O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Postwar Efforts : ‘Facing West,’ a Laguna museum local-history exhibit, introduces the era in a briskly informative way.

It wasn’t until well after World War II that the cozy artists colony of Laguna Beach began to open up to the outside world. And the art began to wake up from a Rip Van Winkle sleep in the realm of plein-air painting.

As late as 1954, a jury of out-of-towners (including prominent abstract painter Lorser Feitelson) appalled the Festival of the Arts leadership by choosing work by progressive artists for the popular summer festival. Modernist exhibitions were few and far between until at least the mid-’60s at the Laguna Beach Art Assn., the museum’s precursor.

“Facing West: Art in Laguna Beach After 1945,” the latest installment of curator Susan Anderson’s vest-pocket exhibitions of local art history at the Laguna Art Museum (through Nov. 28) introduces the postwar era in a briskly informative way, with works that are either already part of the collection or “promised gifts.”

Works by artists who were part of the great breakthrough of Southern California art of the ‘60s tend to come off best. Pieces by artists who flowered just before or after these painters are generally more interesting today as documents of particular moments in the history of style.

That’s partly the luck of the draw--because the works the museum owns may not necessarily represent the artists’ best efforts--but also a matter of geographic and cultural circumstance. Remote and relatively inaccessible from Los Angeles, Laguna Beach was too sleepy, artistically conservative and self-satisfied to become a center of contemporary art.

During the ‘60s, Venice became the epicenter of exciting experiments in light and space, leaving Laguna Beach to wallow in nostalgia and tourist traffic.

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Sueo Serisawa, Keith Finch and Paul Darrow represent a transitional generation whose careers date back to the ‘30s or ‘40s.

Yokohama-born Serisawa’s ties with Laguna Beach are rather tenuous (he never lived there but taught at the Laguna Beach School of Art--now the Art Institute of Southern California--beginning in the late ‘70s).

His soberly academic painting of a wistful child riding a toy horse in front of a blackboard with faint traces of diagrams (“Hobby Horse,” from 1947) may be a veiled allusion to the oppression of Japanese-Americans during the war years, which Serisawa himself spent in an internment camp.

Finch, whose abstraction surely owes a lot to the overblown style of Los Angeles modernist Rico Lebrun, was in his middle 30s when he painted “Woman in Orange and Brown” in 1954. The faceted figure holds a glowing white sphere that is tempting to read as radioactive matter.

Darrow, a student of Serisawa at Claremont Graduate School in the ‘40s, preceded him as a teacher at the Laguna Beach School of Art in the ‘60s. Darrow, just 11 years younger than his mentor, developed a gestural abstract style flavored by an interest in Asian philosophy. His 1965 collage “Japan II” is a muted affair, with layers of brown paper and tissue delicately spattered, abraded and torn.

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In contrast to the clubby aura of earlier days, members of the younger generation of Laguna Beach artists frequently were “commuters”--dashing up the coast to teach at various colleges and universities--and some were notably reclusive.

The most famous--and famously reclusive--of the lot was John McLaughlin. He was born in 1898 in Massachusetts and apparently self-taught as an artist (though he studied Asian painting and was briefly a dealer in Asian prints in Boston), and he served in the Army and spent time in the Far East.

In 1946 he moved to Dana Point with his wife, where--with the exception of a few years in Laguna Beach--he lived until his death in 1976.

Soon after he arrived in Southern California, McLaughlin traded his landscape style for an abstract approach distantly related to Suprematism, the “pure” geometrical style invented 30-odd years earlier by Russian painter Kasimir Malevich. McLaughlin’s geometric forms are meant to be viewed without reference to possible symbolic meanings or real-world equivalents.

By the mid-’50s, McLaughlin had eliminated everything from his paintings except rectangular forms strictly aligned with the top and bottom of the canvas. He was said to rearrange cutout pieces of colored construction paper to achieve whatever elusive balance of shapes and colors he was after, and then precisely duplicate the composition in paint.

The untitled McLaughlin painting from 1956 in the present exhibition is a vertically oriented arrangement of white, black, light blue and pale brown rectangles of subtly varied sizes.

It is possible to read an abstracted landscape into these muted shades. But the net effect of the painting is one of gentle harmony, a sustained chord of undirected reverie. McLaughlin’s interest in Zen Buddhism inspired the studied neutrality of his paintings, a sort of mental stage set or visual mantra for the viewer’s expanding consciousness.

The museum’s long-awaited retrospective of McLaughlin’s work will open next October. The show, postponed 11 months because of the crush of 75th-anniversary year events, will be the first of its kind in these parts since the 1973 survey at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art (now the Contemporary Art Museum, San Diego).

