Tradition Maintained, Altered

Small gestures are sometimes the most powerful. When the staff and architect were working on plans to renovate and expand the University Art Museum at UC Santa Barbara, they made a small gesture that adds up to a significant difference.

The museum’s entrance was moved from the north side of the building to the south side. Before, it opened onto a courtyard of the university’s art department. Now, right next door to the always bustling student center and Storke Tower, a campus landmark, the art museum opens onto the campus at large.

The shift, designed by Los Angeles-based architect Brenda Levin, not surprisingly rearranges all the interior spaces of the old University Art Museum, which were quaintly shabby and serviceable at best. But the symbolic turn-around is as important. The galleries remain an adjunct of the art department, from which they grew during the last 40 years, but now they address the world at large. Moving the entrance has moved art from the cloister to the community.

The $2.5-million project, which opened earlier this month, has resulted in six pleasant galleries providing 4,500 square feet of exhibition space--modest but sleek. The inaugural installations give an idea of how these handsome, straightforward rooms will be used.

The entrance leads to a sequence of three galleries in which works from the university’s permanent collection are displayed. To the right, three more galleries house temporary exhibitions.

Eclecticism is a watchword for the University Art Museum’s collection. A large, juicy 1970 abstraction by Joan Mitchell anchors one wall of the sun-washed courtyard gallery. Its thick, bristling marks of sunflower-colored paint create a loosely floral link to the equally large but utterly dissimilar picture on the adjacent wall: “The Mystic Marriage of St. Rose of Lima,” an impressively delirious vision of Catholic transcendence over this earthly veil of tears, painted by the colonial Mexican painter Cristobal de Villaplando in the 1680s.

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The second room houses works on paper, drawn from the largest area of concentration in the university’s 7,000-piece collection. The three dozen drawings, prints and photographs range far and wide. Tom Knechtel’s exquisite silver-point portrait of a bright-eyed simian, “Joey” (1989), is wittily hung next to Julia Margaret Cameron’s brooding photographic portrait of Longfellow, printed a century before. Rembrandt’s theatrically atmospheric etching “The Flight Into Egypt” (1654) hangs across the room from Jim Shaw’s feverish and disjointed fantasy “Dream Drawing” (1995).

Also included are a selection of architectural renderings, highlighted by domestic plans from such critically important California architects as Irving Gill (a 1915 apartment building whose units climb up the side of a Los Feliz hill like a modern pueblo cliff-dwelling), Rudolph Schindler (stacked volumes of space creating a crystalline 1928 beach house) and Cliff May (a ranch house for Malibu in an X-marks-the-spot layout, designed right after World War II). These and other renderings are the tip of a very big museum iceberg, which consists of some half-million architectural drawings and related materials.

The final permanent collection room houses the small but sometimes choice Sedgwick collection of Old Master paintings, mostly Italian, Flemish and Dutch. Gems include the little 1490 “Deposition,” with Christ’s battered body lowering from the cross less like dead weight than a feather drifting to earth, painted by the great Gerard David; and a 1496 portrait of a sloe-eyed young girl--possibly the future Catherine of Aragon--by the underappreciated Flemish expatriate to Spain Juan de Flandes.

Also on view are the extensive Sigmund Morgenroth collection of Renaissance medals--said to be of great historical importance, and perhaps so--as well as an approximation of an old-fashioned wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities. This eclectic example of the European precursor to the collecting impulse that drove the modern museum ranges from Dutch still-life paintings and pre-Columbian sculptures to a Spanish colonial polychromed statue of St. Anne and assorted 20th century crafts.

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Two special exhibitions are featured in the temporary exhibition galleries. One is more dutiful than delightful, the other is unfortunately weak.

Work by Japanese artist Kenji Yanobe, 35, was featured in the final exhibition at the old museum, so now he’s been invited back to open the new space with a small show called “Atom Boy Returns to Save the World!?” This reed-thin selection of apocalyptic Pop sculptures and photographs chronicles Yanobe’s fictional persona, Atom Boy, a comic-book-style character who struggles--however ineffectually--with contemporary decay.

A one-person automobile and an oversize gum-ball machine dispensing emergency provisions are accouterments for the contemporary apocalypse. So is a yellow rubber diving suit, tricked-out with Geiger counters and a strobe light, creating an intentionally pathetic suit-of-armor for the battle of survival against modern catastrophe. Color transparencies mounted in light-boxes show the forlorn Atom Boy dressed in the suit and posed in contaminated settings, such as nuclear-irradiated Chernobyl and the aesthetically dubious 1970 Osaka World’s Fair.

One assumes the contamination being addressed is thus natural and cultural. The flimsiness of this bland, jokey art tips the balance toward overall cultural rot, however, which happily contradicts my own experience of the world. Claiming that things are always only getting worse is guaranteed to draw a knowing crowd, while setting up the claimant is an inspired seer.

The second and larger show is the first survey of American landscape painter Fernand Lungren (1857-1932), who spent the last 29 years of his life based in Southern California (first in L.A., from 1903 to 1905, then in Santa Barbara). Some 300 Lungren pictures were bequeathed to the university. After extensive conservation work, and with a few loans from private collections and commercial galleries, some 50 paintings and 13 works on paper have been assembled here.

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Like many American artists of his era, Lungren was a successful commercial illustrator, working for Scribner’s, Century Magazine, McClure’s and other journals. He grew up in Toledo, Ohio, headed east (to Philadelphia) for training and then farther still (to Paris and London) for the requisite application of a European cultural veneer. His decisive travel, however, was to the West, where he was sent several times by the Santa Fe Railroad to paint the “exotic” sights and lure travelers to follow.

Stylistically, Lungren was Whistler without the wit. The exploding fireworks of his picture “Rockets” (1899-1901) are a clear hommage to the work of the American expa-triate and dandy, painted during Lungren’s three-year sojourn in London. Pyrotechnical display is its subject--but not its aim, as it always was for Whistler.

Instead, Lungren’s image is informed by up-to-date fashions like Impressionism and the vogue for Japanese prints. But the result is more along the lines of aestheticized reportage.

Lungren’s essential conservatism never left him, even in the 1910s and 1920s when his paintings of the American desert began--inadvertently--to approach nonfigurative abstraction. A tonalist to the end, he painted the sandy gray expanse of desert and rose-hued sky as dry surfaces of fragile color. Unlike, say, Agnes Pelton, whose slightly later tourist-trade paintings of the California desert nonetheless bristle with an ecstatic, Symbolist-inspired sense of mystery and life, Lungren seems to have been more taken with creating a refined but dutiful record of what his eye saw. His tasteful pictures always seem old-fashioned, tethered to the descriptive pleasures of the illustrator.

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* University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara, (805) 903-2951, through July 9. Closed Mondays.