ART REVIEWS : American Modernists: The Unofficial Story

There are an infinite number of ways to tell any story. Art history, however, is one of those stories that always gets told the same way. American painting through the 1930s and into the ‘50s is, then, always about one thing: Abstract Expressionism. Before Jackson Pollock “broke the ice,” as contemporary Willem de Kooning put it for posterity, there was the struggle to reconcile the sophistication of European modernism with the raw energy of American-style bravado; afterward, the struggle not to collapse under the weight of long-deferred recognition.

“American Modernist Painting, 1933-1951” at Steve Turner Gallery tells a different story--not quite as heroic, perhaps (there are neither victors nor vanquished here), but no less compelling. It is the story of a group of disparate artists who experimented with the myriad languages of modernism-- Cubism, Biomorphic Abstraction, Automatic Painting, Surrealism, collage--without laboring under the desire to overthrow anything, to revolutionize anything, to be part of history. As such, their work is suffused with a palpable sense of play, energized by a spirit of inquiry, and disdainful of the crippling dictates of “official” style.

Most of these artists are appallingly underknown. Yet the cross-fertilized, spliced and recombinatory aspects of their work should appeal to tastes shaped by Post-Modernism. Robert McChesney’s charming watercolor of 1944, “Unfavorable Forecast,” brews up a mix of Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Hollywood-style razzmatazz, and Eastern mysticism: a pair of melting, sad-eyed moons set in an amorphous space, with lots of thick arrows, fine black lines, and at the center, a twirling reel of film.

Miro shows up frequently here: in Charles Howard’s 1951 painting, “The Figure Meter,” and in an untitled work by Leonard Edmondson of 1949, along with one of Miro’s most skilled appropriators, Arshile Gorky. Temperamental opposite Piet Mondrian undergoes an impressive rehaul in James McCray’s 1945 gouache, “Flotation,” the latter’s red, yellow and blue squares so distorted and multiplied that they uncannily resemble a map of computer hyperspace.

Most impressive, however, is the work of Knud Merrild, which resolutely refuses a “signature” style--this being the Abstract Expressionists’ winning strategy--in order to embrace experimentation as a governing principle. In one work of 1933, Merrild constructs a three-dimensional version of Mondrian’s geometrized space that strangely predicts some of Peter Halley’s cell-and-conduit works. In another piece from two years later, he offers an elegantly restrained, Cubist-style collage of oil cloth and wallpaper on board; in a third image of 1944, Merrild manipulates finely detailed, marbleized paper to magical effects. Art history is grounded upon the notion of evolution--an unbroken, purposeful movement toward an ultimate, visual truth. Merrild’s art, however, doesn’t progress along a horizontal continuum. What his work--and this intriguing show--suggests is that evolution is probably the wrong metaphor; art history is, in fact, a mess of fits and starts, a chorus of backpedaling and silences, some mistakes, a few reversals, and--only occasionally--a leap or two forward.

Steve Turner Gallery, 7220 Beverly Blvd., (213) 931-1185. through Feb. 27. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Drawing Connections: Certainly there are connections to be drawn between the art of Nancy Spero, Aura Rosenberg and Eileen Cowin. Yet this exhibition at Roy Boyd Gallery is less a thematic group show than a trio of small, solo efforts. As such, it is a well-choreographed tease--eliciting interest without exhausting future possibilities. Spero is the most established of the three artists, and the most vociferous. Her hand-printed, collaged images depict women--dancing, suffering, exploding or dreaming. These are derived from (and bitingly disrespectful of) a wide array of sources--from the prehistoric to the classical, the Egyptian to the Tibetan. Urgent and complex, Spero’s art has long set a standard for politicized art--feminist and otherwise.

“Female Bomb,” from the Vietnam series of 1966, is exemplary--a female nude, more slashed than drawn, her face obliterated by a series of frantically wavering lines. What is repressed, however, makes its inevitable return: the woman’s body is studded with an army of tiny, female faces, each boasting a blood-red tongue of flames.

This work is troubling: there are no clear-cut victims to be championed, no victimizers to be vilified. Spero is interested, rather, in disturbing familiar dichotomies--power and subjection, among them. The point is not merely to generate pity, then, but to jump-start something more difficult: thought--and action. Rosenberg’s feminism is cooler, more distanced. In the corner of the gallery is her “Rock Pile,” a heap of stones decoupaged with color images of sweaty bodies and turgid body parts taken from pornographic magazines. The piece comments effectively on the fragmented body pornography engenders.

Less effective, however, are color photographs of the racy rocks placed in various politically and historically charged locations around Germany. Particularly disturbing is one photo set at Berlin’s Memorial to Jewish Victims of Concentration Camps. While it is conceivable that one could relate pornography’s ritualized abuse of women to the Third Reich’s ritualized extermination of the Jews, Rosenberg does so with dazzling irresponsibility, skating over the fact that one set of rituals is largely symbolic, the other all too brutally actual.

