Rebellion That Stayed in the Abstract

It’s tough being an also-ran in the visual arts, even tougher when your subject isn’t popular. While the Johnny-come-lately California Impressionists were embraced by a broad public, the second generation of American abstract painters active mostly in the 1930s and ‘40s spoke mainly to themselves.

“Defining the Edge: Early American Abstraction--Selections From the Collection of Dr. Peter B. Fischer,” at the Laguna Art Museum, is an exhibition of rarely seen work by (mostly) obscure artists that frustrates, fascinates and instructs in about equal measure.

The majority of the artists in the show were at one time or another members of the advocacy group American Abstract Artists, a feisty bunch who dared, in 1940, to stage a public demonstration against what they felt were the too-conservative policies of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The works they made openly flaunted one of the most conservative periods in American art, when economic depression and war led to the nurturing of realist styles and a collective distrust of European modernist influence.

But in hindsight, at least, many of the works in this group--drawn from the long-standing collection of a doctor in the South Bay--are stylistically timid. Too often, artists seem to be awkwardly trying to fit into the rigid box of a style made famous by others rather than finding a personal approach.

Though some of the artists were European emigres--rightful heirs of Old World abstraction--many of the works in the show appear straitjacketed by the artists’ own cautious personality or by a mannered European approach to modernism.

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There is something almost touching about the minuscule biomorphic shape that seems to have wandered from somebody’s microscope slide into Albert Swindon’s straightforward composition of L-shaped planes, a study for a mural.

At the other extreme, there are vapidly mechanical works (Charles Shaw’s “Plastic Polygon”) and fussy attempts to update still life with a dose of geometry (George Jasimovich’s “Kerosene Lamp”).

A new freshness and freedom--and intellectual power--would come to abstract art in the ‘50s, when Ad Reinhardt (whose 1937 work in the show displays a spatial and coloristic self-assurance) embarked on his all-black paintings, and John McLaughlin (represented by the museum’s own 1962 painting, “#15”) developed his spacious, meditative treatment of vertical blocks of paint.

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Still, the older works are intriguing. As a group, they look backward and forward at the same time--interpreting the rectangular compositions of the de Stijl artists (Piet Mondrian and others) and experimenting with new and unusual art materials (plastic, thumbtacks).

Individually, a few pieces hold their own as significant works--bold and measured inheritors of the de Stijl mantle.

Leon Polk Smith is one of the major figures in the show. His “Diagonal Painting 3,” from 1949, demonstrates a crisp economy of line and a rhythmic use of space.

Four years later, Michael Lowe remade Mondrian’s famously jumpy primary-color rectangles in “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” into pale bars of color calmly nestled lengthwise among large gray and white verticals (“Composition With Grays”).

The Mondrian influence turns vacuous in Burgoyne Diller’s “Third Theme,” from 1963. A little red rectangle serves as too-cute punctuation for a group of sailor-blue vertical stripes.

Diller was another major artist of the period, rediscovered in the ‘60s, when hard-edged painting had its heyday. A fine example of his work is the spare, untitled four-part composition from 1942.

Fritz Glarner, Ilya Bolotowsky and Giorgio Cavallon also were distinguished abstract artists of the period.

Glarner’s skillful use of gray shapes and Bolotowsky’s spacious deployment of form gave their paintings an authoritativeness missing in much other work. Cavallon cultivated a low-key, soft-edged approach to geometric design, in which the slanted sides of the color rectangles give a slight sense of disequilibrium.

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Irene Rice Pereira, one of several female artists in the show, worked in such unusual (in 1939) materials as plastic, which reflected her interests in technology, industrial design and aspects of light and space.

The show also includes a few fascinatingly unclassifiable pieces that do credit to Fisher’s omnivorous interests. Among them are Arshile Gorky’s “Portrait of Hans Burkhardt,” Alfred Jensen’s “They Came Into Being” and John Graham’s “Anschluss.”

Gorky (whose Cubist-influenced painting of his fellow artist includes Burkhardt’s ever-present cigarette) would soon develop the thin washes and calligraphic imagery that gave him entree to the Abstract Expressionist pantheon.

Jensen was simply sui generis, basing his vast, obsessive canvases of brightly painted checkerboards, spirals and other designs on various harmonic theories.

One aspect of abstract art particularly troubling to some during the war years was its lack of an explicit political voice. (Of course, the very fact that artists could paint in “unofficial” styles said something about political freedom.)

“Anschluss,” rather confusingly dated 1932 (Hitler’s annexation of Austria, known as the Anschluss, didn’t happen for another six years), is the only work in the show with an overt political agenda. Its focal point is a stylized image of a man in a beret with a large bull’s nose and mustache (presumably Hitler in the guise of an amateur artist).

Although the show seems desperately in need of a critical essay or two to put this little-known corner of American art into historical context (the catalog, unavailable at press time, reportedly includes no such amplification), the Laguna museum has made a valiant effort to provide wall text on some of the artists.

The collection likely will not be seen again locally: Fischer plans to sell it this winter to the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in Manhattan, which represents Diller’s estate, in order to endow a chair in art history at his Upstate New York alma mater, Hamilton College.

* “Defining the Edge: Early American Abstraction--Selections From the Collection of Dr. Peter B. Fischer,” through March 14 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday. $5 general, $4 students and seniors, children under 12 free. (714) 494-6531.