‘Naive’ Exhibit in Laguna Lives Up to Its Label

Stop to read the labels in “American Naive Paintings from the National Gallery of Art” at the Laguna Art Museum through July 14 and you’d swear you stumbled into Mrs. Grody’s third-grade class.

“Who is the biggest? Who is the smallest? Why do you think the artist portrayed them that way?”

Hello? Does someone think the museum’s visitors have all turned into Munchkins?

No matter that the labels were developed (presumably for schoolchildren) by the National Gallery in Washington and not by the Laguna museum’s own curatorial department. If that’s what they ship you, you jolly well better rewrite them so as not to insult your audience.

Depressingly enough, educational efforts also go amok in “Maiden California,” the museum’s concurrent show of work by women from the collection. It’s enough to make you wonder if the efforts that former director Charles Desmarais made to increase the museum’s level of sophistication have been for naught.

Still, at its best the 35-piece show of paintings by untrained 19th century American artists offers an ample dose of charm. The history paintings--which mostly commemorate the heroes of a still-youthful nation--represent fascinatingly idiosyncratic departures from the high-flown academic ideal of the era.

In “Marion Feasting the British Officer on Sweet Potatoes,” by one George Washington Mark, a redcoat regards the unfamiliar vegetable in his hand with a baleful eye while sitting on a log with wily Francis Marion, the U.S. soldier the British nicknamed Swamp Fox for his successful undercover tactics. A few pint-sized enlisted men are sprinkled into the scene; even more minuscule is the black slave minding the great man’s horse.

Erastus Salisbury Field’s attempt to show “Pharoah’s Army Marching”--painted sometime after the Civil War--shows ranks of ancient Egyptians decked out in smart red or blue uniforms as they parade past heroically conceived but structurally dubious temples. One is so amply supplied with tightly packed columns it resembles a box of cigars.

Among the portraits, those of children are the most arresting, largely because of their air of enormous gravity, with faces wise beyond their years. (These were times of high infant mortality and a widespread belief that children were merely miniature adults.)

In a painting by Abram Ross Stanley, little Joshua Lamb, so young that he still wears a dress, poses with a round-faced dog whose beseeching expression overrides the artist’s struggles with his anatomy. In the distance, tiny images of sailing ships and an imposing building perched on a mountain may hold a clue to the child’s parentage or presumed destiny.

Was the anonymous artist who painted “The Proud Mother” having a bit of a laugh at the expense of mother love? It’s hard to make out the expression on the thin-lipped face of the woman in the picture, who turns to regard a homely, big-chinned baby suspended in air by the hand of an otherwise unseen adult.

Other oddities include a “City of Fantasy” (painted by an anonymous mid-19th century artist who dreamed of crenelated castles, Neoclassic buildings and frame houses happily coexisting in a hilly terrain resembling an Italian city-state) and a “Stylized Landscape” by another anonymous painter that is a dense carpet of furry-textured greens and yellows teased into curving, saw-toothed shapes.

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The most famous of the artists is surely the Quaker sign painter Edward Hicks, best known for “The Peaceable Kingdom” (not in this exhibition).

In the 1840s, Hicks commemorated “[William] Penn’s Treaty with the Indians” in a sensitive, open-hearted style that even today can be seen to grant the Native Americans in the scene the same seriousness he accords the earnest band of Quakers. A text within the painting proclaims the treaty “the foundation of religious and civil liberty in the US of America.”

The Laguna museum has included a sampling of paintings from its own collection by, in the words of the wall text, “unnamed or obscure” artists. But “naive” artists who are prized today had distinctive personal visions; they weren’t simply obscure or clumsy painters. Most of the museum’s contenders seem interchangeable with the run-of-the-mill “thrift shop” paintings of their day.

One exception is an 1890 still-life by one F. Miller (“Cigars, Dollars, Knife and Shoe”) that combines these disparate items--the dollars are the silver kind, the shoe is a baby’s, used to hold matches--in a way that curiously mingles he-man pursuits of the Gay Nineties with a nagging sense of the brevity of life.

Antin’s ‘Boots’ Shine at Show

“Maiden California” is a jaunty title. But the good news nearly ends there. Skimpy (just 14 pieces) and burdened by weak work by lesser women artists, the show makes a poor case for value and innovation in contemporary women’s art in this state. Inadvertently, the show comes across as a plea for an overhaul of the museum’s holdings in this area (or possibly a sly suggestion that Laguna is in dire need of Newport Harbor’s collection?).

The high point of the show is Eleanor Antin’s “100 Boots,” a photo-documentation of the postcards the celebrated artist sent to friends from various locations in California and New York in the early ‘70s. It seems par for the course that the museum, in its wisdom, is showing only 37 of the 51 images because of “lack of room.”

The piece chronicles the adventures of 50 pairs of rubber boots, which Antin “poses” in various scenic and not-so-scenic spots. There is something delightfully fey about the sight of boots clustered at the doorway of a sleek art gallery (“100 Boots Inside”), plopped in a disorganized way in an industrial landscape (“100 Boots Out of a Job”) or circling a campfire (“100 Boots by the Bivouac”).

In this way, Antin deftly recast a host of traditional subjects of painting and photography (bucolic landscape, social realism, Wild West nocturne, battle scene), as well as the tourist snapshot and arid, art magazine-worthy gallery installation view.

The other standout work is by the inimitable Kim Dingle. “George Washington as Annie Oakley,” from 1992, is a mingling of the features of both eminent Americans in one oddly familiar personage--a subversive view of cultural icons through a bisexual prism.

Though Patssi Valdez is in fine form in her rambunctious interior painting, “Daisy Queen,” Suda House, Kim Abeles, Ilene Segalove and June Wayne--all unquestionably important to the history of women artists in California--are unfortunately represented by less than their best work.

Too many of the other pieces suffer from an overdose of didacticism--aided and abetted by the labels, which go beyond providing a context for the work to attempting to nail down Exactly What They Mean, thus draining out the ambiguities and perplexities that make art worth pondering in the first place. Quotes the artists made in heaven knows what contexts are dragged in to provide the last word, as it were.

This approach reaches ludicrous depths in Marcy Watton’s piece, “Bedfellow,” constructed from a bed’s headboard and a large, jaunty piece of orange plastic that resembles a graffiti “tag.”

Watton, sounding like the leader of a community action group, informs the viewer that the headboard was scavenged from a trash bin on Skid Row, a “hostile climate” where “sex is just a base bodily function” and where the graffiti tag is “symbolic of male domination of his environment.” Oh. Well, so much for the more piquant and forgiving interpretation I had in mind.

* “American Naive Paintings from the National Gallery of Art,” through July 14, and “Maiden California,” through July 7, at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday. Admission: $5 adults, $4 seniors and students, free for children under 12. (714) 494-8971.