ART REVIEW : ‘California’ Dreamin’ : Hammer Museum Exhibition Uncovers a Quirky Wave of Surrealism

“It was so surreal,” said a callow young movie actor on a TV chat-show the other night, as he described the odd sensation of seeing himself on the big screen for the first time. Surreal , the term of art he used to describe an inexplicable feeling, is one that long ago slipped into the lexicon of popular slang.

That the actor applied the term to an experience identified with the movies may partly explain why Surrealist painting and sculpture did not take root in Los Angeles until late in the 1930s, well over a decade after Andre Breton issued his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto in Paris. Movies, with their fantastic capacity for noncontextual arrangements of irrational, dreamlike pictures, were already providing a major dose of surreality to the world--and on a scale that dwarfed traditional painting and sculpture.

This is one among many curious speculations that arises from seeing “Pacific Dreams: Currents of Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art, 1934-1957.” The quirky exhibition, which opened Tuesday at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art, gathers together 138 paintings, sculptures, photographs, collages and drawings by three dozen artists who worked in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Two-thirds of them were made in the 1940s and 1950s--rather late, relative to the leading edge of Surrealism in Europe.

“Pacific Dreams” concentrates on the usual suspects, with larger bodies of work by seven of the 36 artists. Lorser Feitelsen and Helen Lundeberg are the well-known husband and wife whose paintings codified Surrealist principles of irrationality in paradoxically rational ways. Painter-turned-photographer John Gutmann was a talented refugee from Hitler’s Germany, while Charles Howard’s icy abstract paintings were included in a landmark 1934 show at New York’s Julien Levy Gallery, which introduced European Surrealism to America.

Knud Merrild’s chance-laden automatist pictures of the 1940s are often erroneously described as Abstract Expressionist; he’s rightly considered here. And Man Ray is the prolific artist-of-many-mediums whose sojourns in L.A. proved so influential to younger generations of artists.

The one surprise among them is the inclusion of a group of six photographs by Edward Weston, an artist more commonly acclaimed for the elegant, stripped-down clarity of his work. An image of a giant coffee-cup billboard in the Mojave Desert or of a nude reclining on a sofa and wearing only a gas mask just doesn’t follow Surrealism’s royal road to the unconscious, the way Merrild’s freely flowing, puddled pigments lead the mind toward intuitive associations. If Weston’s photographs aren’t truly Surrealist, they do suggest a tangentially related sense of alienation in modern American life.

Photography is one of the show’s high points. In addition to provocative selections by Gutmann and Ray, the compelling work of major artists such as Minor White and Edmund Teske is included, together with less-familiar but equally accomplished pictures by Ruth Bernhard and Rose Mandel. All of these photographers employed a common technique of visual layering, created by multiple exposures, reflections trapped in glass or darkroom wizardry. The result is conflicted images that convey inner lives hovering behind a facade or beneath a surface appearance.

Curator Susan Ehrlich, an adjunct professor of art history at USC who organized the show for UCLA, has also included several anomalies, which add a welcome flavor to the proceedings. There is near-juvenilia by the young Philip Guston, in the form of two ambitiously odd paintings that put conventional figure studies within a context of empty urbanism (shades of Giorgio De Chirico’s metaphysical paintings).

Guston’s (and Jackson Pollock’s) high school classmate, Harold Lehman--an artist unknown to me before--is represented by two precocious paintings and a collage, all made in 1934, when he was just 20. Most notable is the collage, wherein the artist is depicted as a land surveyor tethered by the constraints of the Earth, but gazing at the moon and drawing on a cloud.

One key to understanding the endurance of Surrealist art in California into the 1940s and 1950s might be glimpsed in Lehman’s youthful work, in which he portrays the very ambition to be an artist. Surrealism wasn’t just a style or way of making art, chosen at random from among a host of options; for artists in the remote outpost of the Western United States, it also had great symbolic value.

Paris, remember, was still regarded as the center of the cultural universe. Surrealism stood for the most advanced and daring art being produced at the center of Western civilization.

Certainly a Surrealist emphasis on the unconscious as a deep well from which new beginnings could be made was attractive on the West Coast, where starting over has been a perpetual promise that even today continues to lure the multitude. The traumas of the Great Depression and World War II only enhanced this climate: In Clay Spohn’s militaristic drawings of automatons at war, for example, the dark side of submerged forces now unleashed is on grim display.

Add to this mix the arrival of Europeans (or Americans trained in Europe, such as Man Ray) who were fleeing the dark cloud of Nazism. For a tiny number of avant-garde-minded artists working in the provincial outposts of Los Angeles and San Francisco, Surrealist art represented the highest measure of a European culture then threatened with annihilation.

California Surrealism thus embodies an unusually revealing paradox: Unconventional methods are put to conventional ends. An imported, culturally sanctioned method for undermining conformist ways of thinking and feeling is fervently embraced, in the seemingly contradictory interest of creating an artistic community of like-minded individuals among an otherwise indifferent populace. No wonder the Surrealist impulse endured on the West Coast so long.

The show concludes with delicate collages by Jess Collins, poetic assemblage sculptures by Gordon Wagner and eccentric pencil drawings for record album covers by Wallace Berman. Although a chronicle of the wildly uneven work of the Surrealist era, “Pacific Dreams” is as important for indicating where the sensibility of these and other subsequent artists came from: Surrealism laid the foundation of what would become the counterculture.

* UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 443-7000, through Sept. 17. Closed Mondays.