ART REVIEW : ‘Katz’ Holds Pleasant Pastoral Jolt

At first glance, the exhibition looks like a tastefully selected group of conventional still life, landscape and figural paintings, plus a few sculptures and objects d’art. The gallery displaying it at Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum is arranged as a domestic setting using some very nice pieces of furniture--an American Federalist card table, for example. All of this suggests merely well-bred, traditional art.

But look again.

The show is called “Masters of American Modernism: Vignettes From the Katz Collection.” Organized by curator Linda Albright, this is the collection’s first public appearance in the Southland. Its 35 objects were put together by a Los Angeles couple, Margery and Maurice Katz, who acquired their first American work in 1980. What they have wrought causes the most pleasant sort of double-take. What at first looks like a thoroughly tamed house cat turns out to be a creature far more exciting--an ocelot, perhaps--perched in that genteel sitting room.

This is art from the daring first generation of American modernists, many associated with the fabled circle around Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery known as 291. One picture, Charles Sheeler’s 1912 “Red Tulips,” was included in the then scandalous, now legendary Armory Show, which introduced modernism to the larger American public.

It’s normal for once-shocking art to look tame after time. We have trouble figuring out what the fuss was about when Cezanne made work rejected from the official salon or why Matisse’s gang were dubbed “Wild Beasts.” The acid test is not whether such work grows familiar, but whether it grows boring.

This superbly selected cluster of art is the furthest thing from dull. Then, the idea of an artistic avant-garde still felt new and important. These artists imparted their excitement over an aesthetic that was as much about ideas and feelings as about observation and skill.

Cultural highs like this seem to put everybody in a state of rapture. There are artists on view here, such as Konrad Cramer and Herman Trunk, who are scarcely remembered today outside the circle of cognoscenti. Yet, at the time, they performed at a level so high as to be indistinguishable from work by more enduring names.

Joseph Stella is represented by three paintings. “Tropicalia” of 1938, arguably the jewel of the collection, is also its most stylistically radical piece. It depicts a tropical plant stylized into a lush, vaguely threatening symbolic icon. More commonly, the Katzes seem to be drawn to the tension created by these artists when they applied advanced thinking to more conventional subjects based in nature.

Abraham Walkowitz imparted some of Jawlensky’s metaphysic to two renderings of women’s heads. But there is virtually nothing of the concern with urban sights and popular culture that came to occupy Stella and others here. About the closest any work comes is Charles Demuth’s amusingly campy “In Vaudeville: Male Dancers.”

On the whole this collection paints a pastoral picture of the generation. John Marin’s little oil “Weehawken Sequence” is a lyrical river view, where paint imparts the sensation of a cool breeze. Alfred Maurer’s verdant landscape pumps some of the tension of German Expressionism into a sunny day. Marsden Hartley’s still life is dark and monochromatic but its surface expresses the intensity of engagement these artists felt no matter what they were painting.

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Cal State Long Beach, University Art Museum, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach, through Dec. 10, closed Mondays, (310) 985-5761.