weisberg’s art to the near-exclusion of men (although angels seem to have a special dispensation). In her eyes, womanhood seems to exist in a near-magic realm: girls cluster together, as if to ward off potential harm from outsiders; girls and women stand in rolling meadows bathed in sunlight. To be female is to be charmed, it seems. Or perhaps charmed yet troubled by the weight of oppressive male history going all the way back to the Bible.

Weisberg’s art actually does intersect with the movies in at least one instance: in “Children of Paradise,” a 24-foot-long mixed-media drawing from 1980 based on the crowd scenes in the Marcel Carne film. But this is just copycat stuff; the vision is not Weisberg’s own. No, the “filmic” side of her artistic personality is her sensualist’s delight in the experience of light and sun and water.

If paintings like “The Dunes: Persistence of Memory” were seen in Cinemascope, the music would swell and the viewer would likely be transported. But as static works of art, these images look too brightly obvious, too tensely willed to have the enduring kind of meaning their creator so fervently intends.

“Ruth Weisberg: Paintings, Drawings, Prints 1968-1988” remains on view through Jan. 8 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $2 for adults, $1 for seniors and students. Information: (714) 494-8971.