ART REVIEWS : An Education in the New York School of Abstraction

Bombast and monumentality are entirely absent from an exhibition at the Manny Silverman Gallery of abstract sculptures and drawings by 10 artists from the New York School. Although most of the works were made in the 1950s, when New York took over Europe’s position as capital of the art world, they are remarkably free of the tortured heroics that usually accompanied American ascendancy.

Abstract painting, it seems, was exclusively called upon to shoulder the nation’s new burden of cultural greatness: defining an artistic identity able to bear comparison with European masterpieces. This left sculptors free to pursue their art with few expectations and less recognition.

What resulted was a “school” of artists whose work shares little of the notorious existential dread or crisis-inspired desperation of the more famous painters of their generation. A lyrical lightness of touch that borders on decorative elegance and a graceful avoidance of Surrealist-derived autobiography give their sculpture a quirky playfulness, a freshness characterized by irreverence toward tradition and respect for the formal possibilities of common materials and industrial scraps.

Herbert Ferber, Ibram Lassaw and Wilfrid Zogbaum sculpt not by giving form to solid chunks of matter, but by drawing in space. Their moderately scaled table-top works combine the off-hand freedom normally found in sketch books with the permanence usually associated with sculpture. They manage to transform an art of substantial materials into an endeavor as spontaneous, unrestrained and almost as immaterial as the lines made with a pencil.

In metal and in three dimensions, however, their “marks” don’t record the movements of their wrists and arms so much as they seem merely to occur in the air, without the weight of personal associations or the heavy-handed portent of authentic, singular gestures.

Ferber’s floating fragments of brass and bronze move, from 1947 to ‘64, from references to skeletons, death and threatening, spiky implements to curling swirls, smoothly flowing forms and continuous lines--benign designs focused on ease and mobility. The progression of his refinement summarizes the show’s almost joyous departure from European Existentialism. In place of the horror of ultimate meaninglessness, these American artists emphasized idiosyncratic possibility and the openness of carefree improvisation.

Ferber’s sculptures don’t describe a trajectory toward some form of purified abstraction--as the paintings of the New York School often claimed--but chart a movement away from the Angst of high seriousness and toward playfulness. Zogbaum’s smooth squiggles of steel mark the comic extreme of this whimsy. Likewise, Lassaw’s denser sculptures appear to be mad alphabets, haywire computer circuitry or broken mobiles tangled in chaotic yet deliberate elegance.

Richard Stankiewicz, David Smith and David Hare exploit the anthropomorphic possibilities of found industrial scraps. Not as cartoon-like as Zogbaum’s carefully finished figures, their welded configurations of rusted gears, discarded ratchets and broken castings have the presence of tiny icons and children’s toys. They propose that art exists somewhere between the purposelessness of playtime and the uselessness of dysfunctional machines.

Isamu Noguchi’s extremely simplified sculptures are the most elegant manifestations of this tendency to turn usefulness into decoration. Their sinuous contours depart from the industrial roughness of the other metal-workers, but act as a bridge to the wood sculptures by Raoul Hague, Gabriel Kohn and Louise Nevelson.

Hague’s carved hunks of walnut and poplar--the only pieces in the show sculpted with this traditional procedure--have the presence of primordial life forms the artist has effortlessly wrested from fallen trees. Kohn’s sculptures are made by balancing and joining blocks and boards, while Nevelson’s are built out of decorative fragments such as banisters and chair-backs the artist has collected and housed in thin vertical boxes.

Although the art of these three wood workers follows different intentions and defies stylistic similarities, it is united by its sense of renewal. Like the rest of the work in “10 Sculptors of the New York School,” it does not make grand or pompous claims, but quietly achieves its goals without arrogance, pretense or fanfare. As such, it serves as the unrecognized model for some of the best sculpture being made today.

* Manny Silverman Gallery, 800 N. La Cienega Blvd., (213) 659-8256, through Jan. 11 . Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Keyed-Up Colors: Wess Dahlberg’s odd, monochromatic paintings play out a related series of oppositions with similar effectiveness. For his second solo show at Richard Green Gallery, he has keyed up his colors, built up his thick, encrusted surfaces, and pushed the shapes of his strange, incomplete grids to even more extreme configurations.

If Ellsworth Kelly’s elegant slices of architecture pit Pop’s synthetic colors against Minimalism’s no-nonsense geometries, Dahlberg’s eccentric but understated paintings raise the stakes of this attempt to use art as a ground for cultural cross-fertilization. His work fuses the techniques of gestural abstraction with the procedures of automobile painting.

