‘Proof Positive’ Documents 40-Year Print Pattern

With a millennium breathing down our neck, it’s not surprising that 20th century art is beginning to live in a penumbra of historic nostalgia. The latest manifestation is “Proof Positive: Forty Years of Contemporary American Printmaking at ULAE, 1957-1997” on view at the UCLA/Hammer Museum.

Presenting 150 prints by 30 artists, the survey was organized by Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art to celebrate the achievement of Universal Limited Art Editions, a legendary New York print workshop, founded by Tatyana Grosman.

The exhibition reads as a vest-pocket survey of Cold War American printmaking and the art that inspired it. Since that epoch is now objectively over, it’s all but impossible not to view this receding past as a golden age. This, of course, when New York supplanted Paris as art’s world capital.

Aside from the obvious economic and geopolitical circumstances, two artistic manifestations created this hegemony. The first was Abstract Expressionist painting. It looked like American transcendental panoramic landscape translated into the intensely subjective syntax of postwar Existentialism. There are examples on view by Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman and Sam Francis.

As if Abstract Expressionism weren’t American enough, a younger generation concocted Pop art to celebrate and satirize consumerism, creating a visual argot that was very hard for Europeans to emulate.

Pop artists here are the transitional masters who mixed the emotive qualities of A.E. with the graphic iconography of Pop. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg are copiously represented. Only slightly less so are Larry Rivers, Jim Dine and James Rosenquist. As a group they’re sometimes subcategorized as Classic Pop artists.

ULAE operated by invitation, and they seem to have asserted a preference for highly gifted people who nonetheless operated within a humanistic middle-ground. Maybe that’s part of the reason why Saul Steinberg’s “The Museum” and “Main Street” make him come off as most likely to survive in a group whose historical viability is hardly in question. With Steinberg you can never separate what he has to say from the way he says it.

Given all the lore about fears of nuclear holocaust that hung over the Cold War, there’s surprisingly little angst wafting from this work. Instead it lines up quite consistently with my own sense that for many Americans, the combination of their manifest well-being and a distant threat of doom added up to a bemused sense of the absurd.

The older artists represented are familiar, but so good that contempt doesn’t follow familiarity. Rauschenberg’s work does feel like it might someday take a plunge because he’s too prolific to always be at his best. Then you see a suite like the “Bellini” series here, and realize he can still get it right.

Younger artists seem fresher, but not because they’re doing anything all that different. There’s a continued combination of painterly brushiness and personalized imagery. Elizabeth Murray reaches all the way back to Leger-style Cubism and Picasso-esque ferocity. Susan Rothenberg and Carol Dunham each fills abstract forms with things that go bump in the night.

If these folks betray any temperamental difference from their predecessors, it’s probably just a noticeably greater degree of personal participation, in the old tragicomic sense. Jane Hammond uses cheery nostalgia motifs like clown suits and paper dolls to confess that her upbeat sense of life is probably a little dingy. Kiki Smith’s “My Blue Lake” employs what is evidently a manipulated photographic self-portrait to reveal that she herself constitutes the landscape of her own existence.

The Corcoran’s Jack Cowart acted as the show’s curator. It’s presented in collaboration with the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts.

* “Proof Positive: Forty Years of Contemporary American Printmaking at ULAE, 1957-1997,” UCLA/Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., through Jan. 4, closed Mondays, (310) 443-7000.