A Missed Opportunity to Give John Altoon His Due

John Altoon (1925-1969) was an unusually gifted Expressionist painter who was just hitting his stride at the moment an Expressionist era was coming to a close. One result was an edgy, conflicted body of work in which a finally unresolved artistic ethos mingles with stunning flashes of pictorial brilliance.

Add to that the Los Angeles native’s much-remarked role as an exemplar for a youthful and ambitious new art scene in the 1960s, his struggles with debilitating mental illness and his sudden, tragic death from a heart attack at a mere 43 years of age, and Altoon is the stuff of which legends are made.

Regardless of those ingredients, however, the artist and his career today remain a puzzling enigma. His work is neither widely known nor well understood. The most recent sizable show dates back more than 13 years, to a survey of 25 paintings mounted at the old Baxter Art Gallery at Cal Tech, which was one of the few high points in the visual arts programming around the 1984 Summer Olympics. The show lacked an extensive publication, but it was a beautifully selected eye-opener.

Now, San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art has organized an exhibition that, as MCA director Hugh Davies puts it in the catalog foreword, seeks to reverse “the undeserved obscurity in which [Altoon] and his oeuvre have languished for far too long.” But the endeavor, co-organized by Davies and his assistant, Andrea Hales, falls short of that ambitious mark. With fewer than 20 paintings and more than 50 works on paper, many of the latter large in scale, “John Altoon” is a bit of a muddle.

Under any circumstance it’s difficult to wrap your mind around the development of Altoon’s career, since periodically he destroyed substantial bodies of his work. (He threatened to destroy the work of other artists, too, including that of his colleague and friend, sculptor Larry Bell.) The destructive impulse was likely symptomatic of the schizophrenia, depression and paranoia that plagued him.

The exhibition begins with student work: realist self-portrait drawings in pen and ink from 1947 and 1949, when he was at Otis, Art Center and the Chouinard Art Institute, thanks to the GI Bill. The ink drawings don’t really prepare you for the first oil painting on canvas, which dates from a full decade later.

Maturely handled, “Fay’s Christmas Painting” (1958) is a distinctly derivative example of second-generation Abstract Expressionist painting. In 1950 Altoon had left L.A. for New York, where he supported himself for several years as a commercial illustrator. There, he witnessed first-hand the hard-fought and progressive success of American Abstract Expressionism. “Fay’s Christmas Painting” shows his own eventual mastery of the idiom.

In Altoon’s skillful paintings from the end of the 1950s, the whiplash calligraphy, chunky blocks of scraped and brushy color and shifting pictorial space show the familiar precedent of Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Clyfford Still, Joan Mitchell, William Baziotes, Hans Burkhardt, Richard Diebenkorn and other forebears. If anything sets his art apart, it is the paintings’ sense of an almost radically internalized logic, at work without regard to correspondences in the world outside the frame. Peaking in the so-called “ribbon” paintings of 1959, it’s a space that strains toward pure visual imagination.

Often, the natural landscape is sensed within Abstract Expressionist art, as nature is filtered through the psychological terrain of an individualized sensibility. But not in Altoon’s art. What feels filtered instead is the sensual visual inventiveness of other artists.

Obviously, that accounts for the derivative quality of these pictures. Ironically, though, it also establishes the peculiar basis for Altoon’s most distinctive work, represented in the show by 10 paintings and a number of drawings made between 1962 and his death in 1968. These, his most compelling pictures, display a wholly imaginary landscape of erotic play.

Starting with the “Ocean Park Series,” Altoon began to populate his work with a cast of strange, buoyant, abstract shapes, each with a lively sense of personality all its own. The colorful shapes, graphically blunt and brushy, at first cavort across planes of white emptiness; later they acquire an illusionistic density and are set within textured fields of shaded color.

These erotic, sometimes scatological paintings and drawings are carnal carnivals, both exuberant and dark. Swelling, tumescent forms probe and snuggle one another, while exposed entrails flail and quiver in space, occasionally sending curious feelers out into the void. Great smears of dusky pigment and splatters of vivid color speak of delightfully obscene pleasures.

Altoon was not alone in merging eros and abstraction. Perhaps the most closely related Los Angeles art of the period is the somewhat earlier work of Craig Kauffman, whose blatantly sexual 1958 paintings of interpenetrating, mechanistic forms had been completely transmogrified, by the mid-1960s, into sleekly sexy wall-reliefs made from vacuum-formed plastic. However different stylistically, both spoke of a forceful countercultural ethos emergent in the wake of postwar social repressiveness.

Many of Altoon’s drawings are more straightforwardly illustrational in their sexual obsessiveness, but usually these are less engaging because of it. He created eccentric jokes about the gentlemen of the British royal family exposing what they really wear beneath their kilts--specifically, nothing--or about the side pleasures of being a telephone repairman when the lady of the house calls. Elsewhere, bizarre erotic fantasies featuring frogs and monkeys are frankly spelled out.

His extravagant gifts as a draftsman save these often sizable graphic works from puerility--but barely. The prominence of their display in the exhibition, where they mingle indiscriminately with his paintings, mostly just diminishes a sense of Altoon’s achievement.

Not that drawing should be slighted in assessing his career. The abundant works on paper and board amply demonstrate Altoon’s amazing facility as a draftsman, which really took off in 1964 when he bought an airbrush. Some of the most delicate, lilting and airily magical drawings in the show were done with the device during the next two years.

His best drawings leave you feeling giddy. Oil paint is much more recalcitrant than ink or airbrush, though, and in the end you get the feeling that its stubbornness was salutary for Altoon’s art. His best paintings manage a seemingly impossible mix of facile wit and elegant weightiness.

Altoon’s mature career spanned a scant six years, but the San Diego show seems unsure of what it wants to be--life-long retrospective, episodic homage, redirection of emphasis toward drawings or perhaps all three. The lack of curatorial sureness ends up underscoring the current shakiness of Altoon’s reputation.

In order to secure that reputation 30 years after his death, the artist, shown at his best, literally needs to be reintroduced to audiences. A tightly chosen, carefully installed exhibition keyed to Altoon’s strongest work, excluding all else, could have knocked a viewer’s socks off.

* San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla, (619) 454-3541, through March 11.