ART REVIEW : Thoughtful Landscapes in Frederick Wight Exhibition

We get a little nervous when modern artists depart too far from our stereotype of them as working-class heroes or Bohemian aristocrats. The idea that T.S. Eliot was a banker just doesn’t go down quite right. Neither does the notion that a scholarly university art gallery director could also be a serious painter, much less a good one or for that matter a very good gallery director. A man cannot serve two masters.

Then there was Frederick S. Wight.

Today the UCLA galleries that bear his name house an exhibition of about 50 of his paintings. He signed on as director in 1953. He raised the gallery to an important, internationally recognized showplace whose exhibitions were often more interesting than those of the local museums. There was a certain bias to Expressionist sculpture. The jewel in the whole crown was a 1966 Matisse retrospective whipped up by Wight’s support group, the UCLA Art Council.

He painted and exhibited all along but critics were more impressed with his sincerity that his success. When he retired in 1972 it was assumed he would go on painting. A fellow needs a hobby in his golden years.

Some hobby.

Fred Wight, who died in 1986, was an urbane guy. He could regale you with stories about everybody from Leger to Morris Graves over lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air and never repeat himself--even if he occasionally forgot where he was. He had a leonine mien and an Ivy League manner and knew all the moves in the art game. He was with the Office of Strategic Services in World War II and studied at the fabled Fogg Art Museum on the GI Bill. Somewhere along the line he found time to write about 20 novels. You’d expect a gentleman like that to make knowledgeable mid-Atlantic paintings.

Unless you knew about his mother.

The exhibition starts with a formal academic portrait of Alice Stallknecht painted by her son in 1928. She looks fairly formidable in her black lace gown but she doesn’t look like the salty painter she was. Sort of an Alice Neel on Cape Cod who went on working into her 90s.

Fred Wight was a little shy about promoting his own work but he was perfectly passionate about Mom’s. He finally got her a show at the Municipal Art Gallery and it proved he had a good eye even when it came to a close relative.

If anything accounts for the look of Wight’s own work it was his mother. She obviously brooked no fripperies or nonsense. In his late work he demanded no less of himself than the real thing and he painted almost to the moment of his death at age 84.

The show, organized by curator Elizabeth Shepherd, is aptly called, “Sudden Nature.” It consists of thoughtful landscapes, the best of which have a charged jolt of recognition as if the artist had been painting along quietly and suddenly saw things that weren’t supposed to be there.

“Dawn and Evening” uses a skinny palm tree to bifurcate the canvas into two zones of sky. The sun is in one, the moon in the other. It’s about seeing the beginning and the end at the same time. There is a seasoned philosophical wisdom about the pictures, marks of that phenomenon known as an authentic Old-Age Style. That’s when the infinite begins to dominate the real.

Wight based his paintings on the observation of nature, but it was an observation conditioned by a metamorphosis going on inside him. He looked at California but the art has none of the breezy adolescent crispness associated with art made around here. He brought the light of the East Coast and Europe to it.

It recalls a list of other artists that is too long to suggest that Wight was under any particular influence. Artists he felt kinship with just drifted across his mind as he worked. “I wonder why my thoughts keep traveling north,” he may have mused. “The color is coming out bruised like Edvard Munch’s. Always liked that chap once he settled down.

“What’s that? The sky is going all crackled as if it were made of ice. I’m somewhere up around the North Pole. Are my eyes failing or is it my brain? Doesn’t matter. The effect is rather good, I think. Better keep it.”

Wight painted in sets. There are hairy, monstrous palms that bow sagely to one another only to be frightened by a rattling hot Santa Ana wind. Low mountain silhouettes lump up while a stroboscopic moon falls in its orbit. Could be a rumination on the masculine and feminine principals.

At times the sea goes glassy with pastel lines.

“Hmph. A little John Marin creeping in there. Well, one could do worse.”

In “San Andreas Fault” and elsewhere the schematization of strata recognize Arthur Dove or Marsden Hartely in themselves, but a set of clouds is visited by Wight’s younger contemporary, Peter Alexander.

“Well,” he might have muttered, “Getting to be an old romantic metaphysician are we?”

The wonder of these paintings is their candor and openness to themselves. They brood only to be interrupted by crystalline clarity. They are without ambition other that to tap the forces of nature and be a part of them. It’s a moving tribute to an authentic sensibility.

At UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery, to March 3. Closed Mondays. (213) 825-5517.