ART REVIEW : D. J. Hall Unmasks L.A.’s Excruciating Aging Process

J. Hall’s painting has never been easy viewing. Looking at it today brings one to the borders of the excruciating. The Santa Monica Heritage Museum offers a decade survey of her art that has not been seen hereabouts since 1986.

She paints affluent West Side women lolling at poolside wearing twinkling snapshot smiles and bright fashionable togs. They hoist a noonday pina colada under a relentless sun or grin grimly, mourning the celebration of yet another birthday. They are the ladies who lunch in a town called Queen of the Angels. They are the ladies who do nothing when much needs doing.

Hall’s art has unflinchingly probed personal fears. Now, our mindscape drastically altered by recent riots, we realize that her intimate obsessions also embody what has been the central myth of the town. It was a sunny fable of denied reality now dramatically corrected by fire, death and ruin. In her way, Hall was warning us all along. Her subject has always been about maintaining superficial prettiness and ignoring internal rot.

One picture is titled “Famous for 15 Minutes,” after Andy Warhol’s maxim. It’s about more than the posing subject. It’s about a city half paralyzed with anxiety, not over its festering slums and barrios but, instead, terrified over the inevitable loss of youth, glamour and celebrity that comes naturally with age. It all seems repellently narcissistic.

“Sharon and Delilah” may be Hall’s prototypical piece. In it an attractive pair--apparently mother and daughter--say “cheese” nicely for the camera. Keen simile for a town where so many regard themselves as living on a sound stage. Mom wears a straw hat whose loose weave dapples her face with filtered light blurring the marks of age. Daughter looks healthy and youthful until Hall leads our eye to her hand resting on a bottle of designer water. The paw is a mass of ugly veins and liver spots. It’s like watching the lovely princess in the film “Lost Horizon” age 100 years before our eyes.

In Hall’s world every crow’s foot that appears in the morning mirror is promptly cemented over with pancake makeup. Mordant metaphor of a city so neurotic about aging that most of the time it would rather knock down a lovely vintage building than admit to being old enough to be its parent. Well, we’ve got a lot of gutted ruins to rejuvenate now.

The exhibition was organized by museum director Tobi Smith and is titled “It’s Not as Easy as It Looks.” That’s puzzling because Hall’s painting does not look easy. Nominally she is a Photorealist, doggedly translating detailed filmed evidence into paint. That is self-evidently difficult. Maybe the title means that the process is not as mechanical as it looks.

For the first time Hall shows some of the photographic sources, sketches and notes used in preparing finished compositions. One recent work, “Her Father’s Smile,” depicts two attractive women in high-cut bathing suits relaxing in the surf. The one on the left is the artist. That is a clue to the autobiographical truth that lies behind the paintings’ nominally detached style.

We learn from examining source material that figures have been combined from more than one photo and irrelevant details eliminated. That seems less pertinent than what we learn from comparing the expressive qualities of the painted figures with the original photos. Hall is almost cruelly hard on her subjects, including herself. Maybe the exhibition title refers to the difficulty of being the kind of woman she depicts, somehow isolated in a world of questionable privilege, not quite courageous enough to act on her better instincts. There is something trapped about them.

It all comes back home when we realize that Hall’s style most closely resembles that of Los Angeles’ massive hand-painted billboards. They fill the Sunset Strip with giant phantoms of glamour. Painted to formula, they look gorgeous from a distance, raw and agitated close up.

Recent works include some still-lifes and are softer and more smoothly articulated. “Two of a Kind” pictures a figure of a middle-class black woman, probably for the first time in Hall’s oeuvre . Her thinking seems to be evolving but so far everything still belongs to her painted family, images intended to absorb the sins of sitters who go on looking eternally young no matter how decadent--a kind of collective portrait of Dorian Gray.

Decadence here is not perversion or corruption but the corrosive smugness of a comfortable bourgeoise L.A. life carried on while the town turned into a time bomb.

Hall paints like a bottled-up version of Chicago artist Ivan Albright, visually expressing the tension between white, upscale L.A.’s cool artificial prettiness and the rot of its social indolence. In L.A., nothing is as easy as it looks.