Representing the Abstract

Ed Mieczkowski, 68, is part of the second generation of American abstract artists--the ones whose paths were smoothed by decades-earlier battles against the ignorance and scorn of a public firmly wedded to representational art.

Yet the compact, genial man from Cleveland who was strolling through the Laguna Art Museum in a playfully hand-painted hat the other day began reminiscing about his own struggles while ostensibly discussing an exhibition of 60 works by artists active in the ‘30s and ‘40s.

“My slant is, painting belongs to the history of ideas, parallel to all of the other disciplines, like science or poetry,” says Mieczkowski, who knew several of the artists in the show and will give a lecture about them on Sunday.

His favorite (“my hero”) in “Defining the Edge: Early American Abstract Art From the Peter B. Fischer Collection” is Balcomb Greene, who taught at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

Born in 1904, Greene studied philosophy, earned master’s degrees in English and art history, wrote unpublished novels and short stories and sailed to Paris in 1931 to paint.

Resettled in New York two years later, he painted crisp geometric abstractions and became the first president of American Abstract Artists, an important advocacy group formed in 1936 that included Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt and, eventually, several hundred other artists.

“He was like a role model, the mensch as well as the artist, but with the intellect paramount,” Mieczkowski says of Greene.

The world of ideas was a tantalizing lure to the young Mieczkowski. He had quit high school before graduation to take a job retouching photos for a commercial art firm whose macho employees were all World War II veterans. (“When I brought a copy of [French novelist] Andre Gide in, and they found out what I was reading, I caught holy hell.”)

At the outbreak of the Korean War, he had what he calls “this intellectual crisis.” The guys in the office were giving him grief about his future, telling him that “the best I could do was become a mechanical illustrator using an airbrush and work on Westinghouse oil switches.”

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So he decided to quit and enroll at the Cleveland School of Art, where the faculty were conservative regional artists.

“The one thing that bothered me was, I didn’t quite understand art. I felt very incomplete. And if everything was up for grabs, if I was going to be thrown into a war, I was going to go for the thing that meant most to me.”

But something else was eating at Mieczkowski: a troubled marriage. Depressed, he left art school (“I didn’t so much leave as I gave up”) and was promptly drafted. Since the war was winding down, he was sent to Europe. Life in the Army meant freedom from his family, a familiar macho culture and the cultural revelations of Venice, Paris and Munich.

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Back in Cleveland, where figurative Surrealism was still the dominant style, he became an abstract painter, “seemingly without making a decision,” he says.

“It was like you wake up in the morning and [you’re thinking of] a phrase or a word, and by evening it’s a poem. Art’s what the mind wants to do, and this kind of art is what my mind wanted to do.”

Not that he didn’t have what he calls “backsliding episodes.” His wife, to whom he remained unhappily married for decades, was a horsewoman, and his portraits of her mounts were greeted rapturously, he recalls wryly, by one of his more hidebound art teachers.

After returning to the (newly renamed) Cleveland Institute of Art to earn a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, Mieczkowski moved on to Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon University). Still feeling “very shaky on my artist pins,” he audited an art history class taught by Greene.

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Ironically, Greene’s own painting had become increasingly representational in the ‘40s. (In the Laguna exhibition, his “Color Panels,” an abstracted cityscape from 1937, hangs next to “Anchorage,” a landscape-like abstraction with pieces of wood, by his wife, Gertrude Glass.)

Greene asked his students to bring in note cards with questions about contemporary art, Mieczkowski recalls, and the instructor’s expansive answers opened up a whole new world.

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But the best thing about Carnegie Tech, from which Mieczkowski earned a master’s degree in fine art in 1959, was meeting Frank Hewitt, a young artist who was his partner in Anonima, an abstract art group named for the Italian word for “incorporated.”

Reacting against the Abstract Expressionists’ emotional and painterly extravagance, the Anonima artists used mechanical drawing tools to make their Op Art-like paintings, “because that way we couldn’t be Freudian or frenetic or sexual or anything,” Mieczkowski says.

“It was like, ‘Deaden those impulses!’ It was a rejection of the irrational and the extreme poeticizing of art. We wanted to have the poetry in our lives and the order in our art, not the reverse.”

Anonima eventually rented a studio in Manhattan, on West 28th Street, and the Midwesterners made the scene.

They were backups in the Abstract Expressionists’ softball games. (“We were little mammals running about the feet of the dinosaurs, too puny to worry about.”) One summer in Easthampton, N.Y., Mieczkowski and Hewitt buried Willem de Kooning up to his neck in the sand while glancing at each other as if to say, “Let’s finish the job.”

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But the friendship of kindred souls counted the most. Reinhardt was one, patiently climbing the steps of the Anima studio, despite his angina, to see their shows. Another was Charmion von Wiegand, a lyrical abstract painter who had been Piet Mondrian’s dancing partner during his last years of self-imposed exile in New York in the ‘40s.

“These are my aunts and my uncles and my grandmothers and my grandfathers,” Mieczkowski--who continues to work in geometric abstraction--says of these and other artists in the exhibition. “I’m proud of them, and I want to do well by them.”

* Ed Mieczkowski speaks on American abstract art of the mid-century on Sunday at 11 a.m at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Tickets: $3 plus museum admission ($5 general, $4 students and seniors, free for children under 12). “Defining the Edge: Early American Abstract Art From the Peter B. Fischer Collection,” continues through March 15. Gallery: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. (714) 494-6531.