‘Focus’ Surveys California’s Art Landscape

Going to a California beach induces one kind of contemplation, California art inspires another. It’s possible to get a little of each by repairing to the Long Beach Museum of Art for its hot-weather exhibition “California Focus.”

Organized from the permanent collection by museum director Hal Nelson, the show is an interesting, albeit uneven, grab bag. Dominated mainly by Southland paintings, it skips lightly through the decades to include recent video works for those who have the time. More conventional works date back to a turn-of-the-century artist like George Henry Melcher who practiced French Impressionism in the Santa Monica Mountains. (This tendency to ignore the forward march of modernism persists to this day in a place where history is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.)

Many a Lotusland artist have responded to landscape. In recent times, that landscape has existed as much inside the artist as in the external world. Helen Lundeberg, for example, pioneered a unique brand of Surrealism here in the ‘30s. Its subjective view of life persisted in later, more abstract works like her 1958 “Still of Night.”

Joyce Treiman was another kind of maverick. She painted a species of Fellini-esque fantasy in the garage of her Santa Monica Canyon house, combining direct observation with musings on past artists such as Thomas Eakins. He’s very present in her lively, dreamy 1971 “Swimmers Antibes Topanga.” Even a photographer like Duncan McCosker gets a sense of a skewed, unreal world into a recent image like his “Del Mar Fair.” Well, California is a rather surreal place.

Its tendency to breed artists of wall-eyed eccentricity is emphasized in a section that zeros in on Dada humor laced with burlesque. Bay Area ceramic sculptor David Gilhooly is particularly risible in “Bread Frog as Bake Sale.” A wacky celebration of the charms of pastry, it stands next to James Strombotne’s curiously sinister painting “Birthday.” Too bad there’s no Ed Ruscha but it’s that kind of show.

All of these tendencies were, in a way, distilled in L.A.’s hard-edge abstraction of the ‘50s. John McLaughlin was a late-bloomer. A student of Asian art and language, he settled down to paint in Dana Point after serving as a translator in World War II. His two untitled works here are spare fugues of rectangles in black, white, ochre and gray. They demonstrate an original hybrid of European purist abstraction and the unexpected ambiguities of Zen thought mixed with California light and space.

Lorser Feitelson was a pioneer L.A. painter and educator who served in the WPA during the Great Depression. He developed Post-Surrealism with Lundeberg. Grounded in a Mannerist figurative tradition, he eventually boiled it all down to an elegant minimalist abstraction. His untitled work remains sensuous despite being just two curved black lines on a yellow field.

Karl Benjamin, another World War II vet, taught elementary school after he was mustered out. He loved the bright directness of kids’ art and turned it into a kind of building-block style of abstraction. An untitled example based on a swastika form suggests the rich overtones implicit in simplicity.

This section also includes attractive works by Florence Arnold and Elizabeth McCord. Its bright intelligence reveals a quest for answers that hover between the mystical and the technological, the conservative and the radical, the pure and the sensual. They somehow provide the best metaphor of what L.A. modernism was all about.

Interestingly, their style continues to resonate in a section of recent acquisitions where the work of Patrick Wilson stands out.

* Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 East Ocean Blvd., through Nov. 3, closed Mondays and Tuesdays; (310) 439-2119.