The Plain and Simple Truths Within

In the 1950s and 1960s, when stylistic innovation was perhaps the most valuable artistic currency to be spent in the contemporary art world, John McLaughlin’s paintings were utterly bankrupt. Built on the precedent of the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian and the Russian Kasimir Malevich, McLaughlin’s stripped-down style added nothing to the established repertoire of flat, uninflected, rectilinear color-shapes painted on easel-size canvases. Stylistically, they were unimaginative.

Instead, McLaughlin had to settle for something else: He was making some of the most visually stunning, conceptually challenging paintings of the day. How he came to this astonishing achievement without benefit of stylistic novelty is on view in the breathtaking exhibition “John McLaughlin: Western Modernism, Eastern Thought,” a long-awaited retrospective of the California painter’s work newly opened at the Laguna Art Museum. Under the sure hand of guest curator Susan Larsen, McLaughlin’s career has been laid out in more depth and detail, and with more skill and insight, than has ever been managed before.

Of course, we have never been in much danger of knowing too much about McLaughlin and his art. The painter has been dead for 20 years, but his place as a pivotal, even seminal figure for the remarkable postwar history of art in L.A. has remained obscure. Until now, he’s been very much a mystery man.

In the 1950s, McLaughlin was the first Southern California painter of major stature to emerge. A persuasive argument could be made that this distinction also marks him as the region’s first truly great painter, ever.

Postwar L.A. was on the cusp of a cosmopolitan maturity. McLaughlin’s singular prominence in a 1959 group show of area painters that traveled to London’s influential Institute of Contemporary Art was dawning evidence of that internationalist scope.

His spare but rigorous paintings also created the firm foundation on which the indigenous L.A. aesthetic of Light and Space was subsequently built. The celebrated perceptual objects and installations made by Robert Irwin, Larry Bell and James Turrell in the 1960s and 1970s are unthinkable without McLaughlin’s precedent.

Today, his standard still resonates. For more than two decades, the widely admired artist John M. Miller has been mining the rich vein of possibility McLaughlin opened up. At a dazzling show of Miller’s recent white paintings now at Santa Monica’s Patricia Faure Gallery, an exquisite 1963 McLaughlin hangs in a side room like a silent ancestral presence for Miller’s bracing art.

Despite this unmatched 40-year history, McLaughlin’s public reputation languishes. If the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the long-defunct Pasadena Art Museum once took active interest in his career, those days are long since over. The Laguna show is the first full-scale study of his paintings in almost a quarter-century, since the equally small and unprepossessing La Jolla (now San Diego) Museum of Contemporary Art did the honors. Scandalously, McLaughlin has never been the subject of a retrospective exhibition at either LACMA or the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The negligence of our major art institutions does not diminish the magnitude of McLaughlin’s artistic achievement, which is everywhere in evidence in Laguna. In a concise selection of 48 paintings, the show demonstrates how he took the lessons of Mondrian and Malevich and applied them to a philosophical attitude alien from their own. In the process, he created a distinctive brand of painting, which was instrumental in transforming postwar American art.

The subtitle of the Laguna exhibition--”Western Modernism, Eastern Thought”--succinctly describes the artist’s approach. McLaughlin employed the abstract language of Modern easel painting to articulate principles gleaned from Japanese Zen philosophy.

Neither utopian, like Mondrian, nor mystical, like Malevich, McLaughlin used their vocabulary of forms to express his profound distrust for the authority of reason, established since the Enlightenment. For him, painting was instead a tool to facilitate the spectator’s introspective intuitions.

McLaughlin was well into his 40s before he began to paint with sustained dedication, and his direction didn’t become clear until he was 52. By then, he was a mature individual with well defined interests.

Chief among them was Japanese culture. Born to a prosperous, intellectually engaged Bostonian family in 1898, McLaughlin developed an early interest in Asian art, famously well represented in that city’s Museum of Fine Arts. A maternal great-uncle had also been instrumental in bringing the first contingent of Japanese students to Harvard Law School, and the collection of Japanese art he assembled had been passed down to McLaughlin’s mother.

