Shaky Outing for OCMA’s ‘Other’ Venue

The Laguna Art Museum’s current trio of exhibitions (lingering through Jan. 12) is a disappointing lot. So overwhelmingly provincial and qualitatively shaky are they that they underscore the museum’s underdog status as the “other” venue of the Orange County Museum of Art, based in Newport Beach.

The main event is “The California Progressives, 1910-1930,” a sampler of paintings from public and private collections, organized by the museum’s former chief curator, Susan M. Anderson.

She has written a detailed accompanying essay about the various strains of nonacademic painting to be found in Los Angeles and the Bay Area during the ‘Teens and ‘20s. But one searches in vain for a broader geographical context and frank assessments of the quality of this art.

It’s tempting to speculate that fears of offending lenders who are current or potential donors to the museum account for the amount of mediocre work in this show and the lack of commentary on its relative merit.

Anderson’s thesis is simply that the Californians, geographically and psychologically isolated from major art centers, combined elements of Modernism with “a focus on the Western landscape and experience.”

Although these artists experimented with late-19th and early-20th century styles developed in Europe (Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism) and New York (the Ashcan School), they used them mainly as ancillary means to a distinct end: painting the West Coast landscape.

Rather than pushing into new imaginative realms, they tended to slide back to the cozy verities of plein-air painting. Rather than treating landscape as material to be translated into subjective states of feeling or analyses of pure form, they preferred to report on what it looked like, a distinctly anti-Modernist tack.

A few did manage to freshly interpret the feel of particular places. In an untitled painting by Seldon Connor Gile, small squirts of impasto evoke glimpses of cow rumps in a luscious emerald-green field. A horizontal grouping of small red squares--almost like notes on a staff--in Edouard Antonin Vysekal’s “The Red Pots” effectively dematerializes a still-life.

Henrietta Shore introduced a repeated undulating line into “Women of Oaxaca,” in which the S-curve postures of the five women, the outlines of the jugs balanced on their heads and the profiles of the mountains behind them all seem to share the same rhythm.

Maynard Dixon gave “Wild Horses of Nevada” a fairy-tale quality by inserting a mysterious wedge of equine activity into a desert bounded by multicolored, stylized cliffs. The dimples and ridges of the desert landscape, as well as its bizarre colorations, clearly helped the cause of artistic experimentation.

But most of the work is distinctly second-rate, if not downright inept--at least as represented in this show. Despite evident widespread interest in Cezanne, for example, few of the Progressives seem to have been capable of rendering persuasively solid form. Too often experimentation resulted merely in sloppiness or eccentricity.

In the hands of an artist such as Helena Dunlap, vague paint strokes oriented every which way appear to clamber haphazardly over a woman’s dress and the table at which she’s seated. Clarence Hinkle veers unpersuasively between literal description and wishy-washy areas of paint in “Woman in Hammock.”

Clayton Seymour Price’s depiction of stiff, flattened horses wedged between soft landscape mounds (“By the River,” 1927) was obviously informed by German Expressionism, but it substitutes stiffness and peculiarity for emotional effect or symbolism.

When the Progressives were not painting landscapes, even as the background for bob-haired flappers relaxing in the sunlight, they turned their attention to townscapes, glimpses of exotic places (Tunis, Paris), still-lifes and the odd metaphysical composition (such as Rex Slinkard’s wispy, vaguely homoerotic “Ring Idols” or Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky’s “Woman at the Piano,” a figure whose musicality has inspired a prismatic flower to sprout from her wrist).

It comes as a bit of a shock while reading about these long-forgotten artists to find the names of photographers Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange, members of the broad circle of Bay Area artistic innovators of the mid-1920s. Surely it is no coincidence that these are the names that resonate widely today.

Still, even if this corner of art history isn’t terribly stimulating from an aesthetic point of view, it has historical importance. Maybe someday an exhibition will employ the art to make points about land use, the social order, popular ideas and the developmental arc of art colonies.

‘Tourist’--Been There, Done That

Many people who don’t see the point of contemporary art view it as a gimmick. But some work with postmodern pretensions actually deserves that tag.

Pam Goldblum and Jeff Kaisershot’s installation, “Spiritual Tourist,” consists of various found common objects--a toaster, luggage, trays, a frying pan--on which the artists have painted images invoking spiritual leaders and shrines of the world’s religions (including Mother Theresa, the Wailing Wall, Buddhist monks and Hindu swamis).

The two L.A. artists are pushing the concept of religious souvenirs to absurd and superficially entertaining lengths but without an intellectual payoff.

The battered condition of these humble objects seems calculated to induce warm, fuzzy feelings on the part of the viewer, while the freshly painted images--imitating cheesy lithographs, historical photographs or itinerant folk art--have a coyly mannered quality, a faux-global perkiness closer to a Benetton ad than a considered work of art.

Art “exposing” the commodity status of religion has become little more than a cliche in the past couple of decades. It’s quite another thing to isolate and redefine genuine popular expression and belief, a task Goldblum and Kaisershot seem unable or unwilling to do.

More troubling even than the choice of this piece, which hardly reflects the strong work coming out of L.A. today, is its presentation.

It is accompanied by a slick fold-out brochure, printed in Santa Monica, the location of the artists’ representative, the Robert Berman Gallery. The brochure includes a favorable 1995 review by a former freelance art critic at a Canadian newspaper, the Vancouver Sun. The words “Orange County Museum of Art” have been inserted (without brackets or any other indication that the original text has been amended) in place of “Monte Clark Gallery,” where the reviewer saw the multi-part piece.

Beyond the ethical question involved in altering a review (at the very least, the piece may not have looked the same in the other venue), the impression created is that of a crass marketing tool rather than an educational museum publication. If this is a taste of the future, it is rancid indeed.

‘Grounded’ Scenes From Suburbia

Walk into “Grounded: Suburban Landscapes,” a group of paintings drawn from the OCMA collection, and you are face-to-face with Paul Wonner’s “Malibu Living Room” from 1964.

Wonner, primarily a still-life painter, was fascinated by the effects of California sunlight on surfaces and spaces. His image of a middle-aged businessman standing between a glowing lamp and a huge window showing an undifferentiated expanse of blue and white stunningly evokes a sense of place defined as much by what you don’t see as what you do.

In the next gallery, Helen Lundeberg’s “Sundown Shadow” (1979) presents an optical riddle made up of flat, abstracted slices of architecture and landscape. Roger Kuntz opted for a more literal approach in his early ‘60s paean to the gray voids and solids of freeway space, “Double Underpass.” The blurred grids of light in Peter Alexander’s “Century” (1989) reflect the air traveler’s view of suburban sprawl and freeway rush-hour torpor.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty much downhill from there in this show of 17 paintings, including much mediocre and overexposed work as well as work that hardly seems relevant to the theme of the show.

* “The California Progressives, 1910-1930,” “Spiritual Tourist” and “Grounded: Suburban Landscapes” continue through Jan. 12 at the Orange County Museum of Art, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission: $5 adults, $4 seniors and students, children under 12 free. (714) 759-1122.