Madame Yevonde Pictured Her Time

In a riveting 1936 picture of Vivien Leigh, British portrait photographer Madame Yevonde (1893-1975) surrounded the actress with a sparkling sea of intense orange color that crackles against her emerald green jacket. The portrait is lit so that a thin yellow line traces the border that separates these secondary colors, as if Leigh were literally electrified from within. It’s an extraordinarily deft use of color as an expressive element.

It’s also technically adept, given that the portrait predates by a year the single biggest leap forward in the long and difficult history of color photography: Kodachrome film, whose three layers of emulsion meant that a single exposure could replace the three separate negatives Yevonde had to use. Like Paul Outerbridge in California, she was chromatically gifted at a time when color photography was not highly regarded.

Also like Outerbridge, she was a commercial photographer--a fact that helps explain both her need to experiment with technique and her relative obscurity today. Variously known as Yevonde Cumber and Edith Plummer, she reinvented herself with a society-style moniker, all the better to fit the society magazines of London that became her steady clients.

At Jan Kesner Gallery, 19 photographs form a debut exhibition (part of the L.A. International Biennial) of recent prints made from Madame Yevonde’s original negatives. Most focus on portraits of society ladies costumed as classical goddesses. (The idea was born at a 1935 charity gala.) The outfits tend toward the perverse and ostentatious--Medusa as a pale-skinned, dark-eyed vamp wrapped in snake skins; Flora bedecked with tulips and daisies--and sophisticated camp would be a fitting description of the whole.

Yevonde’s way with color is nothing to be sneezed at. She used it like paint to dramatize the theatrical narratives she pictured.

Adorned with enormous pearls, Helen of Troy (the Duchess of Argyll) is an austere vision of icy blues, punctuated with crimson lips and fingernails. Baroness Gagern, swathed in golden robes and bathed in golden light, caresses the snout of a gold-bedecked bull--Europa in the swooning moments before her abduction by Zeus.

Yevonde’s self-portrait declares her self-perception. Focused and severe, she is nonetheless elegantly attired and surrounded by a gold Baroque frame. One rubber-gloved hand holds a glass-plate negative, while a still life of darkroom chemicals and camera lenses is laid out on the table before her. Yevonde blends art and science to create remarkable transformations: Dressed in blue, she’s juxtaposed herself with a bright blue butterfly.

For those with a classical bent, she also adds a telling image. Above her head hangs her portrait photograph of the Duchess of Wellington dressed as Hecate, goddess of witchcraft. She hovers over the artist as if from Olympian heights, acting as her sorceress-muse.

Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 938-6834, through Aug. 25. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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New and Old: Superficially, “Liga Pang: New Work” presents a very different artist than the one last seen in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Then, while living in L.A., Pang was a Neo-Expressionist painter of large, brightly colored, personally inflected images. Now, living back in her native Japan, she makes assemblages--mostly from natural found materials.

The untitled centerpiece of her three-work show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art is a pair of “carpets,” woven together with bits of twine from the slender tips of bamboo plants. These natural tapestries are suspended in the main gallery to form a continuous, undulating wave. It’s large enough to walk beneath and through, as well as around.

The feathery pattern made by the bamboo tips recalls a crosshatched pencil drawing, which gets more tangled as you look through its layers, while also suggesting an spider’s web. The undulating plane is part ocean wave, part rolling landscape.

And, when you stand inside it becomes a rudimentary shelter, with the accompanying references to protection from the elements; yet it also becomes a net, which suggests a man-made snare like the spider’s trap. The Expressionist qualities of Pang’s earlier paintings linger here, albeit in more generalized, less psychologically descriptive ways.

Those qualities are more pronounced nearby in a small pedestal sculpture. A little house made from sticks is stuffed with a bramble of twigs, inside of which sits a small plaster figure. The home is like a ruin being engulfed from within by unstoppable nature.

Pang’s dialogue between natural forces and cultural ones is most simply encapsulated in a wall hanging, whose rectangular dimensions are slightly larger than those of a viewer standing before it. Titled “Bermuda Grass,” it was made by tying pieces of grass into a loose, open grid. The grid is a Modernist icon, but its mathematical, machined form is here tempered by organic structure and hand manufacture.

