O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Selling Out at the Bowers : Exhibit Is Largely of Unmemorable Works--That the Owner Wants to Peddle

Any art exhibition on a sweeping historical theme that is based entirely on one private collection is bound to be a disappointment. It inevitably has more to do with personal taste than historical breadth, and it cannot seriously compete with a show compiled by an art historian from the resources of major institutions.

But when a museum show consists entirely of works that are for sale at one commercial gallery--as is the case with the “Seven Decades: Modern Mexican Art From the Bernard Lewin Collection,” at the Bowers Museum through April 25--disappointment gives way to disgust.

When Lewin--who also owns a massive personal collection of Mexican art--decided to limit the scope of this show to the stuff he’d like to sell, the die was cast.

Not even the museum’s decision to turn curatorial duties over to Shifra M. Goldman, a research associate at the Latin American Study Center at UCLA and a professor of art history at Rancho Santiago College, can redeem such a colossal commercial- cum -vanity showcase.

Lewin, a former furniture retailer who opened his first art gallery 26 years ago in Beverly Hills, was initially attracted to Mexican art by the paintings of Rufino Tamayo, a European-influenced artist whom the dealer has called “the most compelling force in my quest to promote the Mexican masters.”

It probably won’t come as a surprise that this is not a show about major works of Mexican modern art.

With some exceptions, the 74-piece show contains a raft of unmemorable paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture. It is the sort of work that is marketable to the American middle class because of its “universal”--read soothingly traditional -- subject matter. Major artists are represented by minor work--often made years after their major achievements--and most of the minor artists seem very minor indeed.

Goldman’s approach to the impossible task of turning the idiosyncratic contents of a gallery into a meaningful exhibition was to organize aesthetic and social developments in Mexican art into four categories: pre-1920 precursors of modernism; the era of public art and social realism (1920s-1940s); international styles adapted by artists active from the late 1920s to the present; and a nebulous category Goldman calls “new images, new directions,” which seems anything but.

This overview was a reasonable tactic, but it lets too many details get lost by the wayside, and viewers are frequently hard put to comprehend how the works they see fit within the context of Mexican political and cultural history, or even the artists’ careers.

The strongest intertwining strains in 20th-Century Mexican art--a passion for digging up indigenous roots, social militancy and a penchant for the fantastic--can be traced back to the earliest artists in the show, Gerardo Murillo (a.k.a. Dr. Atl) and Jose Guadalupe Posada.

The other major strain--indebtedness to European modernism, particularly Surrealism and Neoclassicism--all too often comes off as a flaccid, derivative enterprise, devoid of the conviction that animates the best social realist work.

Atl, whose labored colored drawings of volcanoes reflected his scientific interests, took his adopted surname from the Nahuatl language. He insisted that Mexican artists develop national themes instead of leaning on European subjects.

Posada, a former farm laborer, protested social conditions and political crises in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with grotesque caricatures that reached a broad audience in cheap reproductions. (Unfortunately, the three small--and unusually tame--Posada prints in this show are presented without any discussion.)

Any museum show is obliged to underplay the strength of Mexico’s great muralists, whose major works are not portable. But Diego Rivera gets truly short shrift here: a trio of unremarkable portraits of now-obscure sitters, including American artist Ralph Stackpole, whose relationships to the artist are not discussed.

The sampler of work by Jose Clemente Orozco is of greater interest. A 1935 caricature of “Tourists and Aztecs” skewers broad-shouldered Ugly Americans averting their glances from a ragged group of diminutive, ailing Mexicans.

Decadent images of sprawling, dancing prostitutes in an undated lithograph that owes a major stylistic debt to German Expressionism (“Women”) would become compelling symbols of the decay of civilization in such Orozco murals as “Catharsis” at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (reproduced in a photograph).

David Alfaro Siqueiros, the other member of the mural movement’s “ los tres grandes ,” is represented by another potpourri: paintings from about 1930 and landscape studies from 1963. The best is “Mother and Child,” in which the dead weight of a sleepy child contrasts with his mother’s waltzing embrace in the confined space of a small room.

Other well-known figures in the show include the incisive printmaker Leopoldo Mendez, draftsman-illustrator Jose Luis Cuevas, and a trio of modernists--Francisco Zuniga, Carlos Merida, and Tamayo--who borrowed indigenous motifs, mostly from pre-Columbian art.

Co-founder in 1937 of the influential Taller de Grafica Popular (popular graphic art workshop), Mendez packed a few square inches of paper with a bristling rhythm of blacks and whites to evoke political and military brutality. In another mood, he cast a shrewd eye on the heavyweight artists of his time in “God the Father and the Four Evangelists.”

Cuevas, whose delicate line inevitably describes the gnarliest of outcast types, is not seen at his best in this show, while the hackneyed, academic flavor of Zuniga’s drawings and bulbous bronze unfortunately seem quite in character. Merida, a stylistic chameleon, is most appealing in a 1921 painting that evokes a ritualistic aura with tight geometric patterning and vivid coloring.

The Tamayos are mostly very minor or very late. “Two Personages Attacked by Dogs”--an oversized print of a mannequin-like couple fleeing two stylized curs--dates from 1983, decades after leading artists elsewhere had moved away from such Existentialist Angst .

Images by other artists also indicate that dated styles have lingered overtime in Mexico. There is syrupy Neoclassicism, wispy Surrealism, vapid abstraction. Other than Francisco Toledo, who draws upon his Oaxacan Indian heritage for a fantastic, scribbled vocabulary of creatures and mechanical objects, fresh voices in this show are hard to find. A viewer has no way to gauge whether Lewin simply doesn’t like--or doesn’t think he can sell--more cutting-edge art, or whether Mexico isn’t producing any.

You could say that this show is better than nothing, since we rarely get to see modern Mexican art in Orange County.

It might have been more focused had Goldman limited her selections to prints and drawings, which (as she writes in the brochure) have been “overlooked, or treated with indifference, by more pretentious exhibitions.”

But it is unlikely that such a show--hardly a major drawing card for general viewers--would have stirred up the requisite hullabaloo.

Once again, the venerable Bowers seems to be in the throes of a “learning experience,” perhaps exacerbated by the lack of an art curator on its large staff.

But at least the lesson is clear-cut: Put scholarship first and do not shackle yourself to the whims and pecuniary interests of a collector if you want to be taken seriously as a venue for art exhibitions. It’s really not such a difficult concept, and it makes a world of difference.

* “Seven Decades: Modern Mexican Art from the Bernard Lewin Collection” remains through April 25 at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday; Thursday nights until 9. $4.50, adults; $3, seniors and students; $1.50, children 5-12, under 5 free. (714) 557-3600.