ART REVIEW : A Small but Vivid ‘1958’ at Corcoran Gallery

Sometimes a small thing can bring a whole era vividly back to life. The Corcoran Gallery exhibition “1958” certainly can be counted diminutive. It consists of just eight objects of no great size, but lever-like, these rare, museum-worthy works, raise vastly greater psychic weight than they possess.

In the linchpin year of 1958, the jazz-soaked Beat Generation reached apogee and began to segue into the hippie epoch. In L.A., the legendary Ferus Gallery opened the year before to start a motion that would lead to the art boom of the ‘60s. Unlike the ‘80s frenzy, it was actually about aesthetics rather than money.

A couple of artists on view deeply influenced young dreamers. They doted on the cracker-barrel Surrealist H. C. Westermann. You can see why in his sculpture of the torso of a very pregnant woman. It’s made of a series of ovoid-shaped pieces of lumber stacked into the appropriate silhouette. The title is carved on the top piece like the musings of a kid scraping his initials into a desktop, “I Wonder If I Really Love Her?”

The Ferus would also show the magical boxes of Joseph Cornell. The one here is rather spare. With the characteristic ball balanced on metal bars and astrological symbol, it’s called “The Geometric Bear.”

Taken together, the two works embody L.A. art’s ongoing attraction to smart eccentricity.

Meanwhile, in New York other ideas were being prepared for shipment to the West Coast. We certainly already knew about Abstract Expressionism. All the same Willem de Kooning’s untitled composition was germane. It’s from the same batch as the classic “Montauk Highway” that now graces the collection of the County Museum of Art. Mark Rothko’s “Red, Pink” doesn’t need history to justify its amazing internal glow.

Ideas new to the time are seen in Robert Rauschenberg’s “Course.” It was among his first sallies into frottage technique. He’d take a photograph, soak it in solvent, then rub its back with a blunt tool, transferring the image to paper. This way he developed a montage method that set the stage for two decades of artistic preoccupation with, first, popular culture and then its corporate domestication into media culture. All that found fruition in John Baldessari and the CalArts crew.

Jasper Johns’ little pencil study for one of his early flag paintings is proto-Pop too, but there’s more to it. Few people recognize that Johns’ deadpan take on Old Glory during the Korean War era prepared the way for present-day artists who play the role of social critic.

What goes around. . . .

Formally, the crucial painting here is Frank Stella’s “Jill.” It’s a very small, square black-on-black number with concentric squares set obliquely to the format like a diamond pattern. Earlier than his big, famous “Black” series, it intimates the rigors of Minimalism.

What’s that? Looks like a nubbly white rectangle with rounded corners. Must be more Minimalism. Actually, it’s Yves Klein’s “White Monochrome 5” and is Conceptual rather than Minimal.

Ah, for 1958 when art that said something was still a surprise and art that said nothing was still a delicious enigma.

Sigh.

James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St., Santa Monica, to May 23, closed Mondays, (310) 451-0950.