ART REVIEWS : Big and Bronze, but Do These Moores Measure Up?

OK. We get it. The nine large-scale bronzes and one stone carving by the eminent modern British sculptor Henry Moore(1898-1986) are big-deal, big-ticket items that required major clout and expense to get hold of and display along the public greenswards of Beverly Hills.

Now, just one question for PaceWildenstein, the Manhattan-based powerhouse gallery whose much-anticipated inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles this outdoor Moore extravaganza is: Would it be too much to inquire if you plan to do any shows that might make perhaps the slightest bit of difference to the art life of the city? Or is this sort of gassy, big-business blubbering all we have to look forward to?

The 1993 merger of New York-based Pace and Paris-based Wildenstein galleries made headlines. In the wake of the 1990 plunge in the art market, the union was ambitiously geared toward the risky proposition of bringing art into a globalizing marketplace. In addition to new spaces in London and Hong Kong, a gallery at a prime Wilshire Boulevard address was planned (there’s gold in them thar Beverly Hills). The opening is scheduled for September.

So, as the high-profile inaugural outing, the Moore show claims an importance as outsized as two of the monumental bronze sculptures among the six currently arrayed in the public gardens along Santa Monica Boulevard. (Four more sculptures are scattered across the lawn at Beverly Hills City Hall.) The hoo-hah sends a signal.

The art signal is weak. The show is trumpeted as “the first West Coast exhibition of large-scale outdoor sculpture by Henry Moore ever to be mounted on public grounds,” which I suppose is technically true. (Notice all the qualifiers.) But the brooding, ovoid mask-cum-womb of “Large Totem Head” (1968) was dramatically sited above a reflecting pool at the Salk Institute for a 1982 Moore exhibition in San Diego.

Starting in the late 1920s, Moore synthesized aspects of the groundbreaking figurative sculptures of Picasso and Brancusi, and the abstract work of his colleagues Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, melding the result with elements of the pastoral landscape so prominent in British art. Simplified, monumental forms oscillate between archaic and modern.

Moore’s most inventive and challenging work dates from the early 1930s to about the mid-1950s. Eight of the 10 sculptures in the show date from 1962 to Moore’s death in 1986, at age 88; none were made before 1950.

This doesn’t mean the work is necessarily bad, although “Mother and Child: Block Seat” (1983-84) and “Reclining Connected Forms” (1969) certainly are. By contrast, the 12-foot-long “Two Piece Reclining Figure: Points” (1969-70), with its rough-hewn interplay between separately conceived forms, convincingly makes use of no less a precedent than Michelangelo. Only a major artist with a lifetime of experience could have pulled it off.

Ironically, however, the show’s emphasis on post-1962 work italicizes the moment in which Moore’s sculpture, superseded by the Minimalist watershed, was safely slipped into the unassailable precincts of history. Moore’s work could suddenly be seen as a culmination of Modern sculpture, closing old doors rather than opening new ones.

Moore became synonymous with the institutionalization of Modern art--hence the old joke that when you arrive in a new city you can always find the art museum just by looking for the building with the Henry Moore out front. Another watershed may be needed before we can look at his art again in a fresh and invigorating way.

The stale show in Beverly Hills sends a sinking signal for hopes about PaceWildenstein. The spiritual trick for a great commercial gallery is to find ways to put business at the service of art, but this inaugural merely uses art to support a business expansion. Sometimes, Moore is less.

* The sculptures are displayed on the Crescent Drive lawn at Beverly Hills City Hall, and along Santa Monica Boulevard between Crescent and Rodeo Drive, through August.

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Fine Print: The Los Angeles Printmaking Society’s 13th National Exhibition at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery is a pleasant if rather tepid affair. The several dozen examples in a wide variety of printmaking processes are heavy on technical accomplishment but rather quiet and reserved on the content front.

One small room holds 11 mostly abstract prints, of which Jerry Brane’s lovely, untitled monoprint with collage uses egg and vessel shapes to create an altarlike image of decorative fecundity. But figurative prints are predominant, with the layered imagery familiar from influential German artist Sigmar Polke as the principal stylistic trope: You’ll find it in prints by Anne Boyiazis, Sergio Soave, Linda Burnham, John Glintzer, Anne Marie Karlsen and others.

As juried by Elizabeth A.T. Smith, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the two artists who set their imagery against the conventional concepts of fine art prints make the strongest impression.

Victor Estrada’s lively “Unidos” is composed from raucously caricatured images familiar from tattoo shops and the back windows of pickup trucks. Using standardized decals as source materials for prints yields a wonderfully expansive and destabilizing edge, as vernacular forms of reproduction colonize the medium.

Jonathan Borofsky makes you wonder about the secondary status traditionally afforded prints, compared to paintings, which is partly due to the only indirect presence of the artist’s hand in the medium. He does it by erasing the hand altogether, instead making a big, witty print of a barefoot step. Borofsky’s footprint is then X’d out--”canceled,” in printmaking parlance, as a wry sign that the artist is never art’s autonomous author.

* Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Loyola Boulevard at 80th Street, (310) 338-2880; through June 3. Closed Sun. through Tues.