ART REVIEW : The Paradox of Millard Sheets at Claremont

Painter Millard Sheets, who died last March, was a dynamic personality who made tame art. This paradox is borne out in late paintings at the Claremont Graduate School Art Galleries (to Sept. 15). The show highlights unexhibited later work, including paintings completed in 1988.

During the ‘40s and ‘50s, Sheets was a strong influence on the fledgling Los Angeles art scene. His early work aroused national interest in West Coast watercolor. His various projects contributed greatly to the early Southern California cultural renaissance. But his cultural vision isn’t sustained by his own art.

Sheets was prolific. Even at age 81 he was busy creating watercolors of exotic places he had visited. Their color is intense but with a strange bluish cast that mutes most hues into cool, idealized objectivity. Occasionally they come vibrantly alive in paintings like “Tahitian Hukilau,” where natives net fish near a swollen white-barked tree.

Sheets’ late drawing style could be described as casually representational with a slight Cubist flavor somewhat reminiscent of John Marin or Arthur Dove. He favored flat expanses divided sharply by sweeping forms of bent tree trunks, stylized running horses, rolling hills or arcing sails. Loose drawing suggests pure flowing movement or clean geometry. For Sheets, the accuracy of these representational forms was secondary to their importance in the painting’s structure and movement. He took far more care with the arrangement of form, and distributions of light and dark, than with drawing. At heart the paintings are not travelogues or portraits, but highly organized formal compositions.

But Sheets never let go of recognizable imagery. Over the years he lost much of the earlier spontaneity. Later works tended to divide scenes into three horizontal bands of differing widths. Against this structure, curving pictorial elements stressed the dynamics of form. Sheets had a quirky, somewhat annoying way of shrinking objects in the foreground so that everything appeared to drop back and crowd the middle distance. The effect is a mild spatial confusion that leaves one wondering if the condensation was intended or if the artist was simply ignoring some points of perspective.

The painterly games Sheets played with abstraction and movement undoubtedly appeared fresher in the 1940s than they do today. Ironically that fundamental lack of invention contrasts sharply with the activities Sheets spearheaded for the Southern California art community. During his years of teaching at Scripps College and directing Otis Art Institute he consistently drew a respected assembly of artist/teachers who stimulated the growing artist community. Sheets showed a passion for acquainting the public with adventurous work. As director of art exhibitions for the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona he cadged major museums for loans that challenged local provincialism. In the unlikely setting of the fairgrounds Sheets displayed artists such as Paul Cezanne, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock from 1940 to 1956.

The artistic challenge he presented to Los Angeles came less from his painting than from his accomplishments as a teacher and arts organizer. At this point in our current cultural revival--so long on energy, so short on remembered history--this exhibit provides a welcome opportunity to note the legacy of a cautious pioneer.