O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Chiefly Naive View of U.S. Presidents

Folk art comes in many varieties, from tourist-bait cutesy stuff to unusual work made by people who view the world at an askew angle because of extreme isolation, fervid religious or political beliefs, or mental illness.

Needless to say, the latter variety are unlikely to turn up at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda.

But, hey, it was a slow week for art, and the press release said that Morgan Monceaux--a Louisiana-born Navy veteran, history buff and sometime jazz singer whose portraits of the U.S. Presidents are at the library through Sept. 12--believes that several of our chief executives had African-American ancestry.

To be sure, none of the four paintings in the color reproduction I received from the library reflected this notion--although skin tones were sometimes rather dark--but I figured the notations Monceaux scribbled every which way in the background of each piece might be provocative.

Monceaux, who is black, spent the better part of 1989 homeless in New York City before finding employment as the janitor of a nightclub in East Hampton, L.I., the upscale town (residents include Steven Spielberg, Calvin Klein and numerous luminaries of the page and screen), where his work was snapped up and displayed last year at a gallery of American art.

As it turns out (not to keep you in suspense), Monceaux picked up the notion that several Presidents had black ancestry from his great-grandmother’s stories.

His own research yielded more familiar gossip, such as George Washington’s alleged liaison with a slave woman and Thomas Jefferson’s supposed liaisons with his slave Sally Hemings. In any case, none of these theories is mentioned in the copious annotations that meander through Monceaux’s paintings.

The painted Presidents are gussied up with real lace jabots, ornamental pins and buttons, campaign buttons, gold fabric stars and “military” braid--accessories Monceaux found in the East Hampton dump and on the streets of New York. (“I used things that were human, that people touched,” he says.)

Several of the paintings incorporate U.S. coins: Washington, whose painting is adorned with a sprig of woolen cherries, holds a quarter in one white-gloved hand; Franklin D. Roosevelt sports oddly narcissistic shirt and cuff buttons made of dimes bearing his likeness.

The faces themselves show a lot more inner turmoil than do the formal portraits reproduced in history books. Quite a few of the Presidents have suspicious-looking eyes and a weary twitch of tension around the mouth.

Lyndon B. Johnson seems to be biting his lip. Bill Clinton’s forehead already looks permanently furrowed. As Monceaux pictures him, Martin van Buren--who looks pleased as punch under clown-like clumps of white hair--was apparently one of the few jolly chief executives.

All of this adds up to little more than fitfully amusing folk Americana, however. Thinking that Monceaux might better be able to convey a personal view of U.S. history in words, I began reading my way through the paintings, a task made considerably easier by the library’s mind-bogglingly faithful transcriptions, bound into a book available at the exhibition.

Although Monceaux sums up some presidential careers--including those of Ulysses S. Grant and Ronald Reagan--in a few sentences, he lavishes many words on others.

Amid the major and minor biographical data (Abraham Lincoln believed his greatest achievement was the Emancipation Proclamation; Calvin Coolidge insisted on wearing white kid gloves to go fishing--at least while photographers were present) there are some genuinely oddball tidbits.

For example, on Franklin Pierce: “His wife was no help during the campaign. It was said she fainted when he got the nomination because she couldn’t stand the Idea of moving to Washington.”

Although Pierce thought his son’s accidental death before the inauguration was “a sign from God,” according to Monceaux, the First Lady “was able to convince him that God was simply removing a family distraction.”

Monceaux also writes that although Pierce was a New Englander, “he supported pro-slavery views of the South” and believed Cuba “might be admitted to the union as a slave state.”

But the artist never offers any hint of what such presidential attitudes mean to him personally. In fact, he blandly credits Pierce for having a “pleasing personality” and--in a phrase that sounds lifted from an old-fashioned textbook--for being a man of “steady application.”

Monceaux, a soft-spoken, sturdily built man, wore a gold earring, white sport clothes and white sandals for the opening of his show last month. Also in attendance was a dark-suited posse of library personnel standing in hunched postures reminiscent of those of Nixon himself; the artist’s dealer, Morgan Rank; a sprinkling of local journalists and photographers; and a horde of polite but bored-looking schoolchildren and their teachers, bused in for the “unveiling” of the most recent portrait (Clinton).

When I asked Monceaux why his art expresses no discernible point of view, he initially said he was “more concerned about political concepts than personal things.”

Then why did he mention so many personal details about the Presidents’ lives? Well, he wanted to “show the human side.” Finally he said, “I don’t want to put my personal comments in. This is history. This is what people need to know.”

In Monceaux’s view--one he shares with some conservative naifs --written history is strictly a series of facts, a time-line of truths.

Of course, history can be as malleable as a tall tale. Key facts can be exaggerated, downplayed or omitted altogether to make individuals or groups look more important or seem more righteous than they really were.

Monceaux’s own decisions about what information to include and what to leave out inevitably color his version of presidential history. (He might have chosen, for example, to mention Jefferson’s “Notes on Virginia,” of 1782, in which the otherwise brilliant and far-seeing President wrote that “blacks . . . are inferior to whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”)

Even Nixon is described with a substantial list of accomplishments that dwarf the mention of Watergate--no doubt to the relief of the black-suit crowd.

Considered as “mainstream” contemporary art, Monceaux’s work doubtless would be ignored by sophisticated critics because it doesn’t deal ironically--or critically, or in any other distinctive way--with its schoolbook subject matter. Attitudes toward work by the formally untutored people we call “folk artists” are considerably more forgiving.

In a brief New Yorker article last August (“Hail to the Chiefs”), art critic Adam Gopnik saluted Monceaux’s paintings as “a unique meditation on American history” that “seek some hidden, expressive element of the presidential character.”

In Gopnik’s view, for example, the image of “shrivelled and mournful” James Buchanan shows “the approaching Civil War concentrated into a single band of worry across his forehead.”

Gopnik, who disdains what he has called (in another, more recent New Yorker piece) “the ideological thuggery” of both left- and right-wing art criticism, doesn’t even discuss the content of the copious writings in Monceaux’s paintings. Nor did the critic ask the artist about his politics or comment on his avowal of objectivity.

Such is the lure of folk art, so charmingly removed (it may seem) from the realm of ideas in the contemporary art world, the one that brought New Yorkers a 1993 Whitney Biennial widely criticized for beating viewers on the head with political sloganeering.

But it is not possible to make art, even folk art, that exists in a political vacuum--certainly not when the subject is American history. Monceaux’s recital of “facts” rests largely on a briskly optimistic, myth-enriched view of American history that predates the work of scholars focusing on the history of minority groups in this country.

The paintings are just what one might expect to see at the Nixon library: A red-and-blue-blooded salute to American orthodoxy by a black man who’s not a bit like those angry minority artists; charming folkloric objects that perfectly complement the piped-in Sousa march music and the unison shouts of schoolchildren asked to name the Presidents, ending with the disgraced public servant in whose honor this building was built.

* “From George to George, Plus Bill” remains through Sept. 12 at the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace, 18001 Yorba Linda Blvd., Yorba Linda. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission: $4.95 adults and children over 12, $2.95 seniors; $1 children 8 to 11, free for children 7 and under. (714) 993-3393.