ART REVIEW : Rieses’ Pieces

A collection of California painting goes on view Thursday at the County Museum of Art. It might change some old prejudices. No, it’s not the latest thing in downtown deconstruction or Santa Monica sand pictures. It’s 57 works from the collection of Linda and Jim Ries. They live in Encino. He practices law. They used to dabble in whaling stuff, but 10 years ago they started up with indigenous painting.

What they have wrought is titled “A Time and a Place.” It scans art made during the first half of the century, most of it around here. Looking at it is a bit like visiting somebody else’s grandparents. One is perfectly free to decide that the best thing they are is quaint and hopelessly out of date. One is equally free to recognize that these are folks full of mellowed wisdom who have ways to entertain us and things to teach us. One of them is that the past is not fixed but fluid. When our view of it changes, that tells us we have changed, or times have changed, or both.

The first section of the show is devoted to art until recently scorned as the sentimental spawn of fuddy-duddies. When one looked at this sort of thing back in the ‘60s, the knee-jerk reaction was to sneer it off as “Laguna Beach permanent wave painting,” reactionary daubings by people who believed in an outfit called “Sanity in Art” and thought all modernism was a Commie plot.

Today, it looks different. Today, the first thing one sees in it is not the painting but the pictures--a field of poppies near Pasadena, a tent pitched for the weekend at Mission Beach, gray sand dunes at Monterey. Skies are as clear as infants’ eyes, space is ample and unpeopled, colors are as fresh as fruit from your own tree.

You see a California that makes you understand why people still think there is a paradise out here in spite of pollution, crowding, crime and overdevelopment. It’s because the place once really was Eden-like and still is for the fortunate. How much difference is there between a beach sunset done in by Granville Redmond before 1935 and one done yesterday by Peter Alexander? Of course, the Alexander is more sophisticated. L.A. is more sophisticated. But both pictures grow out of an aching response to the sheer sensuousness of the land.

Since all this happened, modernism has had its own triumph and its own decline. Now one can view both factions as inhabiting an unthreatening past. How does the traditional work look on its own terms? Well, Paul Delongpre’s watercolor of a sprig of white roses and bees is not that far off the mark set by John Singer Sargent. The remarkable Guy Rose may not be quite the Monet he aspired to, but he certainly finds his peers among American Impressionists like the much better known Childe Hassam. Franz Bischoff is not Manet, but his “Still Life With Roses” is juicy.

Some work is a bit too comfortable with itself. Made out West far from the competition, it’s a little too laid back and inclined to fall into formula. There’s another side to that. The stylized craftsman tradition was big in those days. Edgar Alwyn Payne’s “The Great White Peak” strikes one a bit too schematized at first, but it has undeniable power and energetic internal rhythm. It also looks perfectly at home with the craftsman furniture and objects installed in the galleries for ambient instruction. The lesson is that both painting and objects derive their virtue from having a foot each in past and present.

The storerooms of California museums are chockablock with this work, sitting there waiting for scholarly sorting. Maybe the pioneer revivalism of people like the Rieses will get the ball rolling.

It also speaks well for them that they have already expanded their scope beyond the easy seduction of conservative California landscape. Confined to that, they could be mistaken for nice folks who like agreeable pictures for their depiction of a lost California.

They seem to be made of sterner stuff. For the last couple of years they’ve collected artists who wanted L.A. attached to the larger world. Major figures are the cosmopolitan Stanton Macdonald-Wright and his colleague, Morgan Russell, who still hold the distinction of being the only sometimes-California artists who forged a style in Paris in the great days of Cubism. Theirs was called Synchromism. Present examples lean to sexy expressionism but they make the point, as does Lorser Feitelson’s “Bathers.”

More surprising because she’s more unfamiliar is Henrietta Shore, who is presently enjoying a slow revival. She was a friend of Edward Weston and like him was interested in a purist, nature-based art. Her calla lilies and gloxinia have a subtle personal authenticity despite overt resemblance to Georgia O’Keeffe. And who was Rinaldo Cuneo? A forgotten San Francisco artist. From the look of his untitled teapot still life he was a Cezannesque purist worth remembering.

But the opening selection of the collection got our mind on California’s reflection in the mirror of art. Surrealist and regionalist pictures get us back there. The state’s reputation for dreaminess shows its best face in Helen Lundeberg’s lovely portrait of her mother, “Selma.” Its combination of Victorian reticence, haunted longing and exquisite rendering marks it as an American masterpiece. Eugene Berman’s rattled “Medusa’s Corner” reminds us there was a genuine Surrealist at work here in the ‘40s.

The rowdier, populist side of life turns up in a compelling brace of Depression-era pictures that take us back to two-bit haircuts and boxing at the Olympic. John Hubbard Rich and Fletcher Martin saw it well.

Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” finds feisty competition in Otis Oldfield’s portrait of a dour couple. It’s a shame the Depression eventually drove Robert Gilbert out of art. His study of a woman who looks like a migrant laborer has the nobility adversity bestows on good people.

Maybe it’s the recession, but something makes this WPA-era art seem very timely again, as did LACMA’s Thomas Hart Benton show last year. Our economic downturn isn’t as bad, but when you look at Vincent Galgiani’s, “Saturday Night Dance at Ginger Gulch,” it looks like it was a lot more fun to be poor back then.

The exhibition was organized by the Oakland Museum and overseen here by LACMA curator Michael Quick. He contributed an essay to a catalogue that is useful despite errors in editing.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. to July 7. Closed Mondays. (213) 857-6000.

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