ART REVIEW : ‘Ten Years of Acquisitions’ Traces LACMA’s Progress

“Prints and Drawings: Ten Years of Acquisitions” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art could scarcely be more straightforward. The exhibition is exactly as announced--some 100 graphic images, mainly prints--selected from the museum’s catch during the last decade. There is no theme, focus or agenda.

Or is there? Curators of collections for generalist museums like the County Museum of Art are charged to assemble compendiums that reflect the scope of the canonical history of art. In this case, the responsible parties are Victor Carlson and Bruce Davis. They took the reins after the retirement of founding curator Ebria Feinblatt. She’d been building holdings since 1947, so they had quite a lot to work with already.

Thus, what we see is a progress report about weaving in blank or flimsy patches in the fabric of the collection. For the non-scholarly viewer, the exercise adds up to a rather piquant double-pronged experience. On one hand we see the kinds of icon prints so frequently reproduced that any serious institution is embarrassed without one. The most obvious examples here are modern--the American classic, George Bellows’ 1917 lithograph, “Stag at Sharkey’s” and Picasso’s 1905 dry point, “Salome.” Both are incredibly juicy, tirelessly absorbing images. The Bellows with its frenzied crowd and ferociously attacking boxers always makes one wonder how the artist managed to sustain a feeling of movement in a necessarily frozen picture.

The Picasso shows Salome dancing nude before Herod. She does a kick that reveals her sex while a black slave presents John the Baptist’s severed head on a tray. The ambience is pure Aubrey Beardsley decadence, but the woozy space and figural stylization show the Spanish genius moving toward Cubism.

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Yet the two images are so familiar that seeing them at LACMA has a paradoxical effect. You’re surprised because you assumed the museum had always had them. On the other hand, much of the rest of the exhibition offers the pleasures of the less-than-obvious. There are wonderful, classically balanced compositions such as landscapes by Claude Lorrain, Canaletto and Whistler. There is a superb little etching by Tiepolo that makes the scale of a postcard feel as grand as a palace ceiling.

But what repeatedly draws one’s attention are groups of images that border on the quirky. It begins in the 16th century, when the realism of Northern Europe was infected with the willfully neurotic exaggerations of Italian Mannerism. The seemingly dissonant hybrid produced such arresting artists as Hans Baldung Grien, Jacques Bellange and Hendrik Goltzius.

The curators concentrated on the European 18th and 19th centuries, feeling they’d been neglected. The rising individualism fostered first by the Enlightenment and then by Romanticism seems to take special focus. There’s a suite of etchings by Benigno Bossi titled “Mascarade a la Grecque” that depicts chimerical figures in costumes fashioned from fragments of classic architecture.

Through juxtaposition, the exhibition draws a relationship between a German Romantic like Caspar David Friedrich and the French printmaker Rudolphe Bresdin. The compulsive stylizations of both suggest withdrawal into a fantasy world.

Even such a master as Millet takes on an edge of the odd in his depictions of humble peasant laborers with the heroic proportions of Michelangelo gods. There is such a sense of a brewing storm in the fully romantic art of Delacroix and Gericault that the later urbanity of Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec is like a relief from anxiety.

Thus compressed, 200 years seem to pulse with the malaise that finally becomes the 20th century. The latest art included is a set of lithographs by David Hockney, who is also the subject of a drawing retrospective on view.

In a way, Hockney’s work exemplifies the high-wire act this century has attempted. A couple of particularly lush, rather Picasso-like abstractions could represent our immersion in the irrational unknown. A perfect little image called “Celia Looks” has the Matisse-like aspiration of blending human contradiction into a better formula for civilization.

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“Prints and Drawings: Ten Years of Acquisitions,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through May 19, closed Mondays, (213) 857-6000.