ART : OUT OF THE RUT : In Laguna, a Show by Eight Who Rebelled Against “the Puerile Repetition of the Maters”

You probably know something about the Southern California Impressionists of the early 1900s and the cool dudes who put Los Angeles on the art map during the 1960s. But what happened in between, and should you care?

Well, in between there was one hell of a struggle to get out of the rut of the old-fashioned, Sunday-painter styles that dominated Southern California--and much of the rest of the nation--decades after Europe had hurtled through the revolutionary artistic changes of the early 20th Century.

Los Angeles was a pretty strange place to be an artist in those days. There were no bohemian hangouts, the few art museums were largely ignoring the art of their time, and hardly anyone cared one way or the other about Capital-C culture.

On the other hand, there was all that sunshine and wide-open space. And--until the Red-baiters went wild in the conservative late ‘40s--there was a lot of freedom to do your own thing, even if no one with clout or influence was interested in it and the public simply laughed.

The growing movie industry provided not only entertainment but jobs for people who could paint yet couldn’t live on sales from their paintings. To feed the soul, there were any number of new and old religious and spiritual movements from which to choose--and there was nothing against inventing your own.

For visual kicks, there was the wacko architecture of roadside restaurants that looked like burgers or ice cream cones. For visual enlightenment, there was the nature-oriented architecture of visionaries like Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra. Not to mention glimpses of the heavens at Griffith Observatory.

So there was a strange kind of promise for artists in Southern California, a chance to invent themselves almost from scratch.

“Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists, 1920-1956” at the Laguna Art Museum aims to tell the story of this era with work (primarily paintings) by Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Lorser Feitelson, his wife, Helen Lundeberg, Rico Lebrun, John McLaughlin, Oskar Fischinger, Peter Krasnow, Knud Merrild, Hans Burkhardt, William Brice and June Wayne, as well as lesser-known artists of the period.

Macdonald-Wright was the first of these artists to achieve prominence. His stylistic approach was unique, but his spiritual interests, restlessness, and interest in the creations of popular culture and technology seem to have set the tone for many of his younger colleagues.

A Virginian who moved to California as a child, Macdonald-Wright was only 17 when he zipped over to Europe with his bride to study at a potpourri of art academies. In Paris in 1912, he developed a movement called Synchromism in collaboration with another American artist, Morgan Russell.

The first American movement in modern painting, Synchromism drew on Impressionist brushwork, Cubist fragmentation and the vivid, unreal colors of the Fauve painters. The new style was supposed to be the key to a higher aesthetic harmony in which the juxtaposition of colors was equivalent to the juxtaposition of notes in music.

After moving to Santa Monica in 1919, Macdonald-Wright eventually grew impatient with the rules and regulations governing his new style. He got interested in Tao and Zen philosophy, worked on murals for the Federal Art Project and developed an additive color process for motion pictures.

Still, he was the natural leader of the first rebel group of modernists, the Group of Independent Artists, whose ranks included artists working in styles inspired by Surrealism, Expressionism and Cubism. Unlike their colleagues in Northern California, the Southern California modernists were not inclined to rally around any one approach to making art.

But they did want to proclaim their distaste for traditional painting. “The puerile repetition of the surface aspects of the Masters has ceased to interest any intelligent man,” Macdonald-Wright thundered in his catalogue essay for the group’s 1923 exhibit.

“The modern artist striving to express his own age,” he continued, “cannot be expected to . . . drag forth by the aid of necromantic stupidity the corpse of an art inspired and nourished by a period environment. . . . Let our final work affect you as it will, but at least let your final opinion not be the result of a preconceived antagonism.”

Public ridicule and the close-mindedness of small-time academic painters was one thing. But in the late ‘40s, “preconceived antagonism” from one vocal quarter became a real threat. At the same time that the House Un-American Activities Committee was blacklisting suspected Communist sympathizers in the film industry, local conservatives targeted Modernist artists for supposedly incorporating secret references to communism in their work. In 1947, for example, a potato and a kitchen utensil in a still life by Brice was bizarrely interpreted by the right-wing Sanity in Art Society as the Communist sickle and the Russian bear.