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Anderson grouped the McLaughlin painting with abstract works by Tom Holste, Tony DeLap and Craig Kauffman that reveal other aspects of the coloristic sensibility of Southern California art.

Holste, who was just 25 in 1968--studied with Vic Smith at Cal State Fullerton and with Mowrey Baden and Guy Williams at Claremont Graduate School--and was about to embark on a long teaching career that ultimately overshadowed his art.

Unlike the intimate, handmade look of McLaughlin’s oil paintings, Holste’s untitled acrylic work from 1968 has a cool, airbrushed appearance typical of the surf culture-influenced style popularized by Billy Al Bengston and others. Atmospheric drifts of wispy blue and shell pink gather along the edges of the white spaces outlined by gray and dull red arches.

The flat red arch in “Bagno,” Tony DeLap’s early (1969) silk screened print, hugs three sides of the paper as if it were reluctantly forced to round its square corners. The “machine-cut” corners of the arches in both pieces resemble the ones on dictionary and Bible pages, suggesting a whiff of Pop Art vision melded with Minimalist severity.

DeLap, whose sculptural installations will be the subject of a retrospective at Cal State Long Beach next winter, says the arch form in his print reproduces a cross-section of “Mabel at the Wheel,” his plastic mid-’60s sculpture on view in the museum’s “Kustom Kulture” exhibition. (The title of that piece, he adds, was inspired by an early Charlie Chaplin film.)

Kauffman’s airy acrylic painting with collage on silk, “Number 3” (1969), is part of a series of works he constructed with collaged strips of white paper, which form a loose framework of errant lines and arcs touched up with tips and shadows of bright paint--in this case, orange, turquoise and violet.

Kauffman, then in his late 30s, was especially known for his vacuum-formed plexiglass “finish fetish” sculptures. DeLap, his slightly older colleague on the UC Irvine faculty, lived in Corona del Mar and also made spare, linear sculptures.

Both artists had each gained national recognition in the mid-’60s, when their works were exhibited in group shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and discussed on the pages of Artforum magazine, then based in Los Angeles.

Iowa-born John Paul Jones also taught at UCI, beginning in 1970. His wispy, sexually charged figurative painting was out of step with the aesthetic of the time yet evocative of emotional truths about life and art.

In the blank expanse of “Painters and Shadows,” from 1973, two male artists seem to be in the twin grip of liberating and paralyzing forces, perhaps the shadow of the “heroic age” of Abstract Expressionist painting.

One painter stretches out his brush to almost touch what appears to be a massive canvas; the faint bump of his private parts visible in the sketchy rendering of his body. The other man seems to have no brush; the side of his painting we can see is just a brief curved line.

An archetypal early work by James Strombotne, “Laguna Beach,” from 1960--a decade before he briefly became a resident--blares its modish sexual tensions in blistering swaths of orange paint. The women sunbathers are all nude, or nearly so; the men look smug or downright devilish. Heat and lust radiate in equal proportions; the sea is an ominous strip of black.

In 1960, South Dakota-born Strombotne was riding high. At 26, a year out of Claremont Graduate School, he was part of a show of young American artists at the Whitney Museum and a year away from a solo exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum. Subsequently, like so many artists, he was eclipsed by changing styles and a seeming inability to grow within his chosen approach.

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More recent works in the show--by artists spanning several generations--are not particularly compelling.

Artemio Sepulveda’s 1991 painting of a toothy skeleton gripping a rifle (“War”) owes too much to the hoary tradition of anti-war art in general, and the artist’s famous mentor, David Alfaro Sequeiros, in particular. Roger Kuntz’s evocation of a Goodyear blimp in a field lacks the subtle tensions of his freeway series.

Andy Wing’s “The Split Up,” a ragged drawing of floating figures he made in 1963 while under the influence of peyote, has become a period piece, while Jean St. Pierre’s sloppily expressionistic painting, “The Glass Heart,” of 1985, shows a gifted but uneven artist at close to his worst.

And then there’s Jerry Rothman’s kitschy ceramic and concrete sculpture, “Riding,” a life-size image of a hollow-eyed surfer kid improbably attired in a bow tie and sneakers to ride a flame-painted surfboard. This is the sort of cutesy stuff that stocks the city’s summer craft fairs and stokes the city’s lame reputation among the art cognoscenti.

But all bets are off until we see the final installment of “Facing West”--coming up next--in which Anderson promises to show more of the younger generation.

* “Facing West: Art in Laguna Beach After 1945,” through Nov. 28 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission: $3 adults, $1.50 children over 12, free for children under 12. (714) 494-6531.