How Nice: Paintings in a Museum

“Examining Pictures: Exhibiting Paintings” is way too nervous and unsure of itself to be a first-rate exhibition. Maybe it’s that opening word, examining, with its clinical aloofness and whiff of formaldehyde. Whatever, the proliferation of painting in the 1990s sort of gets poked at with a stick.

But give the show an enthusiastic welcome to the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum anyhow. In addition to a reasonable cohort of excellent works, which range widely across North America and Europe from the 1960s through the 1990s, “Examining Pictures” is a terrific excuse to think about painting and where it’s been of late--and we’ve needed a show like that for quite some time.

We’ve needed it because, from L.A to London, painting has been ubiquitous in the galleries in recent years. Painting has tended to provide as much satisfaction as the gigantic, photographic C-prints and fashion-conscious, pseudo-intellectual stacks of Sony video projectors that have also been prominent lately. Often it’s been more satisfying.

Unlike high-tech art, though, which offers easy opportunities for posers to pretend they’re making subversive work that effectively critiques the dominant Media-Industrial Complex of Global Capital (eek!), painting in the 1990s has labored under a shadow. Or maybe two. The show’s response to those dark places gives you an idea of the rather queasy lack of conviction that makes it rather less bracing than it ought to be.

Shadow No. 1: Painting most recently experienced the Neo-Expressionist 1980s but, like a jar of mayonnaise left out of the fridge, this earlier “return of painting” was tainted. The dubious charge: Neo-Expressionism was reactionary.

A big-money juggernaut backing German painters, heralding the return to international prominence of European art and dragging assorted Schnabels and Salles in its American wake, Neo-Expressionism betrayed the anti-visual revolution of Conceptual art and stampeded straight to the marketplace. “Examining Pictures” does feature significant or surprising examples by Germans Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, Jorg Immendorff and Gerhard Richter--but every single picture dates from before 1980. Rather than one of Richter’s big, glamorous abstractions, which were a virtual logo of the 1980s, a modest 1975 double portrait of British Conceptual artists Gilbert & George turns up in the show.

Tellingly, the single work here from the ‘80s by a German artist is Martin Kippenberger’s cheerfully narcissistic, potbellied 1988 self-portrait in his underpants--an ironic conceptual goof on the gassier pretensions of Neo-Ex from a (now tragically deceased) member of the younger generation. The Kippenberger is certainly swell, but absent a contemporaneous example by a target of his puckish disdain, contextually diminished.

Patricide is of course the way of art, and Kippenberger’s wicked demolition of his elders is apt. It recalls the last time a major group of painters successfully undertook such a parental slaughter, when American Pop artists in the 1960s turned to the most banal, commercial and otherwise unacceptable means they could find to picture the pieties of modern abstract painting--and thus pull its plug.

The electricity in the show’s “Big Electric Chair” by Andy Warhol is provided through a basic visual device: Crimson paint is screened over a ground of emerald green, which sets off sparks on your retina. Likewise Edward Ruscha’s rarely seen word painting, “Scream,” whose visual shout is constructed from a bold graphic design and traffic-stopping palette of yellow and black.

Warhol and Ruscha are the only American Pop artists in the show, which forgoes Rosenquist and Lichtenstein. (British expatriate David Hockney is here with a terrific early work, but it predates his classic California Pop.) Pop art’s insistence on the aesthetic primacy of sophisticated visual rhetoric seems to have disqualified it from “Examining Pictures: Exhibiting Paintings.” Pop’s wholesale massacre of its Abstract Expressionist forebears is reduced to a drive-by shooting.

Which brings us to Shadow No. 2: Flat-out loving painting is taboo, as if an act of necrophilia, because the show is built on the mistaken belief that painting died 30 years ago.

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The exhibition “looks at painting in its prolonged moment of crisis,” as its catalog declares in a ritual repetition of a fundamental mistake. For painting, despite the confused insistence of some, did not in fact die circa 1970, when Conceptual art took the lead. Painting didn’t die, art died. “Art is no longer justifiable,” as the title of an interview with French Conceptualist Daniel Buren declared that year.

Back then, painting was just the thing that established art most often happened to look like. When you said art, painting came to mind. In the politically charged aftermath of 1968, whether in Paris or New York, Bernard Buffet or Jules Olitski, art of any kind had come to seem next to impossible.