The space between the symbolic and the actual--the gap-riddled space of representation--is Cowin’s territory. Her work consists of photographs that appear to have been snatched from film noir; like Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills,” however, each image is invented and self-contained. There is no story, then, only clues--men in trench coats, women in bed, tightly wrapped packages, menacing headlights.

Cowin’s impressive new installation, coyly titled “Based on a True Story,” juxtaposes six such mysterious images. One of these, however, is not a photograph, but a video--the monitor neatly masked, the other images mounted behind plexiglass so as to mimic the reflective surface of the screen.

Slowed down so that movement is all but imperceptible, the video depicts water dripping from between a pair of clasped hands. This is the only image--in the installation and in the entire show--that is unambiguous: trying to hold water between your hands is futile, as much so as trying to generate meaning where there is none. That understanding casts the theatrical Cowin as the realist of this bunch. Context is indeed everything; this one is both dense and provocative.

Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-1210, through Jan. 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Ironic Space: If umbrella stands and other household ephemera could go to heaven, they would be cloaked in Piero Fornasetti’s dazzlingly clever, trompe l’oeil designs. What could be more divine than a table “perpetually” laid with fine china and silver? A cabinet that opens to reveal a country gentleman’s wardrobe, complete with riding britches and suspenders poking out of a drawer? A chair with a finely detailed Corinthian column for a back? A plate embellished with the moon-faced image of a woman as a wheel of cheese, a clock, a light bulb, a hot air balloon, a mosaic, the sea?

This exhibition at Bryce Bannatyne Gallery--the third in a series of four shows devoted to post-WW II designers--offers merely a cursory introduction to the vast trove of decorative objects produced by the Milanese artist from the mid-1950s until his death in 1988. The focus here is on plates--some rare, older pieces featuring the radiant sun and mysterious woman motifs, and some new issues produced by the Fornasetti studio under the direction of the artist’s son, Barnaba.

Several larger pieces, however, steal the show. These include a fantastic bureau designed by Gio Ponti and decorated by Fornasetti, which opens to reveal an elaborate architectural scheme patterned after a 17th-Century print, complete with apse-like interior; and a three-paneled screen entitled “Scaletta,” which with its depiction of stairs, ladders and windows opening onto nothing, incarnates Fornasetti’s famous “ironic space.” See this show soon: objects are being carted off as soon as they’re sold. Despite the best intentions, it seems that the line between untouchable “high” art and eminently salable decorative work is still being very sharply drawn.

Bryce Bannatyne Gallery, 604 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 396-9668, through Jan. 19. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Questions of Identity: A lively exhibition of 35 works drawn from the Lannan Foundation’s extensive holdings in painting, sculpture, and photography suggests that collecting and consistency don’t necessarily share anything but their first two letters.

Many of the works in the show were acquired by the late J. Patrick Lannan, who established the foundation in 1960, others are more recent additions to the collection. Though they date from 1959 to the present, and span a broad range of styles (Photo-Realism, Conceptualism, Assemblage, Neo-Expressionism), certain themes predominate.

A large number are concerned with the self, and broader questions of identity. On this subject, Wallace Berman is characteristically wry; in a Verifax collage of 1963, he maps out a grid of formally posed, middle-aged couples--with their faces rubbed out. Blythe Bohnen’s photographic self-portraits of 1974 and 1983 represent the face in motion as an illegible blur; the individual is not dead here--just impossible to quantify. Jonathan Borofsky’s gargantuan, motorized “Hammering Man” (1977-80) drives the message home with predictably awesome obviousness: in a mechanized society, we are nothing but robotic functionaries of The Machine.

The Borofsky problem--the overblown masquerading as the monumental--surfaces throughout the exhibition: in Malcolm Morley’s 20-foot-long, mixed-media 1974 behemoth “Miami Postcard”; in Anselm Kiefer’s impressively worked, but relentlessly bland 1976 painting of a horse; in Leon Kossoff’s inexplicably large 1971 painting of a children’s swimming pool. Yet for every one of these broad missteps, consolation comes in the form of a work that is tightly focused and witty: Charles Ray’s 1973 photos of the artist modeling every item in his impressively humble wardrobe; Berman and Jay De Feo’s precious, mock-pornographic 1959 images of the latter in leather and chains; Edward Kienholz’s razor-sharp 1959 “tribute” to Walter Hopps, co-founder of L.A.’s historic Ferus Gallery, and former director of the Pasadena Art Museum. This larger-than-life-sized silhouette of the curator-dealer, who opens his jacket to reveal reproductions of works by blue-chip Abstract Expressionists, comes complete with a perhaps too-revealing backside--compartments labeled “Important people with Influence or $,” and “Competitors and Other Un-informed Figures.” However biting, the piece puts a human face on the art world’s arcane rituals; so, too, does this wildly, if not disastrously uneven show.

Lannan Foundation, 5401 McConnell Ave., Marina del Rey, (310) 306-1004, through March 27. Closed Sunday and Monday.