Art Review : Edward Hagedorn at Couturier: The Female Nude Made Benign

Manet flattened his nudes into icons, as if with an ironing board. Picasso turned his into strange hybrids, as bloated as beach balls or as tentacular as octopuses. De Kooning fractured his women with a painterly glee, bordering on sadism.

Whether idealized and ornamented or slashed and trashed, the female nude has been put through the wringer by the artist-architects of Modernism. For Edward Hagedorn, the Bay Area painter best known for his social and political commentaries, the female nude was likewise an obsessive motif, one the artist concentrated on exclusively during the last decades of his life.

At Couturier Gallery, a selection of Hagedorn’s watercolors, drawings and prints from 1920 to ’40 reveals the extent to which Hagedorn seized upon the nude in order to process the experiments of the European avant-garde, while softening some of the avant-garde’s sharper edges.

One elongated nude recalls Modigliani’s attenuated forms. The spareness of another pays homage to the economy of Matisse’s line. A small pastel of a woman leaving the bath conjures Degas’ many drawings on the same theme, although Hagedorn eschews the deliberately awkward angles and irregular vantage points that made Degas’ imagery so revolutionary.

Other nudes suggest that Hagedorn was held in thrall by German Expressionism. Yet, he exploits the decorative aspects of the style rather than its emotional intensity.

Indeed, Hagedorn’s nudes are strongly characterized by an academicized competence. They are inoffensive, quite pleasing, but in the end somewhat too benign to sustain anything other than historical interest.

* Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 933-5557, through Oct. 15. Closed Sunday, Monday.