ART REVIEW : Exhibits Get to the Roots of Geometric Abstraction

Geometric Abstraction gets some of its American roots exposed and its contemporary vitality examined in two worthwhile downtown exhibits.

“Progressive Geometric Abstraction in America, 1934-55,” a highly specific selection of works from Southern California physician Peter B. Fischer’s collection, is being presented at the USC Fisher Gallery through Oct. 28. And “Grand Tour, Italian Geo-Romantic” is at Otis/Parsons Gallery through Saturday.

Focusing on the formative years of American Abstraction, the Fisher Gallery exhibit is a tight survey of some of the abstract artists who lived and worked in New York in the early decades of this century. A few, like Arshile Gorky, Leon Polk Smith and Ad Reinhardt, are well known. But it is largely the paintings by less heralded artists that illuminate and spark interest here.

Charmion Von Wiegand’s brightly amusing “Individual Worlds” is a delightful primary-colored pipe dream filled with traffic signs and international symbols that pitches art as non-verbal communication. There are a couple of masterful untitled oils by collector and scholar Albert Gallatin and an exquisite iridescent free fall in deep space called “Lyrical 7” by John Sennhauser.

The collection favors totally non-objective, hard-edged, linear abstraction. A few biomorphic forms, abstracted landscapes, still-lifes and portraits soften the analytical edges of what is at heart a purist’s vision of even more idealistic art. Overall, the quality of the paintings is remarkably high. These 43 artists may not be the most original or memorable from the ‘30s and ‘40s, but these paintings nevertheless clearly resonate with the intellectual vigor and conceptual rigors that launched American Modernist painting.

The Fischer collection shows how indebted American Modernism was to the influence of European Cubism and Constructivism. Yet it is surprising how vital some of those images remain within today’s art-about-art discussion of image making. That the discussion still rages internationally is the point made at Otis/Parsons’ “Grand Tour, Italian Geo-Romantic” exhibit. You’ll have to rush to catch this one before it moves to Milan, but the energy of the assembled art is worth the hustle.

The nine artists in this “tour,” organized by critic and writer Maria Grazia Torri, are Italian. Their art gives the rational formalism of Modernism healthy humanity. For all their earnestness, Bruno Sacchetto’s paintings of massed, machine-hive numbers have the easy-to-take blunt appeal of a comic book. Giovanni Sgarbossa’s flat-out decorative paintings that parody ornament as Florentine geometric design take the clinical sting out of abstraction. And what Satprakash does to architectural pillars by playfully covering the rigid geometry with Naugahyde-buttoned upholstery spoofs formalism with colloquial vernacular.

Not all the art takes such a whimsical attitude to the traditions of Modernism or approaches it with this kind of inventive flair. Marco Lavagetto’s folding box paintings and Piera Legnaghi’s curls of painted iron seem curiously bland and dated. By contrast, Giancarlo Neri, Giovanni Albertini and Stefano Giovanazzi make exacting, idealistic paintings that manage to pump contemporary musings into old angular symbols.

“Grand Tour” makes a clear point that geometric art isn’t simply a moribund footnote in the art-history books. It is a living symbolic language. When the art, like the high-tech, pseudo-fishing lures of assemblage artist Carlo Marzuttini, can bait us with ideas and images we find intriguing, we’re hooked--and glad to be.