ART REVIEWS : ‘Irises’ May Be the Getty’s Trademark Picture

Great art museums often have a trademark painting--the picture that makes people come to the museum. The Prado has Velazquez’s “Las Meninas”; the Uffizi, Botticelli’s “Primavera”; the Louvre, Leonardo’s “La Gioconda.” Now the J. Paul Getty Museum has Vincent van Gogh’s “Irises,” acquired last week to appropriately thunderous fanfare.

It’s a relief that we should no longer know quite what the painting cost, since the museum keeps wisely mum in such matters. We know it was plenty, since the previous ill-starred owner paid $53.9 million, but muffling the price returns the painting to the realm of art where it belongs just as surely as it belongs in a public museum.

It is also pure poetry that “Irises” should materialize here in spring. The picture is about the regenerative power of resurgent nature, life teeming forth helter-skelter out of the death of winter. Van Gogh painted it in early May, 1889, in the garden of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, the asylum at St. Remy where he had committed himself to treatment against his inner demons. There is some of that in the picture. The critic Felix Feneon wrote of it, “The ‘Irises’ violently slash the petals to pieces upon sword-like leaves.”

But tension is apt to blossoming life, and the picture is ultimately lyrical. Its dominant colors--flutey greens and oboe purples--play clearly across the gallery and have an intensity usually reserved to yellows and reds.

Iris spears whirl across the surface in a flattened funnel-shape, advancing against foreground flowers as if pressing them to the covering glass. Yes, it is under glass, but it’s so well-lit you barely notice. The composition is animated by Van Gogh’s characteristically fervid brushwork and there is a distinct diagonal tug up to a calm patch of orange posies in the top left. Subject matter always remains clear, but you could read a lot into it like a Rorschach blot. Blossoms look like animal heads poking through the foliage.

Cloisonne-clear and flattened, “Irises” is the odds-on favorite to become the Getty’s trademark picture. If it fails to become the people’s choice, that will mean at least one of two things that would still be good news. “Irises” could be outshown only by another more obviously heart-tugging Van Gogh, like the “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” coming up at auction soon. Nobody would object if the Getty got it. That suggests that “Irises” is one of Vincent’s subtler pictures, and it is. Its sophistication just might cool public interest after initial enchantment, leaving it to the cognoscenti to revel in the way it absorbs Gauguin, Hokusai and Art Nouveau and nudges them in the direction of Jackson Pollock. That take would be a bouquet in honor of the Getty’s connoisseurship. (J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu.)

The Tomboy Laureate: Alexis Smith’s series, “El Dorado,” should cause her to be dubbed the Tomboy Laureate of L.A. art. It’s the second annual edition of a suite inspired by Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and a gratifying instance of a sequel superior to the original.

She jumps right in with an homage to the Beat Generation author in “Jack,” a big weathered wood variation on an American Revolutionary naval flag--the one depicting a snake and the motto “Don’t Tread on Me.” She leaves out the motto but evokes it by crossing the snake with a real, flattened tire tread. It seems to say, “If you don’t love outrageous puns and gritty Americana, forget it.”

Smith started as a conceptual Emily Dickinson working beautifully at tiny scale. Then she went up to room-installation sizes and had a lot of trouble. Now she’s pulled into the middle where she handles objects the size of a car fender with ease. In this case, it’s a ‘50s fender called “Adios,” painted with a landscape of the Bay Bridge and tenderized with the bittersweet quotation: “In a sad red dusk it was goodbye.”

The artist steps into Kerouac’s skin and distills his roadside romantic macho into visual verse. It’s scuzzy and erotic in “Fruits ‘n’ Nuts,” where a sandwich board touts a 10-cent sightseeing tour and a nudist postcard closes the artist’s pun about a nerd and his pendulous old lady. El Dorado is about driving the interstate at night with schlock movie-poster fantasies of hot senoritas in cantinas and chicks in tight jeans. It’s about delicious despair and hung-over hope. (Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., to April 2.)

The Strong and Weak of It: When Carlos Almaraz died of AIDS recently, he was the quintessential L.A. Latino Echo Park artist. It is thus a tad dismal to find unexpected letdowns in a posthumous print retrospective. Works are so juicy one inclines to the notion that graphics may have been Almaraz’s metier. Sheets are rich with afterpainting and graffiti moves, so that’s not the problem. Many motifs remain strong--languorous night scenes in the park with the trashy seductive odor of jasmine and neon ripples on the water, unexpected onslaughts of a violent angel who fries a car on the freeway for no decent reason. That’s not the problem either.

The problem is the appearance of heretofore unnoticed shortcomings, like too much chic graffiti stylization in woozy L.A. skylines, a fey weakness for the decorative akin to Rufino Tamayo at his worst and a sense of commedia dell’arte theatricality that does not stop short of presenting cute kids in paper hats riding their hobby horse.

Much of this has to be laid at the artist’s feet, but art also has a way of absorbing its surroundings, so the presentation in an aggressively glitzy Beverly Hills gallery certainly doesn’t help. (Meyer-Schwartz Gallery, 411 N. Rodeo Drive, to April 30.)

After-the-Disaster Sculpture: Junk sculpture has become such a commonplace of the artistic landscape that sometimes it seems impossible to squeeze another mile of meaning out of its rust and dust. Daniel Wheeler doesn’t exactly revive the genre, but he does squeeze out his petit frisson(cq). The ensemble looks like some whacked-out post-apocalyptic amateur museum in the desert, arranged by a deranged survivor waiting for phantom visitors. Among the attractions are a tiny infant’s crib tangled in a tumbleweed, a crusty airplane wing roped off like a masterpiece and a box containing a classical torso hung with the bats of brutality that brought the whole thing down. (Newspace, 5421 Melrose Ave., to April 21.)