ART REVIEW : Echoes of the Present in LACMA ‘Goya to Lautrec’

There is something especially apt about showing prints to illuminate the spirit of the 19th Century. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has done just that in “From Goya to Lautrec: 19th-Century European Prints From the Collection,” a selection of about 120 European works selected from the permanent collection by curator of prints and drawings, Bruce Davis.

The last century feels very close to us. Its social turmoil, urbanization and Industrial Revolution cradled our society. The people depicted in Honore Daumier’s prints seem so familiarly like ourselves that we wonder why they’re done up in those funny clothes and weird beards. This art feels populist and pluralistic. There was no one dominant style. Francisco de Goya retained some elements of the rococo but his images are more severely reportorial. There’s a hangover of the Neoclassical in William Blake but a dawning modernist idiosyncrasy jerks it out of the past. The time was a wallow of isms from Romanticism to Realism, from Impressionism to Symbolism.

Prints are hand-made but it’s possible to pull numerous copies from a single plate. They seem to predict mechanical mass production, photography and the obscene flood of media imagery that inundates us today. There’s more than a hint of journalism in these prints.

French satirist Charles Joseph Travies skewered the pear-shaped King Louis Philippe in accents that set the stage for newspaper cartoonists. Daumier’s famous “Rue Transnonain, April 1834” bore witness to urban atrocity.

The century had a fascination with far-off places that looks like pure exoticism today. In reality, it was often a response to real events. Many of those theatrical-looking scenes of galloping sheiks fighting in the desert reacted to such events as the Greek war of independence against the Turks. It seems to have functioned for 19th-Century artists and intellectuals the way the Spanish Civil War acted for ours. Lord Byron died during the fighting at Missolonghi. Gericault , Gros and Delacroix were all inspired to make prints based on the conflict. Their glamorous images bring to mind television coverage of our high-tech war, Operation Desert Storm.

Printmakers were involved with the environment. It wasn’t exactly ecology, but artists did tend to project their fantasies and fears onto their surroundings. Rudolphe Bresdin’s “The Good Samaritan” saw nature as a wildly fecund energy field whose cells and atoms had run amok.

Nostalgia saturated popular series of landscapes showing ancient views, noble old castles and dilapidated peasant huts. It was as if artists like Thomas Shotter Boys or Charles Meryon heard the sounds of mechanizing modernism, causing them to cherish a present fast fading into a past.

Like the American Pop world of the ‘60s, these artists had a breezy disregard for the borders between fine and commercial art. Alphonse Mucha’s “Job” served as an ad for cigarette papers. It may not be exactly in the same category with the Elgin Marbles but it is Art Nouveau entertainment at its best.

There is a gulf of sensibility that separates us from this otherwise familiar world. These artists saw life with a certain healthy egotistical gusto. They showed little doubt about the individual artist’s power to make a difference. Even the stylish ennui of Aubrey Beardsley’s “The Stomach Dance” or Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Divan Japonais” has an immensely self-confident snap. Not for this lot the impotent anomie of later decades. They were romantic about things. They were discovering things.

Freely mixing the objective with the subjective, they uncovered truths by filtering the sights of the real world through evermore introspective individual personalities. England’s J. M. W. Turner sieved landscape through the fire in his belly until it emerged as a torch to ignite abstraction. The German Max Klinger stressed Albrecht Durer’s symbol-reality to the borders of dream-world surrealism in “Toward the End.”

Artists who rejected their own Romanticism still came up with fresh answers. Between Manet and Cezanne a kind of dead-pan approach yielded an objectivity about the nature of art that proved immensely fertile for our own century.

You might say these printmakers started by predicting the strengths of photojournalism and ended by inventing a visual art no mere mechanism could ever quite equal.

Of course, they lost something, too. The 20th Century made society specialize. Journalism took over the real world. Movies and pop music annexed narrative and Romanticism. Artists were promoted to outsiders, now honored, now irrelevant.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., to April 26; closed Mondays, (213) 857-6000.