ART REVIEWS : Steinberg Does a Number on Lotus Land

It’s been said that for those who feel, life is a tragedy; for those who think, it’s a comedy. Artist Saul Steinberg, whose work is on view at the BlumHelman Gallery in Santa Monica, clearly falls in the latter category. Like French filmmaker Jacques Tati and novelist Vladimir Nabokov--who take a similar view of the exquisite absurdity of existence--Steinberg is a master at discreetly pointing to the chaos that lurks beneath the thin crust of civilization.

A peculiar blend of existential dread and lighthearted whimsy, Steinberg’s work presents man as an urbane yet ridiculous figure, adrift in deep space--defined only by a wobbly horizon line--where he can never secure a foothold. Pregnant with conflicted meaning, his work is sharply sophisticated and deeply philosophical.

Now 76, Steinberg has been widely hailed as the best cartoonist in the United States since his work first began appearing in the New Yorker 50 years ago. He has also come to be viewed as the very embodiment of the cosmopolitan Manhattanite. However, Steinberg is actually a widely traveled man who has spent a good deal of time in the West (he even lived in Hollywood for a spell during the ‘50s). In this selection of 12 drawings dating from 1950 through the present, Steinberg does his inimitable number on our fair shores.

Roaming from Pomona to Pasadena to Malibu, Steinberg’s drawings of the West conjure a sinfully lush place where Beverly Hills ladies wear outlandish sunglasses, homes look like exotic Casbahs, and the streets are wide, clean and empty of pedestrians. Steinberg can be a stern social critic when he’s of a mind to be, but he takes a generous view of the West, depicting it as a giant playpen for adults, a place with room to roam and weekend getaways to Las Vegas.

The drawings are executed in Steinberg’s familiar style, which combines the fragmented geometry of Cubism, the hallucinatory perspective of Max Fleischer, and the vivid colors one associates with Disney--along with Steinberg’s quirky vocabulary of embellishments, of course. The indecipherable flurries of florid script and meaningless bureaucratic seals that he’s been incorporating in his drawings for years turn up here too, serving to underscore his irreverent view of authority.

Central to Steinberg’s talent is his astonishingly deft handling of line (it comes as no surprise to discover that he studied architecture before emigrating from his native Romania). You could eliminate all the trim--the shading, the color--from these solidly built line drawings and they’d still work. Like all good cartoonists, Steinberg is an astute social critic, and like all good artists, he couches his ideas in an original style that works on a purely visual level. One of the few living artists who has achieved mass popularity yet continued to produce work of consistent quality, Steinberg deserves his huge following--this delightful show is evidence of that.

BlumHelman Gallery: 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica; to June 1; (213) 451-0955. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

The Lost Dutchman: One doesn’t usually think of the term Outsider art in connection with photography, but Dutch photographer Gerard Fieret, whose work is on view at the G. Ray Hawkins Gallery in Santa Monica, is nothing if not an Outsider. Born in Holland in 1924, he was an eccentric child who, having survived a year of forced labor under the Nazis, blossomed into a wildly eccentric adult. Now 67, he presently lives in an unheated garage in The Hague, surrounded by pigeons, chickens and mice that he tends with devotion. He squanders his monthly welfare check on pigeon food and spends his days bicycling around town looking for birds to feed. At this point Fieret’s art-making days are clearly behind him, but during the ‘60s he was a creative volcano.

Obsessed with the Symbolist poets, Fieret began painting and writing visionary poetry while in his teens, but it wasn’t until he acquired a second-hand camera in 1959 that he came into his own as an artist. He spent the ‘60s in a frenzy of picture taking, shooting thousands of pictures of himself, his bizarrely decorated studio, and most importantly, his women friends.

Fieret’s images of women are uniquely beautiful, at once innocent, erotic and strange. Part of the fascination of these pictures lies in the fact that the women Fieret photographed were obviously not models--they were average women who, for reasons we’ll never know, decided to undress for his camera (one feels rather voyeuristic looking at these inexplicably intimate pictures). The photos take on another layer of meaning by virtue of the fact that these women were obviously enjoying themselves--Fieret’s portraits are alive with a quality of pleasure and play, and one senses that there existed a secret understanding between the photographer and his subjects.

Fieret had no interest whatsoever in the conventional rules of photography and technically his work is rough. Grainy, often out of focus, scratched and oddly cropped, his work is evocative of the black-and-white images (and the film footage) that came out of Warhol’s Factory in the ‘60s (like Warhol, Fieret is an obsessive movie-goer and has an instinctual grasp of cinematic composition). There’s something primitive and slightly dangerous about Fieret’s women--like Warhol’s superstars, they seem capable of anything.

Intensely paranoid, Fieret is convinced the world is out to rob him, so he stamps and scribbles his name across all his images, and these signings are now considered to be an integral part of his style. The pictures are further customized by the mice who share quarters with him--they’ve nibbled at the edges of many of these one of a kind prints. The negatives to these remarkable pictures disappeared into the chaos of Fieret’s life long ago.

Also on view are photograms by musician-composer-photographer Jon Phetteplace.

G. Ray Hawkins Gallery: 910 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica; to June 1; (213) 394-5558. Closed Sundays and Mondays.