ART REVIEWS : Famous Figures Relax With Cut, Paste : The collage technique was associated with the first great modern art movement, Cubism, and has been going strong ever since--as a show at the Leavin Gallery attests.

It’s tempting to say that “20th Century Collage” at the Margo Leavin Gallery is worthy of a museum, but that’s wrong. A museum would have to think of a rationale for it and produce a scholarly catalogue. Such stately procedures would considerably dampen the spirit of such an ebullient enterprise. It’s a copious strew of 120 works by some 90 artists as preeminent as Picasso and as unfamiliar as Donald Evans, but that’s not the point.

The collage technique is probably the lingua franca of modern art. Kindergarten kids often have their first art experience when teacher lets them go to it with scissors and paste, cutting out shapes and mashing them to paper until the glue squeegees out the edges. Collage was associated with the first great modern art movement, Cubism, and has been going strong ever since.

And no wonder. It’s an immensely fluid way of working. It is intimate in the work of Kurt Schwitters, who made a virtual career of collage. It’s monumental when David Hockney makes a foray in his Picassoid “Henry.”

As agreeable as a dachshund, it will bend itself to virtually any purpose. Among New York artists, we find Burgoyne Diller using it to purist ends while Romare Bearden snips paper poetry about life in Harlem.

Collage probably appeals to our century’s sensibility because its action of cutting and juxtaposing is akin to the movie montage or--today--our increasingly fractured way of viewing the world as something that happens as we flip the remote on the telly. One second it’s war in the Persian Gulf, the next it’s Rita Hayworth in “Cover Girl.”

Here it is all that, plus. This is a show that catches artists in unfamiliar postures. Joseph Cornell, that delicate cosmic seer, is surprised longing wistfully for a calendar nude in “Celestial Navigation.” The long-suffering Eva Hesse looks downright jolly. Ed Ruscha’s “Christmas” proves there is a lyric abstractionist lurking inside an artist associated with words and images. Richard Diebenkorn and Saul Steinberg look exactly like themselves, but there is nothing wrong with that, either.

Artists we do not normally applaud seem to outstrip themselves here. Louise Nevelson’s piece from a series on “Unknown Cosmos” drops her usual glitz and bombast and is lovely. Alex Katz’s defensive urbanity melts away in the blue dusk of “Sunset at Lincolnville Bridge.” Collage seems to encourage casual naturalness.

Connoisseurs will be tickled at the quality of all the work and the rarity of some of it. Alexander Rodchenko’s “Photo Montage” has it all, as do works by Vavara Stepanova and Liubov Popova. It’s also a relief to see the pioneer Russian avant-gardists letting up on their revolutionary fervor for a second.

Students of art will note the influence of Jean Dubuffet on Claes Oldenburg. Lovers of nostalgia and kitsch will get a zing from Allen Ruppersberg’s symphony of corny calendar art in, “Cover for Web of Evil.” Altogether, it is hard to imagine anyone who will not feel well-served by this marvelous show.

Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, to Feb. 16.

Blast From the Past: We live in a moment when crisis and fulfillment overlap in weird eddies. These polar opposites share a common tendency to make us look to the past for comfort and enlightenment. For those who use the fine visual arts as a medium to read social portents and omens, “Los Angeles: The ‘50s and ‘60s” is a must. Besides, it’s a good art show.

Dealer Reiko Mizuno acted as guest curator for this look back to a moment when all disparate aesthetic tendencies in Los Angeles funneled into a single channel and put the town on the map as an artistic Camelot.

The story is well known. In the late ‘50s, the clay sculptor Peter Volkous taught a new way of making ceramics at Otis Art Institute. Kenneth Price and Billy Al Bengston were among his students and got kicked out of L.A. City College for using up the semester’s supply of clay in one day. Robert Irwin was teaching at Chouinard. Ed Ruscha and Joe Goode came out from Oklahoma to study. Irwin encouraged them to get out of school as fast as possible. Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps opened the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega. It all jelled into A Scene and L.A. was on the way. The gang’s all here in an exhibition that lays out the main tendencies. Angry, energetic and intransigent, Abstract Expressionism was the springboard. That’s clear in paintings and ceramic sculpture by Volkous, Emerson Woelffer, John Altoon, John Mason and Henry Takemoto.

Other ingredients gave L.A. art a different twist. The spirit of the Beat Generation seeped down from San Francisco bringing a cockeyed sense of humor and more than a dash of Zen. It wasn’t an art style at all. A shared sensibility glued this stuff together. There was something unspecifically Japanese about its mixture of cult, personal eccentricity and refinement.

A brown-study postcard painting by Lynn Foulkes and Wally Berman’s rock-strewn Verifax collage seem to predict both the innocence of hippies and the threat of the Manson family.

Something truly squirrelly animates Ed Ruscha’s early painting of a bird and a fish that just can’t get to sleep in their common bed. Charles Garabedian knocked off the popular TV hero Napoleon Solo by having him ignominiously blown away in a public toilet. Varying forms of affection seep out of Joe Goode’s “House Painting” and Tony Berlant’s “She Sell Sea Shells.” Robert Graham’s sexy wax nudes bring back the now-blighted joys of sexual liberation.

There is endless talk about L.A.’s agreeable but rather uniform weather. I think it makes people very sensitive as they look for subtle nuances to tell them what season it is. Maybe that is what led to the overriding sense of refinement that comes across here, from the illusive mood of Vija Celmins’ big pencil to the precocious polish of Craig Kauffman, Larry Bell and Ed Moses. They called it the Finish Fetish but it had a sense of the exquisite that joined a hot-rod’s metal-flake paint job to the delicacy of an Oriental jade carver. Look at Ron Davis, John McCracken and Doug Wheeler.

Nothing quite like it ever happened again. It represents a time when art was still about itself and therein lies its lesson.

James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St., Santa Monica, to Feb. 8.