Technically proficient, Pang’s sculptures reflect Post-Minimalist orthodoxy, which infuses a pictorial approach into nonfigurative Minimalist art. Their traditional themes don’t benefit from being rendered in very traditional forms. This “new work” is recent, but it feels oddly like old work.

Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 586-6488, through Sept. 2. Closed Monday.

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Figuratively Speaking: In his second solo show at Blum + Poe Gallery, German painter Dirk Skreber uses materials associated with abstract painting as peculiarly potent metaphors--as figures of visual speech. The fluidity of paint becomes the ruinous force of a flood, which sweeps over landscapes drowning cars, houses and airport runways. Masking tape wraps canvas surfaces, as if it were a bandage on a sprained ankle. A related kind of tape--thick, spongy weather-stripping--seems lame and hopeless when arrayed against the destructive forces of nature.

Or, are they the forces of culture? In one witty passage, weather stripping is lined up next to a flood dike, which is built from a long, 1/4-inch thick, rectangular line of oil paint. A flurry of wrist-driven brushwork breaches the little dam, portending disaster.

A pair of small, cardboard architectural models--one in the shape of a swastika, the other of a building falling off its foundation--likewise gesture toward doom. But they don’t manage to embody a queasy sense of potential ruin the way Skreber’s best paintings do.

Three of the four large canvases in this smart and engaging show (also part of the L.A. International) are aerial views in which the plane of the canvas evokes a plain in the landscape. But the large, smoothly painted surfaces of muddy brown, silver gray and ominous black at first appear to be total abstractions. Crisp, colorful shapes slowly reveal themselves to be tractor-trailers, flying birds or rooftops seen from above. Their figurative qualities literally float into consciousness, surreptitiously accelerating your sense of being adrift.

Skreber’s fourth painting is a tall panel in which vertical strips of black tape are traversed by thick, horizontal stripes of black oil paint punctuated by bright yellow bands. The painting has the look of an emergency sign. You keep trying to “read” it that way as a warning, but like a Frank Stella black-painting its abstraction remains stubbornly intact. A wrestling match ensues in your brain.

Blum + Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through Aug. 18. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Take Off: Good old-fashioned American Puritanism reared its sex-terrified head at Los Angeles International Airport last month, when a new work of public art was unveiled at the American Airlines terminal. “The Wonders of the Heavens and Flying,” a serial image of a leaping male nude etched into a black granite floor by artist and architect Susan Narduli, gave one or more unidentified airport employees the vapors. (Bare skin! In public!)

Either the airline or the airport--depending on whom you believe--ordered the offending nudes covered up, until a review of the project could by conducted by the city’s Cultural Affairs Department.

They reviewed, and the wrappings properly came off.

Now that the work can be seen (it’s in front of the security scanners, at the upper level entrance to the gates), it’s hard to understand how anyone could get excited by the image--artistically or otherwise. Embedded in a red-white-and-blue terrazzo floor that depicts a stylized solar system--it’s a clumsy, logo-like version of a well-known terrazzo-floor sky-map by Alexis Smith at the L.A. Convention Center--the etched-photo mural is tepid and uninspiring.

The overlapping sequence of four images shows a man taking an athletic leap. It recalls the classic motion studies of photographer Edweard Muybridge, in which horses, a pole vaulter, acrobats and others were captured in action. Muybridge’s scientific pictures shook the artistic world in the late 19th century, and they’ve influenced everyone from Thomas Eakins in the 1880s to Sol Lewitt in the 1960s.

Visually, the gridded black-granite disk reads as an abstract space, while the photo-etching process yields a sharp and disjunctive realism for the leaping man. Narduli’s figure feels aimless and adrift--less like a daring leap into the void than a visual lesson plan.

Aerospace gets linked to art through the slender cord of demonstrated motive: an enigmatic yearning to break the bonds of gravity--which may well push pilots to fly and ballet dancers to jump, but is unlikely to explain the actions of passengers queuing up to have their baggage X-rayed.

American Airlines, Terminal 4, Los Angeles International Airport. Permanent.