Survey of Contemporary Austrian Works Has a ‘50s Feel

Austria feels like a nation that decided to drop out of 20th-Century culture. It was a lively art center during the epoch of the Vienna Secession at the turn of the century. Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele made terrific erotic art. Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffman designed even more erotic buildings. Sigmund Freud invented a new art form called psychoanalysis, which was more erotic than any of them. Since then nothing earthshaking has happened.

Not that Austrian artists stopped trying. They’re always represented in big international surveys but rarely seen in Southern California. Now anyone feeling deprived because of this can get caught up at Cal State Long Beach. The University Art Museum hosts “TheDecade of Painting: Austria 1980-1990.”

Consisting of about 70 works, the exhibition was drawn from the private collection of Karlheinz and Agnes Essl. It’s called the Schomer Collection after the Vienna corporate headquarters where it’s housed and claims to be the most comprehensive trove of Austrian postwar painting in the world.

The ensemble looks like something sent from a space station so distant it takes about 40 years to receive news from Earth. There is nothing here that couldn’t have been done during the ‘50s by an Abstract Expressionist or a postwar Monster School artist. Some of this is more the fault of our tardiness than theirs.

Hans Fronius, for example, painted his recent work like a brushy and soulful German Expressionist but who can say that was inappropriate for someone born in 1903? Walter Schmogner shows two keen little portraits. Their high degree of abstraction doesn’t hide their resemblance to the painting of Alberto Giacometti. But the artist is 52, old enough to claim authentic generational residence in his style. Arnulf Rainer, among Austria’s best-known artists, is 65. Nobody can tell a guy that age he can’t be an Abstract Expressionist.

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In addition to being chronologically for real, these artists paint with an energy sadly lacking in much of the other work in the show. There’s a bracing muscularity in Rainer’s “Threats With the Club.” Schmogner’s pieces have a contagious tension that’s shared by the work of Hans Staudacher, another veteran born in 1923. His art brings to mind elegant, high-speed French postwar abstraction in the mold of Georges Mathieu.

Too much of the rest looks haunted, too distracted to work up enough density to give authority to surfaces. This has a particularly adverse affect on abstract works like Herman Nitsch’s “Large Picture With Painting Shirt.” It’s a big, striking image but a lack of layering and in-painting makes its green, white and red scheme look flimsy.

A small contingent of figurative artists are on hand. They’ve been linked to ‘80s Neo-Expressionism but look more like ‘50s monster figuration. Peter Sengl’s striking “Hindfeettrainer” depicts a racing dog lashed to a work-out contraption. The poor beast is apparently made to perform by attached stuffed dog heads that make him think he’s being chased.

It’s a psychologically powerful image. It’s surgical drawing style gives a significantly original twist to terror--turf we thought had been mined out by Francis Bacon. It and a few other images make one suspect a unique and unexploited sensibility probably lurks around Austria. There must be artists over there who could find a way to directly express the sense of lost greatness, exhaustion and self-exile that only seeps from this work.

A separate installation in the courtyard gallery changes the cultural wavelength from Austria to Islam. The piece, titled “Garden of Secrets,” is by Seyed Alavi, an artist born in Iran. He’s transformed the space with deep azure walls covered with paper butterflies cut from pages of Persian Sufi poetry.

The center of the gallery is occupied by a translucent paper house. There is no door but a fountain can be heard gurgling inside. It suggests Islamic architecture’s traditional tendency to present a facade less opulent than the interior spaces, a metaphor of the richness of inner life. Gold lettering bands the top of the little structure’s walls ending with, “Union is yours when this dream world fades and dies away.”

Every aspect of the work is traditional to Islamic mysticism, its respect for written language and architecture, its rejection of literal imagery and the material world. Alavi makes no apparent attempt to transform this canon. We are left to contemplate the beauty of familiar truth.

* Cal State Long Beach, University Art Museum, 1250 Bellflower Blvd. “The Decade of Painting: Austria 1980-1990,” through April 21; “Garden of Secrets,” through Friday, closed Monday. (310) 985-5761.