La Cienega Area

An ambitious show studded with fine work, “Photomontage/Photocollage: The Changing Picture 1920-1980” yields one big disappointment: no catalogue to document these renegade sidelines of photography. Maybe someday a museum will take the time to investigate the subject and its links with contemporary movements in art, cinema, literature and politics.

The early works in this exhibit range from political commentary to antic high jinks, all informed by the Dada spirit, or--in the case of the few Soviet works--Suprematist idea of typography and layout.

The impact of urban life and the industrial age are central themes in works from the ‘20s and ‘30s by such unfamiliar artists as Gustav Klutsis, Joseph Leonard, Karl Steiner and Solomon Telingater. In his 1936 photocollage “Normalisierung,” German Dada artist John Heartfield marshals absurdly grinning faces in Nazi uniforms who saw off the limbs of a wooden trestle to make a giant swastika, the better to pursue the new national policy of remilitarization.

At a distance of more than 60 years it’s hard to know whether Hannah Hoch’s “Clown” photomontage--an egglike woman’s head with a baleful eye peering out from under a curious helmet--was intended as a feminist statement or simply a bit of whimsy. The influence of cinema permeates Herbert Bayer’s 1932 “Self-Portrait,” the much-reproduced image in which the handsome young artist sees himself in the mirror as an armless Greek statue.

From the ‘50s, a droll “paste-up” by California artist Jess features absurdly garnished advertising images of women posing with he-man tools as if wrenched from a madman’s version of Mechanix Illustrated magazine. Other images from the period are the works of Joseph Cornell and Harry Callahan.

Gliding past the ‘60s with quick nods to Roy Lichtenstein, Jerry Uelsmann, Georges Hugnet and an obscure but bitingly agile satirical artist named Mieczyslaw Berman, the show picks up speed with work from the last two decades. As might be expected, this diverse output ranges from social commentary to art-about-art.

Highlights include one of Wallace Berman’s “Verifax” collages, John Baldessari’s waggish “Red Poodle,” Joseph Beuys’ enigmatic double images “Iphigenie/Titus Andronicus,” Robert Cavolina’s faint photograph of a nude printed on a hunk of cement, and the Starn Twins’ mangled blowup of the patterned floor of the Louvre, among others. (Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to Sept. 2.)