ART / CATHY CURTIS : Secret of Irvine Center Exhibit Is That the Works Are Ageless : ‘Greater Years, Greater Visions’ spotlights work done at advanced age by ceramist Beatrice Wood and painters Helen Lundeberg and Florence Arnold.

Artists who retain their creative drive at an advanced age must be somewhat bemused by the waves of young oral historians that beat a path to their door, tape recorders in hand. When did your career begin? What was your life really like? And how wonderful that you never retired!

Artistic achievement by senior citizens is not exactly news. From Titian to Matisse, there have been major artists who made important work as they neared the century mark. But the way a particular artist’s approach changes over time has the built-in fascination of being uniquely autobiographical.

At the Irvine Fine Arts Center, “Greater Years, Greater Visions” offers a sampling of work spanning the careers of ceramist Beatrice Wood, modernist painters Helen Lundeberg and Florence Arnold, and folk artist Jon Serl. (There is also an installation by Kim Abeles that uses a rather cumbersome darkroom metaphor to deal with issues of memory and self-image as they pertain to an elderly woman artist.)

The show--bolstered by copies of letters and other documents, recent candid photographs, taped interviews and a brochure--might simply have been a folksy celebration of feisty old age. But by allowing us to see the late work in the context of output from earlier decades, the exhibit suggests how artists keep rethinking, polishing and reaffirming their initial impulses over the long haul.

A longtime resident of Fullerton, Arnold took up painting in late middle age after teaching music in North Orange County schools for several decades. From the beginning, she infused an anecdotal watercolor, “Back of Archie’s Store,” with a flair for exploiting flat planes of color. Three years later, in “Abstract No. 3 (Back of Archie’s Store),” she reduced the scene further to a patterned surface of bricks and windows.

Studies with the “hard-edge” abstract painter Karl Benjamin gave Arnold a crisp, new direction. He was one of several Southern California artists--including Lundeberg’s husband, Lorser Feitelson--known as the Abstract Classicists, whose work was based on the shifting tensions between flat, solid-color geometric shapes.

Arnold, who stopped painting a few years ago in her late 90s, was a minor practitioner of this style. While John McLaughlin produced meditative compositions with highly simplified means and Feitelson offered a prickly dynamism, Arnold’s work tends to be rather static and contrived. In “Untitled No. 12” from 1976, for example, the black-and-white ladder-like pattern is too neatly balanced, too politely decorative to be genuinely effective.

Yet having the courage to set off in a new aesthetic direction, not just once (taking up painting in the first place) but twice (trading genial realism for a severe abstract style) is unusual at any age. There is a fine implicit lesson here--especially suited to the broad audience of a community art center--about the rewards of open-mindedness, persistence and following one’s intuition.

The “star” of this show, however, is undoubtedly Lundeberg. Beginning as a young woman with her extraordinary Post-Surrealist paintings--very calm, carefully constructed environments in which symbolic objects allude to personal notions about space, time and personal identity--she went on to paint highly purified, semi-abstracted depictions of interior and outdoor space.

Born in Chicago in 1908, Lundeberg moved with her family to Pasadena as a young child. She had a great fondness for books and the outdoors (“I was always a great gazer,” she once said), but she came to art pretty much by accident. In her early 20s, a friend of her mother’s suggested she take a course at a local art school. It was a dull class, but after a few months Feitelson took over.

He had studied abroad and infused into his own art a mixture of Italian Renaissance painting and the “metaphysical” Surrealism of Giorgio de Chirico. He applied to art, as Lundeberg wrote years later, “the same turn of mind which stimulated my college-days interest in the biological sciences and . . . literature.”

A few years later, in 1934, she painted “Sundial,” a small rectangular work on Masonite in which--reading from left to right--the sky successively shows the colors of dawn, midday and dusk. Below are three objects casting shadows. Two are real sundials, but the middle one is really the crumbling wall of a ruined building (apparently a church). These measurements of time are juxtaposed with images of the literal passage of time during a single day, the decay of man-made things and the transcendence of spiritual values.

Lundeberg also worked on mural commissions for the California Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project in the ‘30s and early ‘40s. Beginning in 1942, perhaps in reaction to painting on such a big scale, she made such diminutive images as “Levitating Mountain,” a scene reminiscent of 16th-Century Mannerist paintings of landscapes with tiny biblical figures. In this work, three microscopic figures flee from a golden landscape in which a single mountain mysteriously coasts above the ground.

During the next decade, Lundeberg drastically stripped down her style into large, flat geometric shapes that created closed and open space which could be read as architectural or landscape or both. “The Road,” from 1958, contains a fluid succession of different kinds of space, from the flatness of paint itself (a brown stripe) to the enclosure of a room to a view of two roads crossing and vanishing into the distance. Unlike Feitelson’s “hard-edge” paintings, hers always retained a clear link with the visible world.

But the simplification and flattening process continued in subsequent decades. In fact, some of the later, pastel-hued acrylic paintings look like rather banal graphic designs. But in “Wetlands IV” of 1984, Lundeberg combines perception and imagination to evoke a global, ecological theme. A lazily meandering stretch of land, at once flat and curved, might be the edge of the Earth as seen from outer space. Thin, regularly spaced indentations in the paint are reminiscent of latitude markings on a map.

Despite stylistic changes and variations in palette and painting size, Lundeberg has retained the same basic philosophic approach to painting with which she began, decades ago. As she once wrote, “I am, apparently, a classicist by nature as well as conviction. By classicist I mean, not traditionalism of any sort, but that highly conscious concern for structure which is the antithesis of an intuitive, romantic or realistic approach to painting.”

That kind of personal, focused intellectual outlook--plus an openness toward changing styles, media and techniques--serves as ballast during the long flight of a creative career that equates “retirement” with the death of the spirit and the closing of the mind.

“Greater Years, Greater Visions” continues through Oct. 29 at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave. in Heritage Park, Irvine. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday, 9 am. to 3 p.m. Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free. (714) 552-1078 (recorded information) or (714) 552-1018 (program information).