So enamored of Japanese art did young John become that, after World War I and following some success in real estate, he began to deal privately in Japanese prints and other Asian art. In 1935, with his wife, Florence Emerson (grandniece of Ralph Waldo Emerson), he even moved to Japan--a sign of deep commitment, since Japanese society was still relatively closed to Westerners.

There he learned the language and studied the traditional culture (he also traveled in China). After a second trip in 1937, McLaughlin returned to Boston with enough Japanese art to open a gallery.

During World War II, he served in India and Burma as an intelligence officer, training Japanese linguists for translation and interrogation purposes. Like countless other American soldiers returning from the Pacific after the war, he decided to settle in Southern California. The McLaughlins built a house in Dana Point, just outside Laguna Beach, and John began to paint full time.

The Laguna exhibition shows how quickly his work developed. In 1946, he was experimenting with geometric forms that retained figurative associations with landscapes and still lifes. By 1948, he had painted his first fully nonobjective work--a canvas vertically divided by a white bar on the left and a khaki-green rectangle on the right, inside of which floated a black rectangle.

By 1950, all his work was composed by dividing the canvas into flat shapes of color. Within five years, he’d found the mature aesthetic that would sustain his work until his death 26 years later. In beautifully installed galleries, and through a handsomely designed and well researched catalog, the exhibition follows his exploratory development, finally arriving at the often magisterial paintings from 1963 and beyond.

McLaughlin’s mature work solved a problem central to all effective abstract art. For 500 years, a successful Western painting was one that could be simultaneously looked at and looked through. Old Master art held in dynamic tension an explicit, controlled dualism, in which the picture called attention to its own surface artfulness, while also dramatizing an evocative space beyond. A successful modern picture was no different, except for one thing: It had to manage the simultaneity without benefit of traditional illusionism.

In his pictures from the late 1940s, McLaughlin tried out a variety of methods to achieve this effect. He employed textured brush strokes, juxtaposed smooth surfaces with scumbled ones and overlapped translucent planes of color. He even made a clumsy stab at suspending pigment in wax--the rarely used encaustic technique, brilliantly handled a few years later by Jasper Johns.

Finally, McLaughlin achieved his aim by applying his pictorial understanding of Mondrian and Malevich to his conceptual comprehension of Japanese aesthetics. He began to make intuitively guided divisions of the canvas, often bisecting it into twin fields that play with binocular vision. He carefully calibrated nonlogical color-shapes, using an eccentric palette heavy on taupes, pale blues and off-yellows, as well as black and white, not the primaries familiar from Mondrian.

The resulting pictures don’t create stable illusionistic space within the painting. Instead, the eye is puzzled, slowly sorting out a condition of clarity. A contemplative space is carved out in the mind’s eye of the beholder. McLaughlin’s paintings put the emphasis on clarifying the perceptual capacities of the person looking at them.

Suddenly, art’s main event was not to be found on the canvas; it was located instead within the audience. With this seemingly simple but in fact profound reversal, McLaughlin succeeded in removing from his paintings any trace of autobiographical self-expression.

To help articulate this difficult but nonetheless central concept for McLaughlin’s art, the Laguna Museum invited Kyozan Joshu, a master from the Mt. Baldy Zen Center, to design and build a Zen rock garden on the museum’s lower level. This interior landscape--built from mountain-like boulders, a carefully raked sea of gravel and a varied assortment of cool mosses--establishes just the right tone of slow, selfless contemplation needed for the show. A marvelous gesture, it does more to illuminate the paintings than all the didactic wall texts and audio-guides museums more commonly press into service.

McLaughlin’s evolving work ran counter to the prevailing Abstract Expressionist ethos of the 1950s, in which manifesting an expressive self was all. His paintings turned the tables, helping to create the foundation for a larger revolution that followed. If you want to understand how remarkably significant the transformation was, don’t miss this magnificent exhibition. McLaughlin’s art keeps one foot planted in nature, but it dramatically shifts the other into the radical subject of culture--where all the most provocative art of our time will be found.

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“JOHN McLAUGHLIN: WESTERN MODERNISM, EASTERN THOUGHT,” Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Dates: Tuesdays to Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Ends Oct. 6 Price: $5. Phone: (714) 494-8971.