Show Covers Rare Ground, but Not With Distinction

When Imogen Cunningham first exhibited the photographs she made of her husband, nude, on Mt. Rainier in 1915, they caused such a scandal that she hid the negatives for 50 years.

Just this year, a painting by Eric Fischl of a nude man playing baseball sent a ripple of discomfort through the Chicago Public Library, where the work was on view. A warning was posted at the entrance to the show, stating that some viewers might find its contents objectionable.

Artists and institutions alike are finally beginning to address the sexism that prevails within the art world, but few have acknowledged the double standard that has lingered within image-making itself.

For a complex knot of historical, sociological and psychological factors too dense to untangle here, images of the female nude have far outnumbered those of the opposite sex, except, perhaps, in the art of ancient Greece.

Recent paintings by local artists Donna Fisher and Jane Lazerow, on view at ArtistSpace at Southfair (2010 Jimmy Durante Blvd., Del Mar), are unusual, then, for their concentration on the male nude, but they are remarkable for little else.

Lazerow strives for psychological drama in her paintings by surrounding a central male form with clusters of smaller, sketched figures that she calls “voices.” In “Poised Before the Sea of Voices,” the man strides into a mass of the blue, mint green and purple forms. In other works, the figure adopts equally conventional models’ poses, which Lazerow then tries to embellish and embolden through garish color and clouds of “voices.”

Lazerow seems caught between academic realism and a desire for a freer, more expressive approach. The compromise she practices is satisfying on neither count, for her rendering is clumsy and her spontaneity limited. Only in one image, “Lizard Man, at Mother’s Knee, Listening for Voices,” in which she paints with some semblance of abandon, giving her model an unusual posture and painting him with slashes of ghoulishly hot color, does she procure a bit of tension in her work.

Fisher’s work can be as trite as Lazerow’s at times, but she has more facility with paint and can often evoke a strong sense of emotion and place. She conjures moody auras in her watercolors, haunting her scenes with ghosts, gracing them with muses, suffusing them with melancholy or bleaching them with death. In “Transverberation,” she paints a man, waist deep in a stream or pond, leaning over a floating figure. A ghostly form standing on the water’s edge with arms crossed over its chest emanates a white light and lends an air of the macabre to what may be just an innocent wade.

One 18th-Century writer on art proposed that the male nude could achieve character, but only the female nude could aspire to beauty. Fisher challenges this notion, painting her model with respect for his sensuality and ideal form. In her oil painting “Dithyrambus,” she bathes her subject in golden light, seating him against a chilling landscape and a sky heavy with smoky blue clouds. Here, Fisher comes closest to capturing both the beauty and raw power of the nude male form, but, like Lazerow, she nearly smothers her intentions with excessive effort.

The show, with the overbearing title “Into the Nineties: The Baroque Figure,” continues until Feb. 11.