ART REVIEW : A Poetic Visionary Ripe for Rediscovery : The work of Anne Brigman, a long-neglected California photographer, comes back brilliantly to life in a new exhibition.

Anne Brigman’s 1910 photograph “The Bubble” shows a nude young woman on bent knee at the edge of a still mountain pool, her illuminated right arm outstretched in a graceful effort to scoop up a large, translucent sphere that floats serenely atop the water. At the left, above the fragile orb, a mysterious curve of light glows from behind a rock. The open landscape behind the kneeling maiden seems bathed in fog, which slides imperceptibly into a cloudy sky, while an arc of tree branches at right echoes her kneeling pose. The soft focus employed by Brigman diffuses the picture’s light in a radiant way, making the young woman’s facial features indistinct.

The girlish figure, posed in profile, seems an otherworldly nymph captured in a mythic Olympian frieze. She is fully of this dreamy, inexplicable landscape, where nature merges silently with an antique cultural vision. The nymph herself seems born of the watery bubble, which holds a mysterious promise of genesis.

“The Bubble” graces the cover of the catalogue that accompanies “A Poetic Vision: The Photographs of Anne Brigman,” an engrossing 76-print survey of the California photographer’s work that opened recently at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Brigman has been seen in other group exhibitions lately--her picture of two veiled and haloed women glimpsed as an apparition within a juniper tree was on the catalogue cover to last year’s compelling survey of California Pictorialism, jointly organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Huntington Library--but this retrospective is the first fresh consideration of her work in 20 years.

Brigman is commonly regarded as a Pictorialist photographer, one of many in the early decades of the 20th Century, who sought to manipulate style and subject matter in a conscious effort to gain for photography an equal stature among the other arts. Technically, her softly focused pictures, which she also altered in the darkroom, often have the feel of charcoal drawings. But “The Bubble” also shows that, rather than simply aspiring to a generic idea of art for her evocative pictures, Brigman had a specific aim.

Her pictures are distinctly Symbolist. Although the term was coined to describe a kind of painting that flourished in Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, laying a foundation for Expressionist and abstract art, Symbolist ideas spread so thoroughly into the culture that their embrace by a California photographer would not be surprising. In fact, it is common to other intriguing artists of the period, including painters such as Henrietta Shore and Agnes Pelton.

In Brigman’s pictures iconic forms lose their concrete ties to ideas and emotions and instead become ambiguous suggestions of them. Subject matter is evoked rather than understood. Brigman’s is a highly subjective art that asserts an intellectual alternative to the purely visual qualities of contemporaneous painting and as such stands as an important precedent for much art that would follow.

At the time it was made, “The Bubble” was published in Camera Work, the influential magazine produced in New York by Alfred Stieglitz. A towering figure in the early history of American photography, Stieglitz was determined to see artistic legitimacy conferred upon the medium. He had invited Brigman to become an associate member of the Photo-Secession, his adventurous group of art photographers, barely two years after she first picked up a camera in 1901; by 1906 she was a full-fledged fellow of the group.

Anne Brigman (1869-1950) was one of the few women, and the only artist west of the Mississippi, to be counted as a fellow of the pivotal group. She made photographs for more than 35 years, until she was 70, and she showed them internationally, picking up numerous prizes along the way. Vanity Fair dubbed her “one of the seven most important photographers in the world” in 1916. In addition to “The Bubble,” nine other photographs by Brigman appeared in Camera Work before the magazine ceased publication in 1917, and except for a hiatus during the 1920s, she was among Stieglitz’s most prolific correspondents. Especially through the teens her most common subject matter--female nudes in the landscape--was largely unprecedented in photography.

Despite this noteworthy list of accomplishments, though, Brigman is nowhere close to being as widely known today as she ought to be. If she is not exactly forgotten, especially among historians of photographs that date from the first half of the century, neither is her work even mentioned in standard photographic references, such as Beaumont Newhall’s “The History of Photography” or John Szarkowski’s “Photography Until Now.” When considered at all, she is typically regarded as having been a skillful practitioner of Pictorialism; but she is only one such Pictorialist photographer among many.

