O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Mix Master : Augustus Vincent Tack’s Works Blend Ornament, Spirit, the Abstract

One of the enduring qualities of American art history is its roster of eccentric individualists, the ones with a penchant for concocting odd theories, pursuing unfashionable themes and using peculiar materials.

Augustus Vincent Tack, an obscure East Coast painter active in the early 20th Century, was part of this odd fellowship, and it is rewarding to make his acquaintance in a generous sampler of his work at the Laguna Art Museum (through May 8), circulated by the Phillips Collection in Washington

Although his art veers at times toward sentimentality or preciousness, Tack was as much an American original as William Rimmer, Louis Eilshemius or Albert Pinkham Ryder.

The compelling aspect of Tack’s paintings comes from their unusual combination of ornament, spiritual yearning, references to the natural world, and abstraction. Nurtured by the pre-World War I flowering of the decorative arts, Tack’s art was also suffused with a lush, nostalgia-drenched aestheticism and a heightened sensitivity to the life of the spirit, the legacy of the European Symbolists.

Born in 1870 into a gracious, cultured New York family, Tack was educated in Jesuit schools and was attracted from childhood to art and music.

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At 20, after studying at the Art Students League, he sojourned in France, where he absorbed the lessons of Impressionism as well as academic techniques that would serve him in mural-making. Through John LaFarge, a multifaceted painter who was his principal mentor, Tack became intrigued by the flat patterning of Asian art.

Although New York was the place to be to keep up one’s contacts in the art world, Tack preferred to spend as much time as possible in the placid world of Deerfield, Mass.

Inspired by the countryside--and enraptured by a young painter named Violet Fuller, whom he married in 1900--Tack painted ethereal canvases indebted to Tonalism, the moody American style that favored misty hues and transitional times of day.

With delicate nuances of color barely distinguishable in an atmospheric haze, such paintings as “Winter Landscape” and “Deerfield, Spring Landscape,” conjure the most sensitive imaginable response to nature.

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But in “Windswept (Snow Picture, Leyden),” a painting of a snowcapped mountain from about 1900-1902, Tack introduced another key element that presaged his late work: an irregular pattern of random slivers of unpainted canvas.

During the next two decades, clouded by Violet’s poor health, Tack turned to society portraiture to help pay the bills. Meanwhile, he tried to cultivate a more otherworldly, symbolic style in line with the work of such contemporaries as Arthur B. Davies and Maurice Predergast.

The results included Renaissance-influenced decorative allegorical landscapes and biblical scenes built from daubs of pure pigment, as well as various mural commissions.

In the 1920s, Tack’s approach became increasingly abstract, although always based on forms in landscape. As he wrote in a 1921 essay, his sources included “white foam lying on black water . . . the rhythmic serrations of sand, or snowdrifts blown by the wind, or wind-blown clouds, or the reflections of leaves in water . . . or rain-stained walls or the foliage of thick growing crops.”

A key influence in Tack’s new style was his first view of the Rocky Mountains, in the summer of 1920. Later that decade, he would photograph patterns of light and shadow in Death Valley. Enlarged and transferred to canvas, the shapes made by light became his abstract, visionary tools.

In “Gethsemane” and other biblical paintings of the early ‘20s, Tack created massed landscape and figure groupings splintered into restless patterns of texture and color.

Using rollers and cloths, he purposely “distressed” these works to achieve the abraded surfaces of old frescoes. Operating on several levels at once--as “instant” antiques, religious icons and abstractions--these works had little in common with either academic painting of the day or the work of the avant-garde.

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Tack’s chief booster was Duncan Phillips, the art patron whose collection became a public gallery bearing his name in 1921. He exhibited Tack in 1926 alongside such modernists as Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe and Max Weber. A couple of years later, Phillips commissioned the artist to decorate a library, now known as the Music Room, in the gallery.

The 12 lunettes (arched canvases) decorated with gilded borders are filled with Tack’s idiosyncratic synthesis of Catholic mysticism and ornamental devices. With gold, rich color and textural complexity, the artist translated the resplendent glory of the Renaissance cathedral altarpiece--and the persuasive appeal of Counter-Reformation religious imagery--into the domestic realm of the 20th Century.

The best of these works are the most abstract.

In “Liberation,” for example, small abstract patterns appear to be ceaselessly roiling through a lofty sky, giving the impression of cloud movement; in “Aspiration,” a liquid surge of blue into a field of yellow suggests an almost palpable rising emotion. This is the ecstatic vision at the heart of Tack’s belief in the non-material world, a stunning rush of pantheistic emotion.

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His last significant works, from the mid-’30s, are small abstractions (“Dawn,” “Winter,” “Hill and Sky”) in which natural forms are reduced to a daring handful of irregular flattened elements. More than a decade later, Milton Avery would encode landscape views in a similar way, though with purely secular aims.

Tack’s final mural, “Time and Timelessness,” for George Washington University (it is represented by a painting sketch in the show) was completed by his assistant in 1944, five years before the artist’s death.

It is tempting to claim Tack as a modernist because of the abstract basis of his best work. But he was a conciliator, not a rule breaker.

He attempted to heal the breach between conventional religiosity in art, with its sentimental excesses, and a more direct evocation of religious feeling. For him, the key lay in the mesmerizing power of patterning that he found in non-Western art.

Pattern is a powerful thing, at once decorative and abstract--and therefore potentially open to metaphoric interpretation. Coupled with his ability to pluck out elements of art and design from different eras and cultures, Tack’s investigation of pattern as both an attractive lure and a conveyor of meaning seems particularly apropos in today’s postmodern climate. This was just the right moment to bring him back from the dead.

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Elsewhere in the Laguna Art Museum, two smaller shows continue the investigation into what constitutes a spiritual art for the 20th Century.

“Vertigo Journey: The Early Assemblage of Seymour Locks, 1949-1965” presents 11 oddball works by a Bay Area sculptor now in his 74th year. “Toward Stillness” focuses on paintings and drawings by four colleagues--Tom Holste, Joachim Smith, Doug Smith and Bob Schmidt--who were motivated by a love of the natural world and a kinship with non-Western philosophies. A future column will take a closer look at contexts, credibility and other issues associated with these bodies of work.

* “Augustus Vincent Tack: Landscape of the Spirit” remains through May 8 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission: $4 adults, $3 seniors and students, free for children under 12. (714) 494-8971.