‘Images of Women’: A History of Modernism

Politically loaded and suspiciously vague, “Images of Women” is a weighty title for a gallery exhibition. But it’s fitting. With 100 works spanning nearly two centuries, the current show at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts is a weighty endeavor all around--and probably the better for it.

The conceptual basis of the show is as straightforward as the title. There are no over-arching themes or nuanced analyses, didactic texts or clever categories. Rather, it’s a collector’s show, stocked with an appealing, chronologically organized array of mostly small-scale prints, drawings, paintings and sculptures by a respectable assortment of artists. They include a number of household names (Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, Chagall, Rouault, Miro, Gorky, Ernst, Picasso, De Kooning, etc.).

To the extent that the show acknowledges the politics surrounding the representation of women in art at all, it is politely indifferent. What comes across just the same is the sheer ubiquity of the female body--disguised as goddess, monster, siren, mother or worker. The subject is a veritable cornerstone in the history of Modernism.

The female body is a manifestation of heaven-bound purity in Henri Fantin-Latour’s dreamy “Angel Ascending With a Woman” (1884), the embodiment of dignified labor in Diego Rivera’s eloquent “Textile Weaver” (1934), and an indecipherable piece of a standard Cubist puzzle in Hans Burkhardt’s badly dated “Woman With a Wine Glass” (1947). In a humorous 1931 line drawing by Gaston Lachaise, she struts like a drag queen with watermelon breasts, while in a delicate lithograph by Aristide Maillol she wades through pillows like a nude, boudoir swamp-creature.

Though there is a fair share of mediocre work--as might be expected, considering the scale of the exhibition--there are plenty of gems to keep it afloat.

The playful line drawings of Louise Nevelson, Milton Avery, Man Ray and David Hockney are all particularly charming. Two works by Kathe Kollwitz (a sculpture and a lithograph) convey a degree of hard emotion that is lacking in most of the male artists’ work. And a blue ink drawing of a classically posed nude by George Grosz, though one of the most traditional works in the show, is simply stunning.

Sacred and titillating, beautiful and banal, emotional and sexual, oppressed and exalted--the as- sortment of representations offered here is as varied as in any art history textbook.

But here it’s up to the viewer to draw connections and conclusions.

Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea, L.A., (323) 938-5222, through April 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Vaguely Out of Touch With ‘Nervous System’

The best quality of “A Nervous System”--an exhibition of five young New York-based artists at Hayworth Gallery--is that it makes for a perfectly pleasant visual environment.

Giovanni Garcia-Fenech’s paintings are clean, flat abstractions that resemble images of microscopic organisms, enlarged and tastefully simplified into a few solid forms. Mark Masyga’s paintings, looser and somewhat more delicate than Garcia-Fenech’s, are solid fields of translucent color overlaid with floating clusters of tiny, multihued bricks.

In Nina Bovasso’s paintings, also abstract, color is a more explosive, emotional force and tumbles across the canvas as though propelled by its own internal combustion. Jeff Gauntt’s works, stylistic depictions of trees, are slick and tightly controlled compositions marked by a careful interplay of textures and a spare incorporation of sculptural elements.

The best of Elizabeth McGrath’s sculptures is a curious pyramid of cardboard toilet paper tubes, green glass and sullied hand towels that wavers(albeit rather unexceptionally) between the neat confines of design and the loose quality inherent in found materials.

The precise implication of the show’s title is unclear, but it does allude to the essence of this work: a frenetic but conservative energy, governed by a strict, self-conscious sense of formalism. For this Angeleno, it calls to mind the confined spaces of New York City: the narrow streets, crowded subways, small studios, and entrenched institutions. Unfortunately, with the exception of Bovasso’s work, which is promisingly reckless (even more so, happily, than in her solo show at Richard Heller Gallery last fall), this conservatism leads to attractive but largely unsatisfying art.

