ART REVIEW : ‘Thrift Store’ Show: It’s Priceless

“Pink Poodle and Hydrant With Text” is among my favorite paintings in the current exhibition at the gallery of Glendale’s Brand Art Library. “Man With No Crotch Sits Down With Girl” is certainly an unforgettable image, too. As paintings go, they’re--well, frankly I’m not quite sure what they are.

Therein lies the surprising appeal of this large exhibition, which consists of paintings gathered not from galleries or museums but purchased for a few dollars apiece from an untold number of thrift stores. The assembly effortlessly jams the circuits of common expectation, creating a cognitive dissonance that turns out to be refreshingly insightful. This decidedly outlandish show is among the best of the season to date.

“Thrift Store Paintings” includes 104 works, compiled for the occasion by the artist Jim Shaw. Its initial odd appeal comes from the frequently wild humor in the paintings. (“Wee Wee Monsieur,” reads the text gaily written across the cartoonish picture of a jaunty pink poodle, who brightly eyes a fire hydrant in an otherwise barren landscape; the infantile cornball-ism leaves you momentarily blinking in stupefied disbelief.) But the show is not a joke. There is nothing condescending in its tenor. It’s played perfectly straight.

Save for the fact that these are paintings made by unknown hobbyists and amateurs, rather than by aspirants in the world of art, this could be any exhibition in any reasonably ordinary gallery. Shaw has collected thrift store paintings for a number of years--he owns nearly half the works on view--and the rest have been borrowed from 20 fellow collectors. (Among them are a number of other artists, including Mike Kelley, Ann Magnuson and Brad Dunning.) There are paintings in most of the expected categories--still life, portrait, landscape--and there are plain debts to various kinds of art that flourish within the popular mainstream: surrealism, Norman Rockwell-style magazine illustration, psychedelic posters, religious icons, cover illustrations on science fiction and detective novels, Grandma Moses-style folk art and more.

There is also a clear curatorial hand at work in the selection and arrangement. You’ll suddenly find yourself cross-referencing paintings grouped by nominal subject--dogs, nudes, elephants, fantastic landscapes, portraits of shoes--or else juxtaposed according to the aforementioned styles.

The paintings have no known titles, although each is accompanied by a purely descriptive wall label. The descriptions, taken from an inventory list made up for the purely administrative purpose of being able to identify one from the other, can be blunt or loopy, depending on the items to be enumerated. The somber “Black Mourner in Tones of Gray” hangs near the flashy “Cosmic Blonde Girl With Liquid Universe and Ballpoint Defacing,” while the dull “Old Man With Zoroaster Book” stares across the room at the provocative “Woman Made of Pillow, Wax Lips and Green Thing.”

The paintings are also anonymous. Some have indeed been signed and dated--the dates range from the 1940s on--but who these painters are, or were, is anybody’s guess. The absence of a larger context for the paintings serves to make each one even odder.

Occasionally, the astute eye will discover more than one picture by the same hand. In the obvious case of a suite of 10 heraldic, vaguely medieval portraits of wives of former Presidents (Grace Coolidge is present, but not Jackie Kennedy), we clearly have an unidentified talent who shall henceforth be known as the “Master (Mistress?) of the First Ladies.”

Like an anthropologist at a dig--or, depending on your aesthetic tastes, a detective at the scene of a crime--you scan the rooms for evidence in an attempt to make sense of what is going on. But there is no lexicon of useful terms, save those that can be pillaged from the standard repertoire of art history and criticism, by which to chronicle the disparate clues. It seems absurd to invent, as a medievalist would, a “Master of the First Ladies” for a lumpish painting of Lady Bird as a Texas cowgirl. And however correct the attribution, recognizing precedents in Rembrandt or Magritte for paintings of a pipe-smoker and a pair of foot-like shoes becomes an exercise in utter madness.

After all, these paintings fail miserably by every known aesthetic standard. Half the fun is collapsing into hysteria at the very idea of having chosen to paint a picture of an elephant-shaped lamp--a portrait of a lamp!--or going gaga over the sight of a leering, pneumatic bimbo sprawled out in full recline like some raucous, Playboy-magazine version of Manet’s piercing modern masterpiece, “Olympia.”

Of course, the crowds in 1863 likewise laughed uproariously at “Olympia” herself--a small realization that quietly kicks this most remarkable show into place. “Thrift Store Paintings” is a literal Salon des Refuses, an anthology for our time of all that is rejected and cast off from the “academy” of conventional, acceptable ideas about art.

Napoleon III had established his Salon des Refuses as a means by which to mollify the growing number of angry artists annually eliminated from the officially sanctioned Salon, through which an artist’s livelihood and reputation could be secured.

It was here, at the first “Exhibition of the Refused,” that Manet’s painting caused an uproar. In creating the Salon , Napoleon III inadvertently brought to the foreground art’s new embeddedness in social conflict. Manet, who wanted nothing more than to be embraced by the very academy that modern history soon would relegate to an ashheap of its own, seized the day: His lowdown image of a self-assured prostitute stared imperiously in the face of the raucous, bourgeois crowds who thronged to see it.

It would be silly to think that the Brand Library show means to argue for the unsung aesthetic genius lurking inside the bins at your nearby Salvation Army. (Its bargain-basement-Olympia is plainly no Manet.) Rather, as an installation of found objects, created by a very gifted artist, “Thrift Store Paintings” turns the tables.

As much as the anonymous artists whose work is on view, it is the audience--its tastes, values and points of identification or contention--that Shaw has deftly made the resonant subject of this show. That he chose to install it in a suburban, community-run gallery is telling, as is his pointed omission from the assembly of but a single artistic style: Abstract painting, vaunted pinnacle of modern High Culture, has been curatorially refused.

Despite all the usual platitudes that claim the contrary, the exhibition adroitly manages to suggest the ways in which our modern conceptions of art function to divide us into warring camps. The beauty of this presentation is that, in fact, there is something here to appeal, in one peculiar way or another, to virtually everyone who sees it.

“Thrift Store Paintings,” at the gallery of the Brand Art Library, 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale, through April 3. For information: (818) 956-2051.