ART REVIEWS : Dimitri Baltermants, the Soviet Robert Capa

Through a gray mist, we see the backs of a handful of men in greatcoats, heroic fatalists venturing into the unknown. It’s 1944, the Year of the Ten Blows, the year the Red Army gradually drove Hitler out of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Dimitri Baltermants was there, setting down surreal and epic moments in black-and-white.

Born in 1912, he was studying mathematics at Moscow University when he took up photography to support himself and his mother. During the war he was assigned by Isvestia, the government newspaper, to photograph the troops in Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland. Baltermants was the Soviet counterpart of American photographer Robert Capa, charged with the task of preserving moments of suffering and valor.

In this posthumous exhibit of (mostly) vintage prints of Baltermants’ little-known work, his Cinemascopic range and his keen eye for chance composition show him to be a member of the pantheon of great documentary photographers.

“Grief,” from 1942, captures the extraordinary strength and stoicism of a populace who were to lose between 15 and 20 million of their fathers and sons during the war. Under a lowering sky, on a bed of crevassed earth, men lie scattered in death. Here and there, among knots of observers, grieving women stand with bowed heads.

Baltermants crouched at trench level to capture the blur of legs and coats and the points of bayonets against the sky in “Attack,” from 1941. He watched chilly soldiers in hats and coats amusing themselves at a piano left standing in what appears to be a bombed-out music hall (“Tchaikovsky,” 1945). And he captured the brilliant patterns of deadly light and white puffs of smoke during a “Tank Battle at Night” (1942).

After the war, Baltermants became a staff photographer at Ogonyok, a Soviet picture magazine, and made official photographs of state occasions. Some of this output was routine patriotic propaganda; other images are strongly reminiscent of the work of Margaret Bourke-White. For the most part, the photographer’s personal view must be read between the lines. In “The Politics of Dinner,” from the 1950s, a man wearing an ethnic hat exchanges a forkful of food with Khrushchev while hangers-on in the background flash enormous grins.

The companion exhibit of railroad images by American photographer O. Winston Link is notable mostly for its heavy dose of nostalgia, a train buff’s dirge for the passing of the steam locomotive. Most memorable of these scenes is “Hot Shot Eastbound” of 1956, in which a necking couple at a drive-in movie watch a plane on the screen while a train lumbers by on a trestle--a small-town confrontation of the old and the new.

G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, 910 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to Nov. 10.

Pop Goes the Artist: Arman, born Armand Pierre Fernandez in France, will forever be associated with the ‘60s. Back then he was doing all kinds of bad-boy stuff: filling a gallery with garbage, smashing furniture, embedding everyday objects in chunks of clear polyester. It was hip, it was Pop, and it got him into all the right exhibitions in Europe and the United States.

Such works were part of an early-’60s European movement known as “Nouveau Realisme,” in which the idea was to work with actual objects, preferably used or broken, rather than the bloodless materials of traditional art. Cesar compressed objects like so much garbage, Christo wrapped them, Jean Tinguely made crazy machines out of scrap metal and Arman gathered broken, burned or used objects, including paint tubes, into various formats.

In his recent work, Arman continues to mine working methods he copyrighted decades ago. As a group, the paintings stand up best, because of the sheer zest and delight in materials they reflect. In “Fanfare,” brass instruments fan out on a bare canvas splattered with vertical streaks of “brassy” red and yellow paint. A gust of small brightly paint-laden brushes zips across the canvas in “Winds.”

But the paintings composed of chromatically organized rows of squirting paint tubes have become formulaic, and the ones with globs of paint crisscrossing embedded guitar fragments look like gimmicky updated “translations” of Cubism.

Arman’s sculptures of sliced-up trumpets, cellos and other musical instruments represent a sort of gentleman’s-baroque flowering of his style. Elegant, expensive materials--brass, bronze and resonant wood--are neatly dissected and reassembled in artfully rhythmic ways. Rendered unplayable, these instruments have gone on to a presumably higher calling, as conversation pieces for the wealthy. But the anarchic energy of Arman’s best work is nowhere to be seen.

Fiorella Urbinati Gallery, 8818 Melrose Ave., Santa Monica, to Dec. 5.

Neighbors: What do artists Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman have in common? Well, during the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, they all lived on Coenties Slip, a tiny corner of lower New York. Actually, other artists not represented here (Charles Hinman, for one) also lived there. But exhibits surely have been marshaled on lesser pretexts, and in any case the work is worth another look.

Martin’s minimal geometric paintings and drawings reflect the hesitancies and variances imposed by the movement of the human hand. She is represented by a delicate untitled oil-and-pencil work of skinny stripes and shy dots and “David,” a blonde-and-brown wallflower of a painting with pencil-rimmed rectangles.

After World War II, Kelly and Youngerman both worked in Constructivist styles in Paris before returning to the United States. But while Kelly gravitated toward expansive areas of flat color--as in the sexy double curve of “Untitled (Black White)”--Youngerman worked up painterly, ragged-edged shapes, like the black and yellow “islands” that nudge and cluster in “Scythia.”

Rosenquist’s two small paintings of identical tangles of sauced spaghetti make a delicious combo: One is black-and-white like an old TV commercial, the other glints with the viscous orange garishness of Chef Boyardee.

Indiana, a Pop artist influenced by Kelly’s brand of hard-edge abstraction, combined allusions to various eye-catching tidbits of American culture (road signs, pinball machines) in works ricocheting with bright colors, simple shapes, small words and low numbers. Although the famous “LOVE” graphics have sunk below banality, a painting called “God Is the Lily of the Earth” from 1962 retains the freshness of Indiana’s best work. Pious similes inscribed in a quartet of white circles on a green ground have a sweetly naive folkloric appeal.

Richard Green, 2036 Broadway, Santa Monica, to Oct. 27.