One reason for this shortcoming may lie in a statement by the show’s organizers, which is a tangle of typical art-world ambiguities. Being “emphatically ... open-ended,” the work “resists easy interpretation”; it blends “accident” with “carefully executed detail,” “representation” with “abstraction”; it is “personal” yet avoids “narrative and autobiography.”

One comes away from the work wondering if all the verbal dodging isn’t just a sanctified method of avoiding responsibility for actually making a statement. If these artists were to throw their stylish ambiguity to the wind and dive straight into being either representational or abstract, personal or objective--or else chuck the whole dialectic fixation altogether and take the risk of simply being sincere--there would be a lot more to gain from the work’s aesthetic charm.

Hayworth Gallery, 148 N. Hayworth Ave., L.A., (323) 933-5565, through April 9. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Boundaries Are Shifting in ‘Artificial Splendor’

“Artificial Splendor” is a small but energetic exhibition of work that aims to straddle that ever-shifting boundary between the natural and the artificial in art. Using hip, contemporary substances like resin, Duralar, polyurethane, velvet and aluminum, the six artists in the show play up the material qualities of their organic subjects, exploiting (in the words of its organizers) “the potential artificiality of nature.”

The results vary. In Betsy Kenyon’s photographs of dead flower buds, pictured singly or lined up like rows of bodies for an autopsy, much of the delicacy of the natural forms is sacrificed to the dry, impersonal effect of the materials (Piezo pigment printed on aluminum). Sierra Slentz-Anderson’s jazzy paintings--frenetic tangles of colorful shapes derived from shadows cast by plants and flowers--are perfectly enjoyable but significantly limited by the narrow terms of the exercise.

Wayne Littlejohn’s playful wall sculptures--tacky clusters of cast polyurethane sea creatures--are happily over the top, pulling nature in the direction of souvenir shop kitsch. Similarly audacious are Mary Warner’s large, acrylic-on-velvet paintings of chrysanthemums, one of which curves assertively outward toward the viewer, the other seductively inward as though attempting, like an O’Keeffe flower gone rabid, to swallow the viewer whole.

The most refined works in the show are Kimberly Squaglia’s liquid-smooth oil and resin paintings of wooded horizon lines twisted into kaleidoscopic patterns and Cherie Benner Davis’ elegant vein-patterned designs, some cleanly carved into planks of wood, others painted in an oily, blood-like red onto translucent Duralar.

The concept behind “Artificial Splendor” is not especially novel. All art involves the process of artificialization to some degree. But in the work here--particularly that of Squaglia and Davis, which is so attentive to the resonant quality of its materials--one comes to see more clearly how the nature of our relationship with contemporary, man-made resources defines the nature of our relationship with the natural world.

Frumkin Duval Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 452-8370, through April 6. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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A Few of Joan Brown’s Very Favorite Things

On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, Koplin Gallery has assembled a pleasantly intimate exhibition of paintings by Joan Brown, the late Bay Area artist whose work inaugurated the space in 1982. Titled “A Few of Her Favorite Things: Models, Cats and Dogs,” the exhibition is an affectionate cross-section of the artist’s preferred themes. It demonstrates the intelligence of her vision and makes the case for the continuing validity of her work, 12 years after her death.

The images, most of which date to the mid-1970s, seem simple at a glance. She builds them as one might build a patchwork quilt: with thick, black lines and flat planes of bold color. Aside from a few deliriously cluttered ink and fake-fur collages she produced right out of art school, most of the compositions are straightforward and unadorned--even cartoonish at times.

There is a solidity to the work, however, that belies its simplicity. Her picture planes are unshakable, her forms inviolable. This is especially appealing in her paintings of models (all female). The most distinctive feature of these women’s bodies, it seems, is that they occupy space--boldly, completely, unapologetically.

They can be playful, thoughtful or pensive but are always, above all, incalculably present. One might say the same of Brown’s own creative spirit throughout this show.

Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 657-9843, through April 13. Closed Sunday and Monday.