Santa Monica

Holding Its Own: Whenever it begins to seem that the art of our time is just a perishable commodity eclipsed every season by some hot young charmer, it pays to look at work that holds its own despite the passage of decades. Drawings and cast bronze sculptures by Louise Bourgeois from the ‘40s and early ‘50s are wonderful things, at once exploratory and terse.

“Memling Dawn” is a 64-inch-tall stack of thin, slightly mis-aligned rectangular slabs from 1951 (but cast during the past year, as were all these pieces). It could be a precursor of Minimalism, except that the human metaphorical content is so strong--the artist’s characteristic allusion to jostling humanity in a crowd. Other sculptures testify to Bourgeois’ brilliant melding of abstraction and figuration (as in the iconic purity of “Pillar” from 1949, which nonetheless reads as a female form) and her allusions to architecture (as in the incised “doorway” lines that also create a hood and a face in “Woman with Packages”). The artist’s unerring feel for the small, perfect gesture is evident in details like the pale blue lines painted into the vertical indentations of another “Pillar” from 1949-50.

The drawings show another, more private side of Bourgeois: a scavenger looking at the world to find elements that could be fruitfully abstracted. The images include stop lights, a cocktail glass, a figure on roller skates, stick figures made from ladders, a voracious head eating a tiny head and a hut that billows into a skirt shape. There are also passages already transformed into another dimension, like the group of tall, vertical lines wavering with the lopsided indecision of living things. (Linda Cathcart Gallery, 924 Colorado Ave., to March 17.)