ART REVIEW : Exhibits Reflect Dark Days Present, Past : Expressionists: Ed Moses’ hallucinatory images draw on the riots and his visit to the Lascaux caves. George Grosz’s ominous works of World War I are timely again.

Last spring Ed Moses, like the rest of us, lived the stalking terror of the L.A. riots. Last summer he traveled to France and made his first visit to the 20,000-year-old paintings in the caves at Lascaux. The two experiences melded in his brain soup to produce what are certainly the most temperamentally genuine paintings of his career, at once terrified and rapturous.

For decades Moses worked his way through the history of master modernism from Malevich to Pollock. Nobody constructs an abstract painting with a more deft marriage of structural sure-footedness and ecstatic spontaneity than Moses.

The 10 works on view at the L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice join all that to the earth-tones of the caves and the stinging spray-can pastels of the graffiti writers who acted as oracles of urban chaos. The paintings also introduce recognizable imagery rarely found in Moses’ art. There are copulating couples, old men prattling tongue-to-tongue and beasties from the mind’s preconscious ooze. Make no mistake, however: This is no ordinary foray into Expressionism or Art Brut, although the work would have fit aptly in the County Museum’s recent show of Outsider art.

The difference is drawn by Moses’ ability to tease images from what first appear as abstract blobs and dribbled lines. Where most artists produce figural imagery that acts as a kind of interruption of compositional engineering, Moses manages to bolt them together visually so that both do the same work. The result is that his phallus-nosed profiles and balloon bubbles of invading mind-spirit appear apparitional. They have the convincing quality of those minor hallucinations we find while staring at water-stained wallpaper or a particularly gnarly carrot that looks just like the landlady.

These are paintings that confront us simultaneously with the horrible commonplace fascination of a squashed cat on the freeway and the sublimity of a sunset that nature got just right. Observe the mind-boggling “Ranken 1.” Such work is about hard questions, not easy answers.

“Dorf Number 1” includes a monolith blob that calls forth both the stone heads of Easter Island and the mad Lear. It invites contemplation of the trade-offs involved in swapping primitive culture’s directness for civilization’s obliqueness. In the caves what we call madness may be seen as a state of superior grace and insight. In the subways it is a disease to be cured. If everybody gets it, civilization, having lost its link to nature, collapses not into tribalism but into barbarism. Moses recalls Saul Steinberg’s recent cityscapes with their brain-dead predators in street-chic threads.

These paintings do not comment on society and culture; they embody them in ways that are so personal as to resist deciphering. But Moses signals concern with intercourse both sexual and verbal. Pairs of heads appear repeatedly confronted like the halves of a Rorschach blot as in “Z-Dorf No. 2.” Their conversation is a masked form of violent seduction. One may devour the other but rarely does the quest lead to the spiritual union suggested by Moses’ ectoplasmic mind balloons.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 77 Market St., Venice , through Feb. 13, closed Mondays, Sundays, (310) 822-4955.

Time was when the art of German Expressionist George Grosz appeared the unnecessary reminder of a dark era of World Wars, an epoch that could never return. Now the work seems timely again.

An exhibition of his well-known suites of prints is on view at the County Museum of Art. Drawn from the collections of the Rifkind Center and titled “George Grosz: Social Critic,” it reminds us of the delicate sting of his razor-blade line and the unflinching sneer of his observation.

Grosz (1893-1959) grew up in the working-class environment of a small town in Pomerania. He was exposed to the elegance of Jungendstil but stayed true to his populist loves--cartoons, movies and pulp fiction, the cheaper and sexier the better. In “First George Grosz Portfolio” of 1917 he presents images of an imagined New York rattled by its own energy and a Wild West of amusing macho stoicism. Young German artists of the epoch loved the myth of Amerika. No wonder. Grosz’s images of German towns shows them stark, barren and absurdly ominous.

By 1922 the corruptions of the Weimar Republic were obvious. Streets were littered with war-wounded beggars and hookers while rapacious industrialists got rich on their backs. Grosz, never long on subtlety, produced the lithographic suite “The Robbers,” taking his titles from a play by Friedrich von Schiller. An industrialist’s blubber oozes over collar and belt. Grosz’s placement of his phallic cigar leaves no doubt of symbolic intent. “I will root up from my path whatever obstructs my progress toward becoming the master,” he says.

Grosz could be gross but he could also be touching as in a scene where nouveau riches clods gamble amid the hungry and outcast. He could be funny as in the classic image of bloated burghers at Christmas called, “The Blessing of Heaven Is Visibly Upon Me.”

His satire on militarism “God Is With Us” was confiscated by the police. He was tried (with his friend John Heartfield) for “insulting the German army.” It’s amazing how many of these images, if reproduced on today’s editorial pages, could be mistaken for contemporary. A soldier has a smoke and contemplates a corpse washed up at river side in “Quitting Time.” Surely about the troubles in the former Yugoslavia. Military doctors pronounce a rotting cadaver as fit for service. Probably Saddam Hussein having trouble getting recruits. Jesus Christ is crucified wearing a gas mask. Well, yes, the environment is pretty awful.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through Feb. 7, closed Mondays, (213) 857-6111.