Dahlberg begins his sessions in the studio by stirring a drum of paint until it reaches a creamy consistency and will not bubble or pucker when it dries on his panels. He then paints layer after layer of alternating bands, horizontal and vertical by turn, until the edges of each liquid “stripe” form ridges that “frame” each section of his irregular grids.

The results are extremely focused and highly accomplished images in which paint functions in an original and satisfying manner. Dahlberg’s works address the history of painting by turning its present form into something it never was in the past.

* Richard Green Gallery, 2036 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 828-6666, through Dec. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Like Father, Like Son: “Folk: The Art of Benny and George Andrews” brings together the paintings, collages, drawings and objects of father and son in a generous exhibition that is as joyous as it is sorrowful, as gentle as it is tough.

The work of the senior Andrews, George (born 1911), tends toward the raw. His small paintings from 1970-89 of parachuting pigs, dancing snakes, trees that sprout uncountable eyeballs or smiles, a bridge with many sneaker-clad feet, and colorful abstract patterns labeled with the phrases “Scramble Painting,” “Oh Boy!” or “Ah Ha!” reveal an imagination less impressed with formal sophistication than interested in communicating the fundamental wonder--and weirdness--of living in the 20th Century.

The collaged paintings and drawings of Benny Andrews (born 1930) take off from the inventive silliness of sober wisdom in his father’s vision. The son’s formal sophistication and mastery of modern tropes give nuance and range to the profound playfulness of the father’s art.

Benny Andrews’ broad repertoire of figures--including devilish hounds, giant jack rabbits, matronly schoolteachers and Baconesque butchers--combines with his whimsical array of techniques--spraying, cutting, pasting, and rendering--to elaborate upon the fantasy with which his father’s art approaches life. Both artists engender rich responses to a world constantly made new by unquenchable curiosity.

* California Afro-American Museum, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park, (213) 744-7432, through Jan. 12 . Open daily.

Identity Crisis: Ellsworth Kelly’s four major paintings from 1965 and ’66 at Margo Leavin Gallery just might be sculptures. With his “At Right Angles” series, which has never before been exhibited together, this distinction is hardly a matter of mere semantics. Our inability to determine the identity of these impressive works registers not only the difficulties intrinsic to art historical categorization, but the physical and intellectual problems involved when we try to define art’s place in the world.

Two of them consist of approximately 7x5-foot painted canvases joined at the line where the wall meets the floor. The other pair are free-standing, painted metal L-shaped works whose 6x3-foot vertical portions are mirrored by identical sheets of color on the floor. What is surprising about Kelly’s apparently reductive pieces is that none functions as one would expect.

The thin planes of metal, which should maintain a sculptural presence, almost dissolve into the immaterial effects they have on one’s eyes. Positioned away from the gallery’s blank walls, they transform its pristine architecture into a space interrupted by something seemingly more neutral than the gallery itself. The deceptive “non-presence” of the painted metal disrupts the implacable neutrality of the gallery by carrying its perfection beyond its point of effectiveness.

The canvases, wrapped around comparatively thick stretcher bars, should occupy the place of insubstantial illusions, but instead take on the physical “thereness” of things in the world. They intrude almost under one’s feet as they turn the phenomenal experience of geometric precision into a seemingly infinite expansiveness. Before them, one falls into a space in which illusions and reality intermingle to the point that neither is free of the other’s effects.

Kelly’s oddly three-dimensional paintings--or, strangely flat sculptures--literally occupy both the real-world space of objects and the two-dimensional surfaces of illusionistic images, a domain usually reserved for the play of fantasy and the trickery of visual deception. Confronting the irreconcilability between perception and cognition, they take their place between paintings and sculpture to confound expectations and to force sensation and thinking beyond the borders that keep both processes safely predictable.

These works haven’t been adequately accounted for by art historians because they split the difference between Minimalism’s emphasis on the truth of the empirical world and Pop Art’s romance with seductive illusions and flashy deceptions. Usually thought of as aberrant reductions of formalist abstraction, Kelly’s uncategorizable painted objects never settle for the purely optical equivocations of that kind of painting. Instead, its visual ambiguities and illusionistic conundrums are displaced to the three-dimensional space of the ordinary world, in which bodies move and perception has physical effects.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through Dec. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.