ART REVIEW : Hungary, 1908-30: Beauty and the Beast : ‘Standing in the Eye of the Tempest’ at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art profiles painters at work in a time of great political and social upheaval.

The unpalatable story of how radical art is suppressed by totalitarian regimes grows familiar. Since glasnost, we’ve see an increasing number of exhibitions of the long-squelched Russian avant-garde and shows like the County Museum’s “Degenerate Art.”

Now another lost chapter of modern history comes back to light in an important traveling exhibition originated by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, “Standing in the Eye of the Tempest: Painters of the Hungarian Avant-Garde 1908-1930.”

Today, Hungary is having one of the smoother transitions among nations of the Eastern Bloc who are trying to retool their lives since the Soviet monolith crumbled. Hungary hasn’t always been so lucky. History has cursed the nation with paradoxical troubles. Its chronicle reveals more tangled Oriental complexities than its famously tongue-twisting language. Some of them are funny--like the fact that after World War I the country was governed by Miklos Horthy, a former admiral in a nation without seacoast or navy. Most events were less risible.

In 1918-19 alone, Hungary endured three revolutions after being on the wrong side in World War I. Artists were in the thick of all of them. The nation foundered again in World War II, was saddled with a vicious fascist party, the Arrow Cross, and ended up under the heel of the Communists.

You might suppose that such a bedeviled nation would have neither the time nor the inclination to make art, much less an art of distinction and sophistication. But ever-resilient Hungarians managed it even in the midst of wracking traumas that marked the first three decades of the century.

All this art was lashed to the advanced politics of the day like sinew to bone. Even the fact that it was international in character alarmed the intensely nationalistic Hungarians. A significant number of artists were Jews. In an often anti-Semitic country, that was enough to convince the Hungarian ultra-right that it was all part of a Bolshevik plot.

The sunrise of the Hungarian movement dawned when artists glommed on to the happenings in Paris as the century turned. They loved Cezanne. His art seemed to them to embody and spiritualize the lot of the working man. Hungarian radicals advanced through alliances with the Russian avant-garde and the German Expressionists and Bauhaus. Their renown dwindled as the clouds of World War II gathered and their art effectively vanished when the Communists took over. By then artists had either accommodated to the regime or fled. The exhibition closes with some jaunty posters advertising snacks and cigarettes made by former radicals like Robert Bereny. Reminds us that later Communist Hungary was the first to achieve a good consumer economy.

Museum Director Richard West labored six years to organize the project. It celebrates the museum’s 50th birthday and acts as the centerpiece of Santa Barbara’s cultural festival, “Hungarian Spring 1991.”

An exemplary 300-page book catalogues the show. Heavy with quite readable text, it includes an informative chapter of historical background by scholar Istvan Deak. Viewers are liable to need it. In our a part of the world, many citizens’ knowledge of Hungarian culture begins with Franz Liszt and piddles out with Bela Bartok and the Rubik’s Cube. Even those who remember such names as George Szell, Alexander Korda, Brassai, Marcel Breuer and Ferenc Molnar may not have noticed they were Hungarian.

The show includes a copious 160 paintings, graphics prints and posters by 42 artists. Among them only one name will be familiar to decently informed art buffs--Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Welcome to terra incognita.

When art that has been under wraps comes to light, it tends to look paradoxically familiar. It also tends to look provincial, like small-time art imitating big-time art from a distance. That’s a deceptive impression. Hungarian artists exhibited internationally, had their own journals and were celebrated in such legendary publications as Germany’s Der Sturm. In its heyday, this art was part of the larger scene, contributing its particular frisson to bumptious exhibitions and revolutionary rallies.

Its special collective flavor shows a tendency to manic depression. Early Paris period works like Janos Vaszary’s Art Nouveau-flavored “Woman with a Cat” look worried and washed out. Leanings to brooding carry right through to later Expressionist examples like Lajos Tihanyi’s 1922 “Man at a Window.” It’s an odd, compelling picture that might be seen as a precursor of Francis Bacon. But like many of the other paintings, its emotionalism is depressed and inward-looking.

The sense of social conscience and religious longing is everywhere. Dezso Czigany, in a clear homage to Gauguin, tips symbolism into social criticism in “Funeral of a Child.” Lajos d’Ebneth looks surprisingly like an American Regionalist.

Unlike the work of the Russian avant-garde, this rarely seems intellectual. It’s all emotion-based, sometimes goes awash in self-pity or gets too cute. Csaba Vilmos Perlrott paints himself with a nude model and it’s like a self-serious caricature of bohemian adagio dancers. At his worst, Bela Kadar is like bad Marc Chagall, but there is a piquant lyric sarcasm in Sandor Bortnyik’s “The New Adam.”

About the only time the Hungarians get extroverted is in their graphics and posters-- among the best things in the show. There is real power in Mihaly Biro’s “People’s Voice.” Real anger sparks Sandor Bortnyik’s drawing of revolutionary suppression by the forces of the right.

Even when this art cheers up, there is an edge of strain about it. Janos Kmetty’s painting of a church tower signals a longing for transcendence, but the Hungarians’ most convincingly visionary art was its constructivist abstraction.

The hard-edge work of Moholy-Nagy, Lajos Kassar and Andor Weininger is really good. It comes together in a way much of the rest doesn’t. There’s a kind of internal schism in a significant fraction of this work. It might be a reflection of Hungary’s endless search for its own identity.

It was dominated by others for centuries--the Ottoman Turks, the Austrians, the Soviets. Hungarians have had a terrible time figuring out what makes real Magyar art and character. No wonder. It’s a polyglot culture where actual ethnic Hungarians are a minority.

Further schism is created by the fact that educated Hungarians want to see themselves symbolized by Budapest, urbane and Western. In fact most of the country is still peasant-agrarian.

Hard-edge abstraction either solves the problem or avoids it. It can echo folk art or look as cosmopolitan as an airline logo. It allows you to have a completely integrated identity, or none at all.

* The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St. to May 12. Closed Mondays. (805) 963-4364.