ART REVIEW : Sandro Chia: Works of an Italian Tamer

The opulent ‘80s were driven by an artificially fueled economic boom that created a new class of people with more money than they knew what to do with. The art world responded by offering its wares as good investment and status symbol. Demand exceeded supply, creating a lot of overnight art superstars--overblown, overpriced and under-talented.

So goes, at least, the stereotype of the decade.

But hope is irrepressible. Now with a few years’ distance from that smug epoch, we can wonder if there was not somewhere among the David Salles, Julian Schnabels and Robert Longos people of real gifts who might recover from the too-much-too-soon syndrome and deepen into artists for the long haul. If not here, in Europe where the sheer degree of revived artistic smoke suggested fire. Surely Anselm Kiefer will not be the only painter of substance to emerge from Germany’s Neo-Expressionist movement. What about the parallel Italian school? Well, at the moment Californians have their first chance for a good look at one of its three leading lights, Sandro Chia.

The Palm Springs Desert Museum offers a selection of about 30 paintings and sculpture by Chia, a man who, along with Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi, put Italian Modern art back on the map after decades of senescence.

A scan of the galleries poses one inescapable question. Is Sandro Chia the Marc Chagall of his time?

Chagall, you’ll recall, was hailed as a Modern master in the first decades of the century. Russian by origin, he worked in Paris in the heroic days of invention, returning to Russia to bask in the revolution and make paintings that were a remarkable blend of avant-garde structure and folk poetry from the shtetl. Blue cows jumped ecstatically over the barn and young lovers’ heads floated away like swooned balloons. You never get over the feeling that somehow Chagall was responsible for “Fiddler on the Roof.”

He returned to Paris after being unhorsed from his commissar art job by his old buddy Kasimir Malevich. He eventually became an official sacred cow himself, designing murals for the Metropolitan Opera and basking in Establishment adoration. What was not said was that his work sank slowly into that form of self-indulgence that can only curdle into the coy and the sentimental.

Chia seems to have picked up where Chagall left off. He divides his time between studios in New York and Tuscany. Chia’s “St. Francis” has the characteristic green and lavender palette that makes his pictures look like slices of Oz. In this one a poetic purple cow nuzzles a soul-eyed young saint who seems to listen to a sad song forever repeating itself in the jukebox of his mind. The structure of the painting pays limp homage to the keen visual engineering of Juan Gris. Chia is big on paying homage. In “Two Painters at Rest,” a pair of young chaps lean together with weary tenderness, thinking about Picasso’s Blue Period. “Family” muses on “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon” admiring it while recoiling fastidiously from its toughness.

Chia is apparently repelled by tough. He takes all the starch out of Jawlensky in “Princess of China,” replacing it with a nice frame. Nicely carved. Really.

In “Most Ghost Post,” Chia takes the dynamic of Futurism and tames it to the endearing charm of a costumed waif begging trick or treat.

Taken together it all admits of a kind of historical exhaustion, as if saying, “Oh, I admire the great Modernists so much, but they did it all and, poor me, I can be but a pale echo of their prowess.”

In his works on paper, the use of watery media offers Chia the possibility of sparkling deftness and wit in the manner of David Hockney. The best he can manage is a tired smile and funny titles such as “A Tender Sensation for a False Nose on Her Face.”

Sculpture requires wrestling with the bulk of physical material. Real effort brings out the best in Chia. “Papageno and Papagena” succumbs to commedia dell’arte winsomeness. “The Poet” is sculpturally powerful but purposely pointless. He gets down to it in “Boy and Ram.” This painted bronze shows a classical youth wrestling with a beast that is part Surrealist brick. It’s a good metaphor of Chia’s challenge to re-integrate the Modern and the historical. It gets all his cylinders pumping. He’d be good if he’d keep at it.

* Palm Springs Desert Museum, 101 Museum Drive, Palm Springs , through March 28 , (619) 325-7186. Closed Mondays.