Dark Moon Rising

Leo Politi was a gentle man who wrote books for children and illustrated them in loving terms.

The faces he painted in soft pastels were those of Latinos, blacks and Asians, and were full of hope and wonder because Politi had the heart of a child and was full of hope and wonder, too.

He saw them in an era without stress, even as the era faded, because his genius was rooted in a sunnier clime. Politi preferred the Los Angeles he remembered, rather than the one in which he ultimately existed.

He left that world of memory for us to savor when he died last week at 86.

It was a world of children who climbed trees, who walked to school down quiet streets and who helped in their mother’s kitchen.

It was a world of old Victorians and horse-drawn carriages, of small grocery stores down the block and of immaculate gardens.

Art freezes time and moods for us, whether it’s a quiet Monet garden, the black crows of Van Gogh’s madness swooping over a wheat field or the spiritless new L.A. of facades and angles visualized by David Hockney.

We see the emotions of the past not through fat tomes of history but through the eyes of artists whose genius directs them toward specific subjects.

Politi especially loved the faces of children in a city that no longer exists and gave them to us so that we could remember the way we were.

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I don’t mean to imply that there are no longer glorious young faces among us or that nothing remains of our past that was good and decent.

It is just that a new form of visualization, the cold, stark eye of the television camera, has brought pain once more to an area so long under siege.

I refer to the cruelty displayed by the Riverside County sheriff’s deputies against the two undocumented Mexicans they had in tight custody.

In a sense, the beating, captured on tape, represents an example of an art form which, like oil on canvas, isolates the time and mood in which it is created. The time is now and the mood is violent.

Years hence, the tape will seem as unsettling and powerful as any view of hell offered on the oversized canvasses of the Middle Ages.

And the great-great-grandchildren of our great-grandchildren will wonder at the hostilities we directed at each other due to differences which, pray God, will no longer matter on the sunnier side of history.

They will view the scene of the beating with fascination and marvel at both its awful empiricism and at the primitive emotions it depicts.

But art always has critics. Those works ultimately recognized as creations of genius are often misunderstood or even vilified in their own time.

So it is with that television tape, the art form of today. Those unable to perceive its barbarity offer lopsided logic to palliate the hatred that triggered its creation. They look for reasons and miss its message.

What is important about that tape is what is important about art, the power of its format to tell us about ourselves. What it says brings chills.

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Many emotions fill my mind as I say goodbye to Leo Politi, who loved children, and hello to an art form that trains a relentless eye on the furies of the 1990s.

They overlap in the world we occupy, though I suspect we will see more of the horror the camera sees, and less of what Politi saw, until, down the centuries, we evolve into something better than what we are.

I thought about that the other evening as I watched the lunar eclipse take shape in the emerging darkness. The black moon rising became a kind of metaphor for the malevolence that casts a shadow over our age.

By sanction and temperament, we have bowed to the rantings of demagogues to create enemies, and where enemies exist, victims follow. We saw them on videotape, huddled and terrified, and we saw the wishes of the people being carried out by the agents of reprisal that represent our time and our mood.

And high above all that, the instrument of the new art form looked down and captured the incident which, though we debate its meaning, remains as powerful and evocative as “The Scream” of Edvard Munch.

Leo Politi, through the soft mists of his own gentle nature, saw the faces of Latino children that were open and giving. I can’t help but wonder how those faces will appear if hatred is allowed to grow and police batons continue to swing as the dark moon rises.

Al Martinez can be reached through the Internet at al.martinez@latimes.com