Oils, acrylics, brushes, canvas--painting per se was not the problem. Art was the problem. Conceptualism--an art built of ideas, in which materials didn’t matter--had been around for some time; but Conceptualism gained traction and emerged as a powerful force when the need to re-think art became widely felt.

“Examining Pictures: Exhibiting Paintings” was organized by Italian art critic Francesco Bonami, now curator of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and Judith Nesbitt, curator of London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery. Its catalog statement that the show was prompted by a recognition that “in Europe and North America, there had been a curious shift toward painting” in the 1990s is symptomatic of the confusion; the shift is not really curious at all.

Take Elizabeth Peyton’s luscious, ruby-lipped portrait of “John Lennon, aged 6” (1997), whose riveting presence looms much larger than its actual, diminutive size (just 12 inches high by 8 inches wide). This tiny painting of an aggressively rendered, strangely familiar face performs a stunning manipulation, pulling you in so close for a better look that everything else in the room falls away, disappearing from your peripheral vision. It’s just you and this weird devotional painting sanctifying the childhood of a pop star, in a face-to-face encounter.

In succulent oils Peyton depicts the since-slain Beatle at what would have been roughly the artist’s own age circa 1970, when art’s death was being widely debated. There’s a lesson in this: Today’s young painters were not alive when art expired in the wake of the ‘60s--or else, like Peyton, they were small children, not yet aware that something called art even existed. The “shift toward painting” in the 1990s is largely an accident of birth, a dumb consequence of timing, without metaphysical meaning or implications for some 30-year “crisis.”

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The show features work by two dozen painters who were under 40 in the mid-1990s. The only stake these young artists have in mortality is in killing off their artistic elders--just as Kippenberger wanted with German Neo-Expressionism or Warhol and Ruscha with American Abstract Expressionism. The fact that so many elders of today’s younger painters tend to find painting vaguely (or frankly) disreputable just makes it all that much more irresistible. The kids are doing what kids do--which is fun, not curious.

One big disappointment of “Examining Pictures” is that most of the best work chosen for display is by artists safely over 40. Exemplary are John Baldessari’s classic 1967-68 text painting, from which the show takes its under-the-microscope title, or the great image of artist-as-comic-hoodlum portrayed by Philip Guston (1913-80), who was an inspiration for many post-1970 painters.

New painting may have been the catalyst for the show, but it’s poorly represented, with way too much mediocre work from New York, Italy and especially Britain. The selection probably represents the simple regional biases of its Italian and British curators (as for New York, ambitious curators everywhere always have one eye glued to Manhattan). To assert my own regional tilt: I could lie on the sand in Santa Monica and come up with a list of more gifted young ‘90s painters who emerged within a 20-mile radius of my beach blanket than you’ll find represented among the assembled out-of-town art in the Hammer’s galleries. (Toba Khedoori and Laura Owens, the two younger L.A-based painters who are in the show, would certainly be on it.) The curators have got to get out more.

The best part of “Examining Pictures: Exhibiting Paintings” is the way works are eccentrically mixed and matched in the galleries, without regard to typical categories like country, chronology or style. Next to a sign-like Jannis Kounellis, dominated by the word “paint” elegantly scripted above a silvery puddle, hangs a Robert Ryman abstraction composed just from white paint marked on a white surface--and the singularity of each painting gets quietly emphasized. Each one rises or falls in an eloquent conversation conducted with the viewer.

One unexpected byproduct of this tight curatorial focus on individual paintings is that, for the first time in memory, the convention of painting museum walls white as a backdrop for contemporary art suddenly seems tired and anachronistic. Once, back when art itself was in doubt, white walls signified that art was indeed in the building. Now it seems sort of dopey, like the white hoods that shroud the hapless macho artists chomping on cigars in Guston’s poignant work.

Who could have guessed that a museum show about 40 years of painting would make you long to paint the museum’s walls?

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“EXAMINING PICTURES: EXHIBITING PAINTINGS,” UCLA/Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd. Dates: Through April 2. Closed Mondays. Prices: $4.50. Free on Thursday. Phone: (310) 443-7020.