The exhibition in Santa Barbara shows that Brigman’s work is ripe for reconsideration. One big hurdle, however, may be its association with Pictorialist tradition. Brigman is not among the younger generation of California photographers who began as Pictorialists but who eventually abandoned the style in favor of so-called straight photography. Today, for eyes taught to see Pictorialism as sentimental, weak and unready for the bold, crisp, modern rigors of straight photography, her work can be difficult to look at.

But look you should. Although Pictorialist photographs still tend to be regarded as a class, without much differentiation made among photographers, the differences among them can be critical. As an artist Brigman was a Symbolist, plain and simple. Her pictures telegraph a cerebral otherworldliness, which laid important foundations of subjectivity for what we now think of as modern art.

(Ironically, after Brigman moved south to Long Beach in 1929, her studio in Oakland became the gathering place for Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Edward Weston and other photographers associated with Group f/64. Their commitment to unmanipulated photography, which contradicted the Pictorialist aesthetic, soon became a rigid dogma. Its success was instrumental in lowering the curtain on Brigman’s style of work.)

The Symbolist impulse can be seen in the show’s very first image. A circular picture, “The Spirit of Photography” (1908), shows a young woman dressed in a diaphanous gown, seated and holding a camera like some latter-day Greek maiden with a lyre. The camera’s lens is pointed toward a glass sphere, ready to capture a picture of the nearly invisible orb of light and air. The evocative glass sphere turns up in several Brigman pictures (including “The Bubble”), as if it was a talisman for the fragile, mysterious beauty of the world.

Yet Brigman’s actual signature is found in another motif. The female nude in nature, especially the nude entwined with the dramatic pine and juniper of the rugged Sierra Nevada appears in her work as early as 1905, and it continues again and again into the 1920s.

Of course, these also represent a more exalted origin for all those cheesecake girlie pictures of buxom babes in the woods common to 1950s and 1960s calendar art. But Brigman’s photographs are determined to endow the world with magic, by visually fusing youthful, sprite-like female forms with those of ancient, weathered nature. Sometimes, as in “Invictus,” you even have to look twice to find the figure within the gnarled tree.

The exhibition convincingly proposes that, as a woman, Brigman had different, less objectified uses for female nudes than did many male artists, who typically photographed them indoors in theatrical studio settings, not outdoors in the wilderness. No simplistic equation between Woman and Nature is being drawn; instead, it’s easy to see an artist’s self-invention being undertaken through her art.

After her move to Long Beach, Brigman no longer had the Sierra at hand in which to photograph; she had also begun to devote more of her time to writing poetry. (Snippets in the catalogue are pretty corny.) The quantity of her production, never large to begin with, slowed.

However, a provocative group of pictures from the 1930s, not often seen, offers a surprising conclusion to the show. At first they bear a certain resemblance to straight photographs--close-up images of a cactus or a palm frond or intimate images of the seaside patterns left in sand as the tide recedes. Closer inspection reveals none of the sharpness and clarity of a Weston or a Cunningham, though, and all of the soft, graphite-like surfaces common to her earlier work.

Deprived of Sierra grandeur, Brigman simply took a far more intimate but nonetheless Symbolist approach to landscape than before. Now, temporal grains of glistening sand carry the poetic weight once ascribed to mountain wilderness.

Santa Barbara Museum curator Karen Sinsheimer and catalogue essayist Susan Ehrens have done a good job bringing Brigman’s life and art back into the light. And although I don’t think they have gone quite far enough in separating her out as a distinctive artist within the Pictorialist genre, the rediscovery and resuscitation of the reputation of an artist too easily forgotten to history is among a museum’s most significant accomplishments. If “A Poetic Vision” does not fully perform the task for Anne Brigman, it has admirably begun the necessary labor.

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‘ ‘A Poetic Vision: The Photographs of Anne Brigman,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St. Through Nov. 5. Closed Mondays. (805) 963-4364.