Co-curated by Susan Ehrlich, a specialist in Los Angeles modernism, and Paul Karlstrom, West Coast regional director of the Archives of American Arts, “Turning the Tide” covers a lot of ground and inevitably includes work that looks tired, trivial or overwrought today. For the most part, the artists who didn’t look to Picasso--or any other European or East Coast art giant--for help were the ones who eventually defined a new look in painting.

Although Lebrun’s massively grandiose paintings made him the man of the hour in Southern California art of the ‘40s, his debt to Picasso can seem overbearing. In “Mexican Meat Stall,” a collage from 1954, Lebrun still carries the torch for the Spanish master. The profiled horse-like dog and man’s head, the hand grabbing the knife and the upraised hand can all be traced to “Guernica,” Picasso’s epic painting of 1937.

More fruitful in the long run was the strain of Southern California painting--exemplified by Feitelson and Lundeberg--that transformed the Surrealists’ fascination with the irrational side of human behavior into a cool, sunlit analysis of mysterious aspects of life.

In Lundeberg’s “Microcosm and Macrocosm” of 1938, a pensive woman (the artist, in one of many self-portraits) fingers a tiny magnifying glass and thinks of the universe--pictured as a placid seascape with red-circled images of a planet, a constellation and inchoate masses of protoplasm above and below the water.

Three decades later, Lundeberg was using flat, overlapping planes of color to evoke another kind of introverted space--at once abstract and concretely architectural--in which exterior and interior become one. Erlich intriguingly suggests in her brochure essay that this space is akin to the three-dimensional projects of Neutra-style houses.

Feitelson, whose dreamily lucid earlier work contained symbolic objects and images of statuesque women as creators and guardians of life, also segued into abstraction. His large, flat, angular shapes jostle and drift in eccentric, off-balance ways.

In his catalogue essay, Karlstrom says the movies influenced the look of Los Angeles modernist art, and his major example is Feitelson’s black-and-white “Magical Forms” series. A scholar has claimed that the rhythmically skewed shapes are based on the odd perspectives and stylized black-and-white contrasts of ‘40s film noir. That sounds frankly far-fetched.

It seems more probable that the same uneasy feelings about the world that created the film noir genre--the Existential dread fashionable in the ‘40s in post-War Europe--also fed Feitelson’s psyche. He has written that this work was intended as a metaphor to express “the deep disturbance of our time, ominously magnificent and terrifying events, hurtling menacingly from the unforeseeable.”

Untraditional, forward-looking forms of spiritualism appear to be the strongest link in the Modernist art of Southern California. These forms included the touchie-feelie movement known as “Dynamism,” represented in this show only by the dizzyingly linear paintings of Lee Mullican. The movement hoped to pin down “the formative powers which make and unmake reality,” according to a manifesto from 1951. Works were intended to be “objects for active meditation . . . a state of self-transcending awareness.”

Most transcendent of all the work from this era were the canvases of McLaughlin, who--along with Feitelson, Karl Benjamin and Frederick Hammersley--became known as an Abstract Classicist after a 1959 Los Angeles County Museum exhibit bearing that title. All these artists worked with flat, single-color geometrical forms. But McLaughlin, who died in 1976 in Dana Point, is widely acknowledged as the father of contemporary art in Southern California.

Self-taught, isolated geographically from the Los Angeles artists, he made uncompromising work consisting of flat, one-color squares and broad vertical or horizontal bands. Although the right-angled geometry and limited palette--dominated by black and white--is ultimately based on Constructivist models, the impulse behind the work was new. A student of Zen with particular interest in Asian art and culture, McLaughlin viewed his work as a receptacle for meditation. His art offers utter simplicity, large areas of open space and visual rhythms that provoke a continuous murmur of tension within the attentive viewer.

It seems somehow apt that this work, a gateway to Minimalist painting of the ‘60s, was nurtured primarily by the careless neglect of a bright, sprawling land with no rules--a place where an artist in an era of button-down conservatism could find inspiration in the spiritual practices of a Buddhist sect, and no one would say a discouraging word.