ART : Efforts of a Minor Player Are on Display at Laguna Museum : Edward Corbett took a back seat to the bolder, more strikingly novel approaches of his famous colleagues.

If I mentioned the name “Edward Corbett” to you, you would likely say, “Who?” Well, there’s no shame in that. Corbett is one of the legion of serious smaller talents who never made it into the history books.

Back in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, he was a leading light on the San Francisco scene and--briefly--a serious contender on the New York scene, when the field contained such luminaries-to-be as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.

Why did Corbett--whose retrospective, organized by the Richmond Art Center, is at the Laguna Art Museum through March 24--vanish into the woodwork? Was it because no leading critic persistently championed his work? Because he didn’t belong to a clear-cut “school” of painting? Because he didn’t like to make pronouncements about his art? Because he didn’t stick it out in New York?

Maybe. But that isn’t the entire story. Corbett’s self-effacing, small-scale art quite naturally took a back seat to the bolder, more strikingly novel approaches of his famous colleagues.

At a time of sweeping change in painting--big scale, bold use of paint--he never moved beyond the easel painting tradition. Even his best work retained a rather genteel and decorative quality. In the end, this lover of elliptical French poetry never quite achieved an ineffable poetic language in paint.

Corbett, born in 1919 in Arizona, was an Army brat whose father eventually retired to Richmond, Calif., in 1935. The artist was a slight, fastidiously cultured man who seems to have spent much of his life waging a private war against invasive forces, both mental and physical. A brief stint in the Army gave him a nervous breakdown, alcoholism dogged his life, and diabetes finally killed him at 51.

In art, he was attracted early on to the late 19th-Century French Symbolists. Sequestered in his master-at-arms cabin in the Merchant Marine during World War II, he drew shadowy figures influenced by Odilon Redon’s mysterious images of women.

In 1944, he spent a year and a half in New York, where he was deeply smitten by the Piet Mondrian retrospective. But Corbett was interested only in the stained-glass look of Mondrian’s blocks of pure color (see “Composition in Red and Green,” in the exhibit), not his metaphysical theories of art.

In New York, Corbett was ill at ease with the groupthink of the art scene and depressed by the “cement, ugly shadows, bad smells and dreary light” of Manhattan. So he moved back to San Francisco, which was a very inviting place to be in the late ‘40s, as Richmond Art Center curator Susan Landauer points out in her exhibit catalogue essay.

The city was a magnet for brash young artists who enjoyed one another’s company. A North Beach studio rented for $15 a month, and an Italian dinner (with wine!) cost only 45 cents at a popular hangout.

Corbett exhibited at a gallery in Monterey, sent his canvases off to the San Francisco Art Annual and taught first at San Francisco State Teachers College and then at the San Francisco School of Fine Art. But he was still having a hard time figuring out how to paint.

Most of the art activity of the era apparently left him cold. On the international scene, Picasso was turning out instant masterpieces between breakfast and lunch--but Corbett was not a fan. On the other hand, the American social realists, clinging to an outworn style, provided no inspiration.

Corbett also hated the dinky little School of Paris still lifes that were pouring out of Europe. The idea of exploring psychological states or archetypal myths through art didn’t appeal to him, either. Despite his broodings about the corrupt state of society, he recoiled from unpretty subjects. (“There is enough ugliness and neurosis in the world without putting it down on canvas,” he once told his students.)

In a few years, he would voice his discomfort with Action Painting, the leading style of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and others, championed in New York by critic Harold Rosenberg.

“I think random markings by anyone or random actions are the opposite of what leads to art,” Corbett told an interviewer. In his mind, art was “design,” achieved with “intentions” and “careful concentrations.”

By the end of the ‘40s, he hit on the style he would pursue for the next decade: vaguely landscape-like mists and wells of color that typically ranged from milky blue or blush-pink to deep black.

In his “Black Paintings” from 1950, the pretty tints disappear temporarily, but the big, bulky shapes and loopy patterns of drips--made by tipping the canvas this way and that--remain soft and lyrical.

New York painter Ad Reinhardt was inspired by these paintings, but the all-black works he produced a few years later were far more radical in their suppression of painterly incident. It would have been inconceivable for Corbett to have pushed his work to such a stark resolution, or to imbue it with a solid philosophical foundation. He always seems to have shrunk from discovering the potential depths of his style, as if he simply couldn’t handle too much intense self-scrutiny.

Corbett resigned his teaching job in late 1950 when he learned his contract wouldn’t be renewed. (The school was in a budget crunch because the numbers of matriculating G.I. Bill veterans had drastically decreased.) He moved to Taos, divorced his first wife, married a painter--and turned his attention to making charcoal drawings, the perfect medium for his fascination with smoky patterns of light and shadow.

In 1952, Corbett had his 15 minutes of fame in New York when Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy Miller trekked out to Taos to select 13 of his drawings for the landmark “Fifteen Americans” exhibit that also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and William Baziotes.

One critic called him “the most interesting new artist in the show,” and he was invited to be part of the well-respected Borgenicht Gallery’s stable, which represented him throughout his life. Corbett visited New York only briefly for the occasion, however, and refused to sit for a group portrait with the other artists in the exhibit.

The following year, he began teaching art at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Under his gaze, the snowy hill country around him was transformed into compositions like “Mt. Holyoke No. 36,” a milky field of white disrupted by small, dark shapes clinging to a pair of long, hairline fissures in the paint surface.

Despite the presence of a pronounced horizon line in many of his works, Corbett bridled at being called a landscape painter, saying he was really expressing “self-awareness deriving, perhaps paradoxically, from responsiveness to a vastness and inhumanity of environment.”

In his “Paintings for Puritans” works--begun in the mid-’50s and continued sporadically in the next decade--he relinquished more vestiges of landscape to reach a purer degree of abstraction. But his persistent undercurrent of decorative fussiness kept these works from achieving the sublimity he wished for them.

Corbett somehow couldn’t let go and work on the larger, bolder scale of the Color Field painters of the ‘60s. He remained the finicky craftsman, proud of his layering and glazing years after other painters had abandoned such techniques--yet he was somehow oblivious to major lapses of taste in his insipid and garish late paintings.

Was it lack of will or self-confidence that led him to produce pleasing surface effects without engaging deeper human or philosophical issues? It’s tempting to wonder whether an interest in, say, Zen Buddhism might have given Corbett’s essentially passive art the deeper rigor and concentration that it lacks.

“The areas of mystery and indecision are precisely where art, for me, begins,” Corbett once remarked.

Alas, these areas also seem to be where art, for him, ended. His paintings--so lightly dusted with a vague aura of “mystery”--are too sweetly inarticulate to probe the depths of stillness and mutability.