YEAR IN REVIEW 1995 : ART : Canvassing the Year of Brilliance : A dozen exhibitions sketch the depth and range of the Southland’s numerous museums and galleries.

We asked each of our art critics and regular reviewers to select the three most memorable exhibitions they saw in Southern California during 1995. Some of the results were inescapable, some surprising. Collectively, however, they speak of a remarkable range of exceptional art in the region’s far-flung museums and galleries.

CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT

Agnes Pelton (1881--1961) has been a minor footnote in the history of early American Modernist art since 1913, when she was among the very few women invited to participate in New York’s legendary Armory Show. Her more authentic claim to fame was in abundant evidence in “Agnes Pelton: Poet of Nature,” a concise and stunning exhibition of the painter’s full career, organized last March at the Palm Springs Desert Museum, where a distinctly American brand of Symbolist abstraction--visually describable as part Kandinsky, part Walt Disney--marked her work from 1925 on. If you missed the exceptional touring show, which brings back from obscurity an almost forgotten Southern California artist of unusual distinction, you will have a second chance: In May it arrives at the Weisman Gallery at Malibu’s Pepperdine University.

“Gary Simmons: Erasure Drawings” marked an out-sized leap forward in the work of the young New York-based artist. Simmons, 31, executed five monumental drawings in white chalk on walls painted with black slate, which encompass the main gallery at the Lannan Foundation (through Jan. 7). Powerful, beautifully drawn images of catastrophe, abdication of duty, comic reversals of fortune and rapturous artistic reveries were partially erased, by means of big sweeping gestures of the artist’s hands. The erasures simultaneously spoke of a fury at social injustice, a resignation over human fallibility and a horror at the silencing of art.

Monique Prieto’s small October exhibition at ACME Gallery (her second) was a buoyant--and surprising--salvage operation for the most thoroughly debased tradition in contemporary art. Composed with the aid of a computer, her large acrylic paintings of bulbous, abstract shapes on raw canvas wittily manage to redeem the flatulence of 1960s Color-Field painting. Prieto (who was born in 1962) eliminates gesture and illusionistic depth, while happily reaffirming the dreaded flatness of the picture plane. Yet her slithery, resilient shapes--which often ooze into one another in long, stiletto-like drips that seem to defy gravity--conjure an animated voyage through the digital world of cyberspace. Rather than another tired, academic critique of hoary formalist abstraction, hers is a wholesale transformation of its premises.

WILLIAM WILSON

It didn’t feel like a year in which it was appropriate to equate Best Exhibition with biggest, prettiest or most imposing. It seemed more a time to scan for significance.

In January the Museum of Contemporary Art introduced “Line Drawings” by Piero Manzoni, an Italian who died at age 30 in 1963. The largest work was a tube about the size of a small barrel, clad in zinc squares. It encased a roll of paper bearing a single line roughly 4 1/2 miles long. The most striking thing about this work was the slow and rather jarring sensation that something had sucked the meaning out of it. Viewing it was like looking at the empty ornaments of some courtly dynasty toppled by revolution. The value placed on individuality, inventiveness and love of esoteric knowledge that made Modernist art seem relevant for decades had evidently been withdrawn.

The patrician J. Paul Getty Museum addressed the issue of diversity in a honey of a small exhibition, “Book Arts of Isfahan: Diversity and Identity in 17th Century Persia,” on view to Jan. 14. It illustrates how ruling Persians, merchant Armenians, Zoroastrians and marginalized Jews each managed to maintain group identity, while absorbing aspects of one another’s artistic styles as well as those of Europe. In art such borrowings are always an act of admiration and shared humanity, a crucial lesson that art teaches to life.

As if to cheer us up about the apparent nullification of Modernism seen in the MOCA exhibition, the Santa Monica Museum of Art recently opened “A Glimpse of the Norton Collection as Revealed by Kim Dingle,” a buoyant, antic exercise in intertwined eccentricity, on view to Feb. 25. The art, drawn from the collection of Eileen and Peter Norton, is all in the contemporary tradition. He’s the computer-whiz who retired a young multimillionaire to pursue philanthropy and collecting off-beat art. The Nortons are clearly in it for fun, sheer idiosyncrasy and social satire. Artist Kim Dingle dramatizes the wall-eyed nature of the whole enterprise by presenting the work as if it were still in storage.

