‘The Spirit of Myth’ Only Whets Appetite : Art review: A small exhibition of early Mark Rothko paintings leads up to the mature work that made his reputation.

The small exhibition “Mark Rothko: The Spirit of Myth” is like a tasty hors d’oeuvre with no entree, or a hummable Broadway overture not followed by a show. Tightly tracing the artist’s development in 24 paintings made between 1930 and 1949, the story stops just short of the period of the mature work, on which rests the Russian-born American artist’s reputation. You leave the galleries of the San Diego Museum of Art licking your fingers, but with a hungry growl in your stomach.

The exhibition is drawn from the holdings of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which in 1986 became the repository of nearly a thousand drawings and paintings given by the Rothko Foundation. After Rothko’s suicide in 1970, at the age of 67, and following a protracted legal battle over the fate of his sizable estate, many of his paintings were dispersed by the foundation to museums around the country.

The National Gallery gift was made in an effort to create a study center for the artist’s work, and the exhibition “The Spirit of Myth” is a kind of traveling tutorial on Rothko’s roots. It began its marathon tour of 24 smaller American museums six years ago and won’t conclude the journey until 1998.

Some pictures among the two dozen selected for the show are very familiar, such as the stacked stripes and layered blocks of atmospheric color in “Number 11” (1949), which shows the artist working his way toward his signature style--the radiant fields of luminous color that would click into place by 1951 and reach a level of rich and stunningly beautiful visual complexity by 1954.

Other paintings are less familiar, although none comes as a real surprise. This is not a show that will change your conception of Rothko’s art, which was pretty much nailed down in 1987 by the retrospective exhibition mounted by London’s Tate Gallery.

In fact, Rothko’s achievement always hovers in your mind’s eye, even if it isn’t articulated among the six paintings from the 1930s and the 18 from the 1940s that are on view. If you know an artist evolved into a major figure, you look at his early work differently than you would if he had muddled on in a minor key throughout his life.

In the claustrophobic “Street Scene” (1936-38), where schematic figures seem squeezed by the pressing urban environment, or in the statuesque, abstracted forms and fields in “Ceremonial” (circa 1945), you tend to scan the picture for clues about what would come later. Rothko’s simplification of forms and his flattening of space would seem to be two self-evident, formal examples, but neither is particularly unusual among artists of the period.

More provocative is the narrative implication that unfolds between the realist paintings of the 1930s and the abstractions of the 1940s. “Street Scene” is plainly an attempt to describe an oppressiveness in modern urban experience, specifically during a time when the darkening forces of global catastrophe were looming. The primitive abstractions of 1943 and after, with World War II now raging, demonstrate a subtle shift.

The spindly totems and inventive, biomorphic shapes of “Ceremonial” or “The Source” or “Untitled (Sacrificial Monument?),” which seem like hitherto unseen flora and fauna struggling for growth, describe a yearning for a new, reconstructed experience. It’s as if Rothko were starting from scratch, by going back to a primordial beginning in an effort to start over. A full range of imaginative possibilities is being called into play.

Finally, in the so-called “multiform” paintings of the late 1940s, Rothko began to eradicate references to the world outside the canvas. Drawn figures dissolved in favor of brushy colors and amorphous shapes. In Rothko’s mature work of the 1950s, soft rectangles of color hover in light-filled, atmospheric space, echoing the canvas shape, as if painting itself is being articulated as a profound experiential engine. The paintings become less an attempt to describe an event than an effort to create provocative conditions for the viewer’s own depth of resonant experience.

The traveling exhibition leads you right up to the brink of this fundamental and exciting transformation--and then suddenly it’s over.

There are, in fact, two later paintings on view, but both are dogs. (Their entombment in plexiglass boxes doesn’t help.) Neither dates from the period of Rothko’s most significant work.

The small 1951 picture is a muddy concoction of orange and yellow-greens. The larger, cherry-red painting from 1970, the year of Rothko’s death, looks unfinished; the best that can be said is that at least its blaringly cheerful hue might help dispel the romantic, oft-repeated fantasy that Rothko was only painting in gloomy grays and blacks in the months leading up to his tragic suicide.

If you want an abundant opportunity to see Rothko at his finest, in the decade or so following the emphasis given by this show, visit the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where a half-dozen major Rothko paintings from MOCA’s permanent collection are on view. The National Gallery show provides a concise and often insightful set-up, but these are the main event. The San Diego Museum would have served its audience well if it had managed to borrow a few.

* San Diego Museum of Art, Balboa Park, (619) 232-9367, through May 28. Closed Mondays.