O.C. ART REVIEW : Encounter With the Unknown : Yes, ‘Modernist Abstraction in American Prints’ in Laguna Beach has Calder, Pollock and Weber, but most of the 60 artists represented here are obscure.

If you drop by the Laguna Art Museum to catch “Modernist Abstraction in American Prints” (through July 26), you’re apt to run into more unknown dead artists than you’ve seen in a long time.

Sure, some of the Big Famous Guys are represented, mostly with a single work apiece. You’ll spot painters Milton Avery, Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Richard Diebenkorn, Lyonel Feininger, Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Charles Sheeler and Max Weber, as well as sculptors Ibram Lassaw and Theodore Roszak.

But these names account for only a fraction of the 60 artists in the show, drawn from the collection of the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. Just about everyone else is utterly obscure.

After reading the brief catalogue essay by National Museum graphic arts curator Joann Moser, you get the feeling that the show might just as well have been called “Awful Modernist Abstraction in Terrible American Prints-- NOT !” The main point seems to be that in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s--when artists made the bulk of these prints--abstraction was anathema to a large chunk of the art-loving public and prints were an equally tough sell. Now, we presumably know better.

But Moser seems to mistake this state of affairs for a guiding concept on which to base an exhibit. Her show merely dumps out a grab-bag of artists who worked in different styles, for different reasons, without explaining who they were, whom they knew, and what they were about.

Throwaway remarks in the catalogue about Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 workshop and the group called American Abstract Artists don’t adequately set the scene, either in terms of what abstract artists were up against, or why nobody seemed to be interested in prints. And we get zero biographical information on the artists, despite the fact that most of their names are not even household words in art historians’ households.

So we’re really on our own here. An exhibit that pretends to perform a historical function--reviewing a body of work “for a more complete understanding of 20th-Century American art”--turns out to be just a mishmash of assorted Stuff.

Fortunately, the unknowns turn out to be rather interesting, especially in the endearingly awkward way so many of them straddled figuration and abstraction, clinging stubbornly to solid pieces of the real world years after the Europeans had shattered it into splinters and shards.

Early American abstract artists had to travel abroad to find out about new developments in art. Marguerite Thompson Zorach, for example, was in her early 20s in 1908 when she began studying in an avant-garde Paris art school and discovered the Fauvist paintings of Matisse and others.

In her linoleum cut, “Provincetown Players,” puppetlike nudes are divided into black-outlined sections resembling stained glass windows--a style that somewhat recalls the work of the so-called Russian Primitives. In 1915, when she made the print, Zorach and her husband, William, were designing sets for the theater group, famous for its stagings of Eugene O’Neill’s plays. The viewer may well wonder whether this print was a study for a set design or an imaginary vision of the actors’ psyches.

For American artists who stayed home, the generally acknowledged turning point was the 1913 Armory Show in New York, which--in addition to American works in a variety of styles and paintings by the major French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists--included Fauvist and Cubist paintings that shocked the public.

But the 1920s ushered in an era of conservative backlash among American artists. (Concurrently, in Europe, even Picasso had retreated from Cubism to paint his monumental classically inspired figures.)

During the ‘30s, social and economic problems and the requirements of public mural painting projects established by the Federal Arts Project programs conspired to marginalize abstract artists. Conservative factions supported popular home-grown styles that didn’t respond to European movements; left-wing artists thought art should quit gazing at its navel and become politically engaged.

Gung-ho images of workers, machines, bridges and vehicles--subjects frequently depicted in the public murals--pop up regularly in these prints. Many artists’ compositions reflected the bulky curves typical of the Streamline Moderne style of industrial design.

Ida Abelman’s lithograph, “Machine and ‘El’ Patterns,” displays a fascination with lively linear design--from the spiraling of screw threads to the rat-a-tat-tat of rivets--as well as the tension between flattened abstract elements and three-dimensional imagery.

Jolan Gross Bettelheim offers a more sinister vision of a wartime “Assembly Line” in his lithograph showing rows of identical bayonets, soldiers and workers with pickaxes slung on their shoulders.

Musicians, a frequent Cubist subject, also crop up in American strivings toward abstraction. Benton Murdock Spruance’s lithograph, “Arrangement for Drums,” breaks the scene of three drummers into a syncopated pattern of curving elements--heads, fingers, pedals, bow ties and even a distant full moon. The profiled head of a black man in Sargent Claude Johnson’s lithograph, “Lenox Avenue,” intersects with piano keys and a cigarette wafting three neat lines of smoke.