SUSAN KANDEL

Historical evidence for L.A.’s on-going infatuation with the surreal came in July at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum show “Pacific Dreams: Currents of Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art,” a glorious array of surreal-ish paintings, photographs and sculptures made on the West Coast between the Depression and the Cold War. If curator Susan Erlich somewhat oversimplified the case, arguing that Surrealism made sense here because of our indigenous culture of fantasy, the show’s 30-plus artists implied that making sense itself has always been overrated. Salvador Dali’s misleadingly obsequious (i.e. nasty) portrait of movie mogul Jack Warner was typical of the twisted logic that prevailed, in an exhibition whose range was unmatched by that of any other group show this year.

Bruce Conner’s “15 Beautiful Mysteries” at Kohn Turner Gallery in June, spanning the years 1961 to 1994, emblematized Surrealism’s obsessive, incandescent wit. The San Francisco-based artist’s repertoire is eclectic, and although none of his signature 1960s assemblages was included, their erotic, neurotic energy was everywhere in evidence: a series of photographs of a TV set showing an image of an oversized eyeball; two large ink drawings, covered from edge to edge with minuscule Rorschach-like blots; and several beautiful, perversely nostalgic collages pieced together out of bits of old engravings. The show was transforming, circumventing logic so consistently and so rhythmically that the frustration became soothing.

At Richard Telles Gallery in October, Ginny Bishton’s work was truly compulsive, which is its lure. In her first solo exhibition, she showed four rather abstract-looking drawings, produced according to a random concatenation of four symbols and five colors. Wrapping around the gallery’s four walls were 1,300 miniature photographs of the artist gathering the ingredients for a loaf of bread, which never got baked. Bishton’s impressive work engages with art history--Minimalist series, Postminimalist gestures, Surrealism’s fetishization of perversity--yet it isn’t formulaic. Bishton has a way of ducking out gracefully before formulas reach their foregone conclusions. For her, nothing is inevitable.

DAVID PAGEL

In June, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art played host to “Kandinsky: Compositions.” If Vasily Kandinsky’s delirious paintings didn’t send a spine-tingling shiver up your back and draw your eyes into swirling tumults of emotionally loaded color, shape and line, you might describe them as drop-dead gorgeous. But these 15 exuberant early 20th century abstractions were too stimulating, celebratory and hedonistic to cause you to shut down in front of them. Soul-wrenching confusion and earth-rending chaos fill the best of these pictures, along with saber-waving horsemen, trumpet-blowing angels and mind-bending inventiveness. Springing to life, rather than dropping dead, is the least you could do in return.

Few modern paintings make more rigorous demands on their viewers than do John M. Miller’s riveting abstractions, shown in February at Patricia Faure Gallery. At first, their repeated rows of sharply angled bars, sandwiched between even more steeply slanted bands, jar your eyes with an overdose of restless, unsettling energy. After a while, however, every band and bar slips into place as the visual discord slides toward a profound sense of serenity. Miller’s paintings are at once hard-edged and supple, concentrated and expansive, authoritative and open-ended, impersonal and intimate. Like John McLaughlin before him, Miller is one of Southern California’s undiscovered treasures.

Lassitude rarely looks as good as it does, for as long as it does, in Cy Twombly’s splendidly languorous paintings, surveyed in an April retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. These monumental fields of scribbled gestures and smudged colors poetically express what happens when Expressionism runs out of gas: Although language peters out and forms dissipate, their fading traces convey an undeniable desire to communicate. As an artist, Twombly was a slacker before it was fashionable. Without force or directness, these quietly explosive, sometimes surprisingly colorful abstractions invite viewers to drift in a world of furious daydreams, where hot passions lurk just beneath the surface.