ART REVIEW : Printmaking From Whistler to Pollock

The voices of such great American poets as Carl Sandburg, Jack Kerouac and Walker Evans whisper through the galleries housing “From Whistler to Pollock: American Prints From the Collection.” On view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through Aug. 6, this selection of 90 works from the museum’s permanent collection reveals a little about the evolution of printmaking--which doesn’t appear to change that drastically from one decade to the next--and a whole lot about the American Dream.

Dating from 1850 to 1950, these melancholy valentines celebrate the idealized collective mythology we have fashioned for ourselves, and make us fall in love again with the endless stretches of land, the skylines and the boundless opportunity that made America the promised land of the early 20th Century.

Expertly curated by Victor Carlson, the show gets off to a sleepy start with 10 images by the first American printmaker to achieve an international reputation, James McNeill Whistler. Well represented in LACMA’s collection, Whistler is accorded considerable wall space here for his well-mannered portraits and scenes of Venice and London. Expert draftsman though he was, Whistler comes off a bit tepid here, and this body of work feels like a visual diary kept by a highly cultivated traveling gentleman. It’s all a little too picturesque.

Similarly, “The Old Violin,” a trompe l’oeil pirouette by William Harnett, seems dry and academic, as does an uncharacteristically saccharine work by Winslow Homer. Titled “Mending the Tears,” this image of two seamstresses at work lacks the thematic complexity and crisp quality of light that enliven smaller Homer works depicting children at play by the sea and a soldier in a tree shouldering a rifle.

The inherent delicacy of the printmaking medium invites an introspective mood, and the show includes several studies of pensive individuals having quiet moments alone. Mary Cassatt’s dry-point etching of a beautiful female child is the best of this lot, while Thomas Moran exploits the opposite end of the spectrum with “The Much Resounding Sea,” a dramatic image of a lifeboat making its way to shore as the mothership sinks in the distance.

The second gallery opens with 10 images by Childe Hassam, a leading American Impressionist who was heavily influenced by Whistler. You can almost hear the twittering birds and rustling leaves in Hassam’s New England landscapes, which have the same tasteful, burnished glow of Whistler. In other words, they’re rather dull.

From there, the show starts cooking with gas. Two images by the ever reliable Edward Hopper are awash in the same delicious loneliness that colors his paintings. In “Evening Wind,” a nude young girl poises before an open window with fluttering curtains; you can feel both her restlessness and the humid breeze, smell the locomotive smoke and jasmine wafting on the air outside her window in this incredibly evocative image. The bittersweet allure of loneliness is also the leit motif in two street scenes by Armin Landeck that shimmer with a haunted quality reminiscent of De Chirico.

New York’s Ash Can School promoted a radically different world view from that of Whistler and his followers, preferring to depict gritty urban themes, especially life in New York City; the Ash Can approach provides some of the high points of the show. Gerald K. Geerlings’ “Jewelled City,” a stunning night skyline of Chicago, is a definitive expression of the magic and mystery of the big city, while George Bellows, known for his visceral depictions of boxers, offers five prints bursting with a robust vitality worthy of Dickens. “Splinter Beach,” an image of a dirty Manhattan shore jammed with men in various stages of undress is like a working-class version of a Calvin Klein ad; Bellows’ boys all look impossibly healthy and indomitable.

Five images from John Sloan’s “New York City Life,” a series exploring Gotham’s different classes, capture men at a peep show, people sleeping on a roof on a sweltering night, girls at a penny arcade. Drawing with the loose, sexy line of Reginald Marsh (who is represented here with a print of a massive, black locomotive), Sloan makes the life of New York’s lower-middle class look pretty swell.

Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood straddle the urban and rural worlds, and Benton’s “The Boy,” an image of a young man leaving the farm for life in the city, touches on the allure of both. The farm this intrepid traveler leaves is beautiful, yes, but it also seems suffocating in its lush coziness.

Like Benton and Wood, esteemed wood engraver Paul Landacre, a native of Los Angeles, depicted nature as something dark, sensuous and pulsating with mystery. Landacre also invested images of industry and city life with a rich fertility bordering on the erotic and over the course of his prolific career, Landacre, who is generously represented here, addressed most of the themes that make “From Whistler to Pollock” such compelling viewing; the stalwart individualism America has always revered, the reckless, pioneering spirit that built this country, the dazzling variety and sheer scale of American landscape.

Most of all, however, these images remind us that the United States is a country settled by immigrants, people exiled from their homeland, longing for things left behind. That yearning for something unattainable and remote is a big part of our heritage, and it permeates every image in this marvelous show.