A couple of lithographs--Grace Rivet Clements’ “Reconsideration of Time and Space” (a far-flung world connected by telephone wires) and Joseph Vogel’s “Shadow and Substance” (in which a film projector seems to be expelling barbed wire and a rifle) seem to be meditations on Modern Life.

Other works from the period range from slices-of-life in the big city (Louis Schanker’s woodcut of two squat yet oddly birdlike figures playing “Wall Handball”) to faintly ominous visions of nature, such as Frederick Gerhard Becker’s etching, “Pulled Forms,” which contains a network of pods and a large white pincerlike form that look like sci-fi mutants. A rare overt political statement in this group, Werner Drewes’ woodcut of 1934, “It Can’t Happen Here,” features cavorting cartoonlike figures whose bodies are distorted swastika shapes.

Hayter, one of the very few artists here whose reputation rests on his prints, predates the famous painted women of Willem DeKooning with “Unstable Woman,” an intaglio work of 1947 that unleashes a dangerous floating bundle of boomerang curves.

The few prints by the handful of well-known artists generally don’t show them at their prime, and the exhibit offers no information on how these works relate to paintings and sculptures dating from the same period.

In Davis’s lithograph, “Rue de l’Echaude” of 1929, a French street becomes a crazily zig-zagging stage set of hotels and cafes, flimsy as cardboard. Davis, a former cartoonist, painted witty abstract views of such everyday objects as eggbeaters and cigarette packs in the ‘20s. A visit to Paris in 1928-29 inspired a group of stylized paintings of street scenes; in a few years he would transform these, too, into completely flat, jazzy abstractions.

Sheeler’s 1924 lithograph, “Yachts,” displays his whisper-light, clean-lined Precisionist style at its breeziest, with a brace of curling sails in soft grays against the pure white of the paper.

In 1931, when Gorky made his lithograph, “Painter and Model (The Creation Chamber),” he was still heavily indebted to Picasso’s brand of Cubism and a hoary theme of European art. A few years later, he would complete a stunning aviation mural for Newark Airport (one of the Works Progress Administration’s rare abstract commissions) and launch his trademark calligraphic painting style.

Perhaps the most elegant and characteristic of the prints by notable artists is Gottlieb’s woodcut, “Pictograph,” from the ‘40s, which continued a theme from his paintings of the decade. The flat, abstracted faces peering out of small compartments reflect his interest in archetypal symbolic forms.

By the early ‘40s, in the wake of World War II, the center of the art world had moved to the U.S., and Abstract Expressionism was the style of the hour. (In 1940, members of the American Abstract Artists group actually picketed the Museum of Modern Art in New York to demand more representation of work by living American abstract artists.)

It would still take another few decades for contemporary printmaking to catch on as an arena for large-scale painterly experimentation and--not incidentally--a means for collectors to buy famous artists’ own versions of their astronomically priced paintings.

But artists who have specialized in printmaking, as opposed to other media, have remained the low guys on the totem pole. Perhaps this second-class citizenship accounts in part for this exhibit’s skimpy treatment of its subject.

A sampling of abstract paintings, sculpture and prints from the museum’s own collection is also on view, probably for the practical reason that the museum needed to fill another gallery. But “abstraction” is much too big a catchall to make sense as the theme for an exhibit, and the Laguna Art Museum’s holdings are too spotty to trace the various phases of abstract art in California in an authoritative way.

Instead, the assortment of works on view range from the ridiculous (Frederick Schwankovsky’s “Modern Music” of 1925, in which a floral design seems to have sprouted from the knees of the woman pianist) to the sublime (the sunny purity of John McLaughlin’s “No. 2--1975,” a serene late work divided into broad bands of white, yellow and black).

There are a few strong contemporary pieces in between--among them, DeWain Valentine’s luscious, candy-colored monster toy, “Yellow Roller,” and Jud Fine’s “Bresse Orpington,” a delicate see-through box made of chicken wire. A few of the vintage items on view are rarely exhibited, including Gordon Onslow Ford’s rather tortured black-and-white painting, “World in a Drop of Water” from 1959, and Peter Krasnow’s 1949 canvas, “K-3,” a warren of mysterious puzzlelike designs.

But ultimately, this little show is rather like a potluck dinner, dependent (as is the rest of the collection, in the absence of a substantial acquisition fund) on contributions over the years from artists and collectors, who sometimes bring Jell-O salad instead of the gourmet grub everyone was counting on.