ART REVIEW : A Glorious Century of French Works

Whether they’re dashed off at a cafe or roughed out slowly in the studio, works on paper are direct links with artists’ impromptu ideas. A group of French drawings and watercolors from 1850 to 1950 are the work of artists who contributed--in greater or lesser ways--to a century of artistic glory.

“(Eugene) Delacroix was passionately in love with passion,” the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote when his friend died in 1863. “His works contain nothing but devastations, massacres, conflagrations; everything bears witness against the eternal and incorrigible barbarity of man.”

In the animated pencil strokes of Delacroix’s “Arab Horseman at the Gallop,” about 1849, the painter captured the intensity of a cruel-faced rider hunched atop a flying horse, a sword clutched in one hand, his pennant disappearing into the air like a plume of smoke. During his late 20s and early 30s, Gustave Caillebotte exhibited in several of the Impressionists’ exhibits of the 1870s, although his paintings don’t possess the coloristic and brush techniques popularly associated with the group.

His black crayon study for “Canotiers Ramant sur L’Yerres” (canoeists sculling on the Yerres River) of 1877 reveals his interest in observing people engrossed in a physical occupation as well as in unusual viewpoints. We peer down at the hat obscuring the head of the larger canoeist--divorcing details of his personality from the pure activity of his arms and legs.

Camille Pissarro’s simple black chalk drawing, “Man Pushing Wheelbarrow,” bears no date, but it may have been sketched during the 1880s, when the Impressionist painter was turning his attention from broader landscape views to peasants’ activities.

Pablo Picasso’s earliest work in the show is a still life from 1911, a year he was working out the details of synthetic Cubism, in which the fragmented real-life subject was often hard to locate in a complex grid of lines and arcs.

In 1920, when Picasso drew “Nu debout, les pieds dans l’eau” (standing nude, feet in water), he was in the grip of his “classical” style. A firm, continuous outline traces the woman’s elongated body and classic, Venus-like pose. A few horizontal lines conjure up a body of water. A 1946 pencil portrait of a broad-faced woman with an antique-style coiffure is recognizable as a blandly idealized image of Francoise Gilot, Picasso’s lover and subject of several fantasy portraits of the era.

Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes promoted Cubism in an influential 1912 essay and remained devoted theorists of the movement. But as painters, they were fussy and tight, reducing the brilliant invention of Picasso and Georges Braque to a decorative formula. Metzinger’s 1911 Cubist sketch of Gleizes seems to poke fun at his 30-year-old friend. Gleizes’ “Aladdin” of 1938 is a chic fantasy of whirling blue arcs and playing-card diamonds, commandeered by the winking face of the Arabian Nights character.

A couple of minor artists in the exhibit lean on Henri Matisse’s fascination with female figures in richly colored and textured rooms. But only Matisse is able to make interior space seem as casually sensuous as the outlines of the female form. In “Model au repos” (model resting) of 1934, a woman swathed in a bunched-up gown relaxes in a room alive with assertive patterning.

Other artists represented include Braque, Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, Andre Derain, Henri Harpignies, Fernand Leger, Andre Lhote, Aristide Maillol, Paul Signac and Edouard Vuillard.

Louis Stern Galleries: 9525 Brighton Way, Beverly Hills, (213) 276-0147. To Sept. 28. Closed Sundays.