EXHIBIT : The Essence of Dole : A display of collage works by the famous Santa Barbara artist chronicles the evolution of his unique talent.

The subtitle of the William Dole show at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, “The Collage Years,” is a bit deceptive. In fact, most of his artistic life was spent in the embrace of collage, and it is his contribution to the medium that made him perhaps the most widely recognized artist to have come out of Santa Barbara.

And Dole, who died in 1983 of emphysema, was very much a Santa Barbaran. A professor at UCSB beginning in 1949, Dole was more than an artist with gallery representation in Los Angeles and New York who merely made Santa Barbara his operational base.

It was the work of Dole that so impressed the late Esther Bear that she launched a gallery in her Montecito home in 1960, which was a widely influential art space for the next 15 years.

His memory still lingers strongly in town, as evidenced by the companion show at Frameworks, featuring four of his students’ work.

Collage was Dole’s calling: The artist honed his special, subtle brand of cut-and-paste profundity. But it was also a metaphor for his way of observing life in minute detail--sharing ideas, distilling.

One can’t deny that Dole’s work had a strong link to Cubism, with its simultaneous, multiple planes of reference, and--at least in practice--to the work of the famed Dada collagist Kurt Schwitters.

There also seems to be a Beat connection. Dole collages are a freewheeling blend of the sacred and the profane, nodding to the East--both philosophically and through a serene compositional approach--while keeping an ear to the modern American ground.

Dole’s work was elegant, distinctive and cross-cultural enough to avoid easy comparisons and parallels. He mixed exotic paper and newspaper scraps, swatches of watercolor, memorabilia from his travels. His works are small and deceptively calm. “Of Thanksgiving” is barely larger than a business card.

Anyone who breezes through the SBMA show without paying attention will miss this celebration of awareness.

Story has it that collage entered Dole’s life during a sabbatical to Florence in 1954-55, as he began melding precious papers and printings as well as his own sketches. A sense of travel and nostalgia was woven through many of his works, as in the early “Precious Memories,” with its wistful reflection on cafe life abroad.

You can see the transformation taking place in his “Young Tree” of 1957, abstracted and spare. “Mono Lake” of 1959 is reduced yet further, a landscape suggested by horizontal bands.

In the show, we get the benefit of hindsight and overview. For example, we can see the evolution of his work from the 1962 “Stately Romp, Really the Blues” (he wasn’t allergic to humor) and, a decade later, “Ambient,” both contemplations on varying shades of blue. Ambience is a key to his art.

“Edie’s Japanese Garden” relies on hieroglyphics and an Oriental sense of poise and order. “Gold Cross” mixes a faint cross of gold leaf, rice paper rectangles and fuzzy characters.

Standing apart from the smaller pieces is a wood collage, the big, coarse materials that have a tactile relief. Even here, though, the composition is bolstered by an assured sense of what goes where.

The show, rather than being a cool, academic exercise, offers a strong whiff of Dole’s essence. It was curated by Paul Mills, the former museum director and Dole’s friend. Two display cases, one with the actual tools and materials of Dole’s trade and one with photographs depicting his studio, take the show out of the realm of straight curatorship.

“Six Collages,” a video showing in the museum, is assembled and shot in a way sympathetic to Dole’s complex compositions, nicely accented by composer Jim McCauly’s Stravinsky-esque score.

A musical analogy registers with Dole’s work. Bits of language--usually Latin or other non-English--act as snatches of melody wafting up through the maze of abstraction, the harmonies of color and shape.

Over at Frameworks, we can see the fruits of Dole’s teaching. Perhaps the most direct local product of Dole’s influence is Mary Heebner, whose gutsy collage work was prominent in Santa Barbara art spaces for many years. In the last few years, she has been painting.

Here, Heebner shows recent “Dialogues,” scroll-like works in tribute to Dole, made partly from materials given to her by the professor. The pieces fuse collage and her own abstract Expressionist-like mode of painting.

Dole proteges Theodore B. Villa and M. Hiroko Eejima are now art teachers at Santa Barbara City College, and show Dole’s influence in different ways. Eejima shows tromp l’oeil depictions of wrapping materials, while Villa’s watercolor pieces, often delicate and precise images of American Indian artifacts, show an appreciation of the tactile.

The wise guy of the four, James Risser, wears his collage sensibility more ironically. The large “Present Distance” slaps together rarefied imagery--renaissance painting and Hindu tapestry-- obscured under a milky wash. A stamped ink imprint of Donald Duck, on the other hand, is clear as day.

Seeing a healthy stock of Dole--74 small but mighty pieces--serves as a revealing object lesson in the ways of collage. The ‘70s art scene was a high-water mark for conceptualism and the reconsideration of 20th-Century art conventions. Many ‘80s artists, egged on by the art market, madly appropriated ideas catch-as- catch-can (a form of collage). It was a good time for the Donald Ducks of the archetypal world.

The storm of image-overload has quelled somewhat; in this transition phase, Dole’s subtleties appear all the more relevant. At this stage, his work has weathered beautifully the furious test of time.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* William Dole: the Collage Years, 1955-1982, at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., through April 12.

* Re-Collections: A Tribute to William Dole, work by M. Hiroko Eejima, Mary Heebner, James Risser and Theodore B. Villa, at Frameworks, 131 E. De la Guerra, in Santa Barbara, through April 11.