ART / CATHY CURTIS : Laguna Museum Exhibit Spotlights One Artist’s Bow to the East : Works show how Nicholas Brigante’s style was influenced and how it evolved from both Chinese and Japanese painting.

East was East and West was West, and the twain didn’t meet too often in the days before Sony and Toyota, but Western artists of the past 100 years frequently infused their work with motifs borrowed from Eastern painting and decorative arts. For decades, Asian art served Western art primarily as a technical novelty (unusual perspective treatments, flat areas of color) or a flavorful dollop of exoticism (a Chinese vase in a still life, a Japanese dressing gown worn by a Western woman).

Yet it wasn’t until the 1940s and ‘50s--in the abstract works of Mark Tobey, John McLaughlin and others--that Western artists began to invoke the philosophies behind the art of China and Japan: the distinctive world views of Zen Buddhism and Taoism.

The artistic journey of Nicholas Brigante--a minor but serious-minded painter whose Italian family settled in Southern California in 1897, when he was an infant--offers a glimpse into a vanished era, when Asian decorative arts were among several aesthetic influences that vied for the soul of an introspective American artist. At the Laguna Art Museum through Feb. 2, a small group of Brigante’s works trace the slow ripening of a style influenced both by Chinese and Japanese painting and European modernist movements like Synchromism and Surrealism.

Brigante studied at the Art Students League of Los Angeles in his late teens and early 20s and showed with the Group of Independent Artists of Los Angeles in 1923. It was the first major modern art exhibit the city had seen, and it consisted of works in a variety of styles, based mostly on Cubism and German Expressionism.

The foreword to the exhibit catalogue--which championed the virtues of modernist styles and decried the “corpse” of traditional painting--was written by Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Five years Brigante’s senior, he was the co-founder of Synchromism, a painting style based on a system of color harmonies, and a lifelong devotee of Asian art. In his 60s, he spent part of each year in a Zen monastery in Japan.

Macdonald-Wright’s fascination with Asian art proved infectious for Brigante, but it wasn’t until he, too, was in his 60s (in the 1960s) that he found a way of embodying it in a genuinely personal way. And by then, his was only a small voice in a chorus of more original artists inspired in various ways by Asian philosophies.

Judging by the early paintings in this exhibit, Brigante took quite a while to find himself as an artist. “Falcata and Vase,” a watercolor from 1932, has a curious flattened perspective reminiscent of Japanese prints. But the composition itself is more worshipful than evocative, with a blue Ming vase, a snippet of painted Asian landscape, a plant, perfume bottles and a would-be artful arrangement of cigarettes.

Brigante’s 1933 painting, “Cynical,” is standard Regionalist fare with a faintly absurd dose of Orientalism. His sturdy, red-cheeked, and to all appearances cheerful wife is shown reading the Los Angeles Times, which bristles with headlines about crime and money woes (“Tells Court She Packed Bodies in Trunks,” “Fall of Peseta Hurts Missouri Mule Market”). A window shows the garden as a misty green blur of Japanese-style landscaping, rendered in a faux-Japanese painting style.

Ignoring some peculiar remarks on the wall text about how the composition and surface of the painting reflect a study of “Old Master” and “Renaissance” artists (which ones?), we’d still be hard put to see this work as more than an unconvincing pastiche.

Suddenly we jump to 1955. It’s hard to suppress a giggle at the title of a watercolor from that year: “Frustration” consists of tentative, splintered flags of bright color that seemingly hang in thin air. Brigante seemed hard put at that moment to reconcile his facility with color, his loyalty to Asian landscape painting and his interest in Surrealism (a wall text says that following World War II he was doing “automatic” drawings, a Surrealist technique that purportedly tapped the unconscious).

A few years later, with “Cloud Lands of Abstraction,” Brigante seems to have achieved a breakthrough using the traditional Chinese technique of making paintings with only ink and a brush. In a five-part work from that series, “Santa Lucia Mountains,” dated Oct. 6, 1960 (the precise day emphasizes the speed and immediacy of the artist’s work), he grandly yet delicately pulled out all the stops.

The painfully eked-out, straw-like lines, the striated washes of pale black, the flurry of small markings and the brilliant untouched white of the paper reduce the artist’s view of the mountain to a huge, cosmic cycle of falling, scattering and blazing matter. No longer wedded to superficial appearances, Brigante conjured up a holistic impression of the mountains as a microcosm of the Earth’s cycle of destruction and rebirth. His experience with Surrealism no doubt proved helpful in unlocking a deeper source of personal imagery, distinct from either Western or Eastern landscape painting traditions.

Brigante’s finicky handling of line is different from the fluid brushwork associated with the Chinese masters; it is a nervous, insecure thing--perhaps fitting for the mid-20th-Century Age of Anxiety. He uses it to good effect in “Clear Pool No. 18,” from about 1972--a painting from his “Tidepool” series--which offers a close-up view of the light reflecting within a tide pool and the delicate traces sketched by insects skimming over the water.

These monochromatic works are more satisfying than Brigante’s late works in color, which seem too prettified and formless. An untitled acrylic painting from 1976--13 years before his death--strikes an (unwitting?) Bicentennial note with its slices of red, white and blue, and festive dusting of floating white particles.

Originally, this brief survey of Brigante’s work was to have been a sidelight of “The Transparent Thread: Asian Philosophy in Recent American Art,” a traveling exhibit about the influence of Zen and Taoist philosophies on such New York and California artists as John Cage, Walter De Maria, Robert Irwin and John Baldessari. This exhibit, organized by the galleries at Bard College and Hofstra University in New York State, was canceled by the Laguna Beach museum for financial reasons.

One unfortunate consequence is that we don’t get to see an important development in Western artists’ interpretations of Asian art and ideas. By 1976, a generation of painters and a younger generation of environmental and conceptual artists would incorporate Zen Buddhist-derived ideas into art physically unlike anything anyone had seen before. Using such varied means as real architectural space, light, glass, paint, photography and human activities in “real time,” these artists dealt with notions of space, time and randomness, to reveal the idiosyncratic, disorderly order of the universe.