ART REVIEW : Out of Storage, Into Modernist Light : Norton Simon Museum Uncovers Its Treasured but Long-Hidden Scheyer Collection

It gives local pride a nice glow to discover that the most important new exhibition of modern art in town has been here, unseen, for decades. The case in point is the Norton Simon Museum’s presentation of “The Spirit of Modernism: Galka Scheyer in the New World.”

The Scheyer collection is one of the revered treasure troves of pioneer modernist art in these parts and would hold such status anywhere. It consists mainly of works by four masters: Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexei Jawlensky and Lionel Feininger. It was donated to the old Pasadena Museum in 1953 after the death of the impetuous, intense German collector and dealer. She moved to Los Angeles in 1928 to promote her passion for these Bauhaus artists and became part of the city’s original tiny circle of modernist bohemians.

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It included artists like Edward Weston and Stanton MacDonald Wright, architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra and Rudolf Schindler, collectors like Walter Arensberg, Aline Barnsdall and bookseller Jake Zeitlin. The history reads like the story of trying to bring civilization to Eden.

Scheyer’s donation included numerous works by artists outside the core group such as Picasso, Nolde and El Lissitzky. It totals about 450 works. When the Pasadena showcase went upscale becoming the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art in 1969, its curator, John Coplans, regarded the Scheyer collection as its greatest cultural asset. When the financially beleaguered institution was absorbed by Norton Simon in 1974, local observers such as then-Times art critic Henry J. Seldis wrung their hands over the fate of the Scheyer collection.

Actually, parts of it were kept regularly on view. Almost incredibly the museum never showcased it until now, possibly due to the late collector’s fondness for concentrating on his own acquisitions. Even more surprisingly, Norton Simon chief curator Sara Campbell says she and her staff could find no records confirming that the highlights of the collection have never before been shown together.

Maybe that’s why it looks so fresh. There’s a wonderful zest about the nearly 300 works lining the newly refurbished lower galleries that surround it. Everything is modest in scale, energized in impact.

Jawlensky was Scheyer’s special friend among the artists. He gave her the nickname Galka , which is Russian for blackbird. She posed for him frequently. Her heavy features appear in many of those female heads that were his semi-exclusive subject matter.

Initially they are loose and colorful, echoing Matisse and the French Fauves. With time, their mood moves the clock simultaneously backward to the brooding Russian icon and forward to pure abstraction. In the ‘60s, Jawlensky was credited as a precursor of the theme-and-variation serial painting practiced by the Minimalists.

His paintings are at once joyous and haunted. It’s a curious combination of emotions also reflected in the troubled playfulness of Paul Klee. Limpid watercolor fantasies have wonderful titles like “The Gate to Hades” and “Barbarian’s Venus.” They try to weld the wonder of a child’s vision to the wisdom of a mathematical philosopher. They probably succeed so well because Klee was an accomplished musician. He also wrote one of the great poetic treatises on modern art, “The Pedagogical Sketchbook.”

Klee’s immensely smart sense of fun ripples over to Feininger. The only American of the Blue Four, Feininger invented the comic strip “The Kin-der-Kids.” Some of the cartoonist’s animated drawing style carried over to his abstracted village-scapes and curiously melancholy images of boats.

Kandinsky, the overarching inventor of non-objective painting is seen in a small early masterpiece, “No. 151 A, Sketch for Deluge I” of 1912. More revealing are a set of images on the theme “Small Worlds.” These almost purely geometric abstractions are a triumph of talent over the often dead surfaces of lithography. They investigate the idea of inventing an imagery to match cosmological metaphysics.

Hanging nearby is a similar set of so-called “Prouns” by Kandinsky’s fellow Russian, El Lissitzky. Across the way there’s a handsome double-framed geometric abstraction by Laszlo Maholy-Nagy “AL 3.” Taken together they are like early forays into the idea of art as an act of perception, an idea realized here in the ‘70s in the work of our Light and Space artists.

The compression and deft selection of this landmark exhibition makes its title entirely apt. The spirit of modernism was all drawn from the same well. It was a quest to distill feeling behind the merely visible. It was an act of immense idealism in a troubled world. It’s the kind of show that reminds admirers of modernism what attracted them to it in the first place.

It comes with four handsome little monographs of the principal artists available boxed or separately. The exhibition has a good long run until next fall. It would, however, be a very good idea to leave it up permanently.

* Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., through Sept. 10, closed Monday through Wednesday (and Thanksgiving Day). (818) 449-6840.