ART REVIEW : John Gutmann Retrospective Is Eerily Prophetic : On the run from the Nazis, the San Francisco photojournalist saw premonitions of the war to come in his views of urban street life.

In the 1930s, people longed for relief from the major misery of the Great Depression. Little did they know that prosperity would only return with the awful holocaust of World War II. Imagine knowing that the solution to your present problem is going to be a worse problem.

Sometimes ignorance is a blessing.

John Gutmann, on the other hand, seemed to see it coming. A significant 95-print retrospective of his photographs opens today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show was originated by his hometown San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and also visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Gutmann is 85, but this is his first Los Angeles museum show. Major histories of photography leave him out of account. There is a feeling here of the belated recognition of a seasoned and accomplished California artist. While Edward Weston celebrated nature, nudes and bell peppers in Carmel, Gutmann was slugging it out in the salty city.

Among the earliest images on view is a 1934 shot of three fighter planes in formation. In silhouette they look like Japanese Zeros. The work is called “Omen.” All the pictures in this section have oracular overtones. There’s a graffiti called “I Am the Magic Hand,” plus a hand pointing to the spot where a suicide landed and a hand thrust through a broken window.

Handwriting on the wall.

Pretty soon we come across, “Japanese Admirals on a Flagship Visiting San Francisco.” The officers look like fancy-dress thugs, as pugnacious as the postage-stamp-size mug of the heavyweight champion of the Japanese fleet.

How did Gutmann know?

He came to San Francisco in 1933 from Berlin. He had been a student of the Expressionist painter Otto Mueller and, like a lot of German artists and intellectuals, he was on the run from the Nazis. That experience certainly could have given him the feeling there was big trouble brewing. But the fact that he seemed to smell smoke in the Far East is downright mysterious. Few artists were into that, except Milton Caniff and everybody thought “Terry and the Pirates” was fiction.

Chalk it up to intuition.

Whatever it was, Gutmann’s visceral precision cast a strange mantle over his work. He shifted his aesthetic priorities from painting to his Rolleiflex and started work for the Berlin agency Presse-Foto. He sent pictures to illustrate articles about life in the United States, but the organizers of this show got it right when they called it “Beyond the Document.”

There is an eerie edge to almost everything he shot. The work goes way past garden-variety photojournalism. He knows how to use the camera like a painter. His style echoes that of George Grosz and the German Neue Sachlichkeit. He gets great expressive compression in tiny pictures. He displaces space in a bird’s-eye view called “Gulliver’s Descent.” A man being lowered from a building looks like a giant because he is closer to the camera than other figures. Look at that strange picture of the Golden Gate bridge in 1934 when only one tower was completed.

Gutmann traveled around to New Orleans, Chicago and elsewhere for New York’s Pix magazine. It must have been an odd life for a foreigner to be that kind of nomad. His work has some of the desperate flavor of Wim Wenders’ later film “Alice in the Cities.” In it, the hero takes endless Polaroid shots searching for landmarks in anonymous Amerika.

Gutmann found the icons of pop culture, but for him they weren’t camp. He found something monstrous in giant parade balloons shaped like dragons, one-man helicopters and neon signs whose framework looked like webs for King Kong-size spiders. He found pathos and humor in the people of pop culture and was way ahead of the game in discovering graffiti. He caught a kid drawing in the middle of the street and called it, “The Artist Lives Dangerously.” He was touched by a scrawl reading, “Apology: To my best buddy I ever had. I’m sorry I did you wrong, Glenn. From Clarence.”

There is more than one side to his work but it’s mainly about urban street life.

Right. It’s a tawdry carnival but there are worse things.

He is a lot crazier than heartfelt WPA Depression photographers like Dorothea Lange. He went to Mardi Gras and captured a little jitterbug with great legs. Her mask and gauzy blouse make her look like she is in a state of metamorphosis from chick to poltergeist.

Almost everything is in a state of becoming worse.

A woman in frowzy finery walks the street. She is a tramp but there are worse things. Her shadowed face looks like a skull.

A person could be dead.

In 1936, Gutmann photographed Olympic diving champion Marjorie Gestring midair in a graceful horizontal twist. It’s beautiful, but she is above the board and it looks like she could crack her head coming down. At least she is in control. Next to her stands a shot of a man plummeting helter-skelter through the air. He looks like the suicide victim hinted in the first gallery.

There are very few things worse than a man driven to kill himself.

There is, however, a World War.

Gutmann saw it coming. He made pictures of the tension we feel when we sense trouble on the way.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. (213) 857-6000. To Feb. 3. Closed Mondays.