SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : The Wild Westerns : Museum of History and Art presents cowboy-and-Indian works of illustrator W.D. Koerner.

Astrong gust of kitsch blows through the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, which is presenting the no-nonsense cowboy-and-Indian lore of magazine illustrator W.D. Koerner. The man to call when Western imagery was required, Koerner (1878-1938) was a noted illustrator whose paintings graced the pages of the Saturday Evening Post and other curl-up-and-read publications of the period.

In terms of wild-West mythology, the show leaves few cliches unturned. There we see the Native Americans, proud and dressed for war or the hunt. There we see the proverbial posse, the two scowling cowpokes with pistol hands poised for action, and the pioneers snaking across the plains in a wagon train. There we see a forlorn cowboy draped over a fence, with a “dream of his own spread.”

Everything you know from seeing John Ford and Howard Hawkes films--minus the shootouts, scalpings and barroom brawls--is here, in living color and loving brush strokes. Koerner had a nice, loose way with a brush and an unfussy, realistic approach in his paintings, the surface energy of which was lost in the translation to the reduced, flat, two-dimensional plane of the magazine page.

Flashes of the offbeat, and the mildly poetic, do pop up in the gallery. In one painting, careworn riders saunter down a dim twilit trail, brightened only by the faint light of a match in cupped hands. Another painting, a depiction of a fulminating storm over the prairie, is more about the fierce Turner-esque gathering of clouds than the cattle drive below.

Is it art? Not if the definition thereof has to do with extending and upholding the fine art traditions of the time.

But something charming and historically valuable comes from the exhibition of these old images from a day when magazine illustrations filled a role now replaced by the frazzled, electronic parade of mass media.

One woman at the museum had a different, less detached response to the paintings. “I remember lying down on my stomach at the age of 12 and looking at the Saturday Evening Post for hours. I never knew who painted those pictures, but I recognized some of these paintings when I looked at the show.”

The power of collective memory is stronger than we know. Will kids these days, decades from now, have the same fond recall of MTV vidclips? It’s cause to shudder.

Up the Coast: Attrition has always exacted a toll on the Santa Barbara art gallery scene. The difficulties of navigating high rents and would-be collectors (now recession-battered) require of gallery owners courage, a sense of mission, and/or a private cash reserve for survival.

Now, it looks as if one of the area’s better-equipped artspaces, the Arpel Gallery, is tossing in the towel--unless an eleventh hour plan works out. Chris Lyons has run the gallery, an admirable, high-ceilinged space in part of a former chapel, for several years with an eye on notable local artists. Lyons hopes now to keep the gallery from slipping out of her hands by turning it into a cultural center, joining forces with local arts organizations.

As a fitting swan song for the Arpel (at least as we’ve known it), Lyons is presenting a large multimedia exhibition of the art of Ron Robertson. The prolific artist, who has worked in many media over his 50 years of artmaking and who has taught at Santa Barbara City College when not pursuing other such activities as abalone diving, had a show of his latest phase--witty assemblages/sculptures--at the Arpel a couple of years ago.

What we find in the gallery now is a rambling 239-piece exhibition chockablock with technical assuredness, wry humor, sociopolitical commentary, philosophical asides and puns (“conclusion jumpers” appear more than once), and general inventiveness. Robertson is an artist of many impulses, a political activist, a diver, teacher and has had an interest in the Orient, carried over into calligraphic imagery and printmaking.

Somehow, out of all of this comes a logical cross-referential show, a multi-tendriled portrait of the artist.

In several large, boldly painted canvases from the ‘60s, Robertson uses the trompe l’oeil, surrealist strategy of confusing artifice and actuality. In another corner, an ecumenical message rings out, where comical friezes of Adam and Eve and multiple Boddhisatvas meet a “Shrine for All Occasions.”

The large rectangular “Rainbow Arch” seems like a parody of the looming, garishly tinted “Chromatic Gate,” the controversial public sculpture by the late German-cum-Santa Barbara artist Herbert Bayer.

Robertson also has a sharp eye for commonplace materials and artful uses for “innocent” found objects.

His cleverly assembled recent works constantly refer to dysfunctional machinery and, by extension, dysfunctional civilization. The rusty, corroded metal contraptions appear to be salvaged from shipwrecks within swimming distance of Atlantis. Or is that America, as viewed from a grim, future vantage point?

Robertson, who is represented by Sherry Frumkin in Santa Monica, says now that his latest urge is to return to the womb of the easel, having now completed 186 assemblages in the last few years. Let’s just hope that, when the next body of work is ready for public view, there’s a place in his town to show it.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* “Exploring the West of W.D. Koerner,” at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, 100 E. Main St. in Ventura.

Ron Robertson, “Retrospective--50 Years,” at Arpel Gallery, 32 E. Micheltorena St. in Santa Barbara, through Nov. 30.