ART REVIEWS : 1’The Eight’ Gives a Fun, Funny Course in History

A quick glimpse into a strange phase of American art history is readily available in this fun, often funny and sometimes embarrassing exhibition at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center.

Organized by the prestigious Phillips Collection in Washington, “Men of the Rebellion: The Eight and Their Associates at the Phillips Collection” is at once a piece of shameless self-promotion and an insightful depiction of an “uncultured” country on the cusp of discovering modern art.

The 57 paintings and works on paper, bolstered by 40 prints from UCLA’s Grunewald Center for the Graphic Arts, sketch what is commonly thought of as the passage of an American Realist tradition into the 20th Century.

Mostly made in the teens and ‘20s, the works include heart-wrenching images of impoverished tenement dwellers and perversely staid fantasies of Arcadia, in which androgynous nudes frolic in bountiful gardens or effortlessly exercise as if their bodies are efficient, aerodynamic machines.

The stylistically inconsistent art of “The Eight” is united--or so the art historical anecdote goes--by its adamant rejection of a dry and lifeless academic style. Dubbed, in their day, as progressive rebels, this characterization of Arthur B. Davies, William Glackens, Robert Henri, Ernest Lawson, GeorgeLuks, Maurice Prendergast, Everett Shinn and John Sloan is misleading.

Invented by newspaper critics, labels don’t accurately account for their art. Led by Henri, “The Eight” did refuse to participate in the National Academy of Design’s annual juried exhibition in 1907, and organized their own show the following winter in a Fifth Avenue gallery in New York. Their paintings, however, are not driven by a disdain for the American academy’s hidebound rules as much as they are animated by the desire to come to terms with European Modernism.

Five years before the landmark Armory Show, which introduced abstraction to this country and put its regional styles on a crash course with modernity, these artists were among many struggling to ingest the formal lessons of modern art and somehow make them their own.

Nothing more than happenstance brought them together as a group. Many of their so-called associates, including George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent and Jerome Myers, would constitute a more coherent group than the original “Eight” ever did.

Their wide-ranging styles and divergent approaches--often celebrated as proof of their strongly individualistic, and therefore “American” character--are really just the result of their various, exploratory attempts to make sense of culture’s place in a rapidly expanding country.

Davies, Lawson and Prendergast, the only artists collected in depth by the young Duncan Phillips, looked to Symbolism and Impressionism. Davies’ hallucinatory landscapes were filled with shooting geysers, cascading waterfalls, sinuous nudes and countless kids skipping rope, hunting butterflies and climbing trees. They transformed a dreamy, 19th-Century infatuation with individual idylls into a crowded, more democratic fantasy land that didn’t exclude the masses.

Four colorful oils by Prendergast stand out for their weird, homespun take on Impressionism. Depicting jam-packed street scenes, they combine strong optical effects with a feel for needlepoint patterns, as if they want to be both ultra-modern paintings and throwbacks to an age of handicrafts.

Henri’s fleshy, unsettling “Dutch Girl” puts a creepy, almost demonic spin on the Mona Lisa’s ambiguous smile, and Luks’ smirking portrait of an actor posing as a scheming capitalist gives beguiling shape to New World vulgarity. Shinn and Sloan confront all classes of society in their alternatively tough and romantic pictures of urban life.

More than any other image, Luks’ “Blue Devils on Fifth Avenue” captures the brash, tumultuous energy of a culture beginning to discover itself. A battalion of parading French soldiers in bright-blue uniforms march out of the darkness and across a patch of fiery orange sunlight in a painting that is otherwise swallowed in deep shadows.

The paved street seems to open onto a hellish chasm, as if the city might not only be overrun by foreign devils, but turned upside down by their intoxicating presence. Strange as it may seem, Luks’ painting isn’t jingoistic, cautionary or protectionist. It clearly represents a fascination with the potential for aesthetic and social upheaval recently unleashed in the land.

His image is an apt metaphor for the exhibition. Rather than celebrate eight artists’ rejection of an academy that wasn’t very influential, the show outlines an early phase of a transatlantic exchange that would define, for the first half of the century, the most exciting art made in this country.

* Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 443 - 7000, through Aug. 8. Closed Monday.

Identity and Culture: More than 100 hard-to-find lithographs, woodcuts, screen prints and etchings by 41 artists offer an intense, focused survey in “Alone in a Crowd: Prints by African-American Artists of the 1930s-40s From the Collection of Reba and Dave Williams.”

Organized by the Newark Museum and currently on view at the Long Beach Museum of Art, this engaging, uneven show is more sociologically interesting than aesthetically innovative.

But that’s part of the point. Many of the prints were made under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Arts Project by artists more concerned about communicating everyday experiences to a broad audience than pursuing formal refinements that were often perceived to be elitist.

Images of labor and alienation, of back-breaking toil and spirit-crushing oppression predominate. Although sentimentality sometimes gets the upper hand, many pictures capture their subjects with simple dignity and pictorial energy. The best function both as messages and images, as straightforward statements and concentrated distillations of shared experiences.

Dox Thrash invented a unique printing process that gives his dockworkers, prayer meeting and extremely rare abstractions rich tonal variations and a powerfully romantic tenor.

Robert Blackburn’s “People in a Boat” wedges six individuals into a small craft, fusing their bodies into a solid, communal block.

The visual energy picks up in John Woodrow Wilson’s narrative fable, and reaches a nearly thrilling pitch in Raymond Steth’s cacophonous “Evolution of Swing.” William Henry Johnson’s colorful screen prints stand out as jazzy, dynamic designs that recall Stuart Davis’ paintings as they celebrate aspects of black culture and history.

As a whole, the exhibition records a lively struggle to sketch a definition of African-American identity and culture, sometimes standing outside white society, and at others overtaking it with an art all its own.

* Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 East Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, (310) 439-2119, through Aug. 8. Closed Monday and Tuesday.