Emerson Woelffer’s Lessons in Artistic Integrity : Art: Three simultaneous exhibitions are devoted to the work of an artist more revered by peers and students than celebrated by mass and media.

It has slowly dawned on the L.A. art sphere that aesthetic seeds it planted as far back as the ‘50s have grown to ripeness. Without exactly intending to, the town has spent several years celebrating its cultural coming of age in an unplanned series of retrospective and survey exhibitions devoted to everything from Assemblage to the Cool School, from Frank Gehry to John Baldessari.

Every time it seems that just about everybody deserving of recognition has received it, somebody else pops up to remind us that more superior art has been made hereabouts in the past three decades than anybody can keep in mind all at once.

Among the latest entries in this bracing derby are three simultaneous exhibitions devoted to the art of Emerson Woelffer, an artist more revered by peers and students than celebrated by mass and media. The exhibitions add up not only to an ad hoc retrospective but an object lesson in artistic integrity.

The gallery at Otis Parsons School of Art and Design presents “Emerson Woelffer: A Modernist Odyssey.” Organized by Anne Ayres and Roy Dowell, it surveys the artist’s works on paper in 65 examples from 1940 to the present. On La Cienega Boulevard, the Manny Silverman Gallery offers a sampling of paintings from 1947-1959. And in Santa Monica the James Corcoran Gallery forwards the chronology to 1977.

Woelffer is 78. His oeuvre forms an authentic West Coast branch of the more gentlemanly form of Abstract Expressionism. Like his friend Robert Motherwell, Woelffer grounded his art in classic modernism. His favorite painting is Picasso’s “Girl Before a Mirror,” to which he has painted many a masked hommage. His favorite painters include Miro and Klee. He cleaves to the doctrine of automatism espoused by the Surrealists and regards himself as an Abstract Surrealist.

That means his form and method come directly from the subconscious without recourse to representation or social issues. Woelffer admits that the real world does enter unbidden. Recent compositions seem to have graffiti art in mind.

The result has been five decades of lyrically contemplative, celebratory, heartfelt, sometimes whimsical art of sensitive form and seamless color. He is a much better artist than numerous better-known members of the New York School who were his contemporaries. Sense suggests that appropriate recognition would have come his way if he had just rooted in Manhattan.

Instead he chose L.A., where he has acted as an object lesson in The Real Thing for generations of artists and students including Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Charles Arnoldi and Tom Wudl.

Speaking recently of Woelffer’s art, Richard Diebenkorn said: “I can’t tell you how much I respect the guy.”

What we see is the work of an artist who’s lived long enough to watch the style of art he practices change from a subversive rebellion into a classic American art form. What happened to Abstract Expressionism is very like what happened to jazz. Not surprisingly Woelffer is a jazz fan with a closetful of tapes. He prefers Chicago-style jazz, not surprising since that’s his hometown.

“I grew up in the era of Prohibition and gangsters,” Woelffer remembers. “My father was a middle-class real estate and insurance salesman. I was an only child. He wanted me to be a big-league ball player so that when I retired to the insurance business I’d be a hero to potential clients.

“When the Depression hit, I went to work to help out. I sold ice cream at the World’s Fair and did a little bootlegging for a mobster in the Capone circle.”

Despite such distractions and his failure to graduate from high school, Woelffer managed to study at the Art Institute’s famous classes, paying his way by being a janitor. Grounded in academic art, he was fascinated by the Kandinskys and other advanced art in the institute’s renowned collection. Eventually Lazlo Moholy-Nagy hired him to teach at the New Bauhaus school and Woelffer’s career was launched.

These days he lives in his longtime dwelling on Mount Washington, not far from the Southwest Museum. “I always managed to go where the action wasn’t. When I probably should have stayed in New York, I went to Italy. I asked Franz Kline if he wanted to go along. He said he’d just bought a new Thunderbird and was going to stay in Manhattan for the sake of his career.

“Funny things have happened to me. Early on, Peggy Guggenheim recommended me to a dealer named Howard Putzel. He was giving Adolph Gottlieb his first solo show at the time and offered me one. I was elated, but before it could happen he dropped dead. Later, I had a show down in Dallas. It opened on the day President Kennedy was assassinated.

“I’m a sensitive person. Movements and groups bothered me. I think I’m a loner.”

His house has the peculiar stillness of dwellings with a single inhabitant. It wasn’t always so. Woelffer looked after his mother for much of her life until she died a decade back, having outlived her 100th birthday. He was thrice married, last and longest to his photographer wife, Dina. She died two years ago, after they’d been together 44 years. Old friends like Richards Ruben have moved away, or died like Mike Kanemitsu.

Now the house is quiet but not without the sense of others’ presence. Virtually since childhood the artist has collected African and Oceanic art. Traveled broadened his taste and an opportunity to include ancient Mexican and Turkish work. Every room in the house is crammed with these aboriginal souls.

Woelffer, slender, bearded and alert, chuckles. “Sometimes I think I’ll just sell all this ‘wood,’ go to Mexico, buy a fast sports car and have a last fling. But I don’t. I’ve never looked for masterpieces, just things that feed my spirit personally. They are my life.

“I don’t feel lonely. It’s kind of nice being able to get up when you want to and fix your meals when you feel like it. Kind of independent.”

He escorts a visitor down to his below-stairs studio warning him to watch out for a large rat-trap set in one corner. The studio is crammed with paintings old and new. Recent work is notably loose and free.

Objects that would be art for others are memorabilia for Woelffer. There are photographs of artists taken by Dina--Lenore Tawney, Agnes Martin. He keeps a picture of a small Kandinsky he once owned but had to sell when times got rough.

“I can’t complain. I’m dedicated to my work and I think I’m a pretty fair painter. I’ve had a string of grants and awards. The Art Institute gave me an honorary bachelor’s degree. Otis gave me an honorary doctorate.” He laughs again. “Now if somebody would give me an honorary high school diploma I’d be all set.”

Manny Silverman Gallery, 800 N La Cienega Blvd., (310) 659-8256 and James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St. Santa Monica, (310) 451-0950 . Both through Saturday.. ; Otis Parsons School of Art and Design, 2401 Wilshire Blvd. , (213) 251-0555, through Nov. 14 . Closed Sundays and Mondays .