Bureau of inspiration

The first thing Arnold Mesches saw when he came to work on the morning of Aug. 6, 1956, was shattered glass from his building’s front door. He scrambled upstairs to his studio above Melrose Avenue and saw that all the art there -- more than 200 pieces -- was gone.

Whoever it was had taken his radio, his art supplies, even the paintbrushes he had left in turpentine. Among the losses was a series of almost 30 paintings and drawings on the life and death of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, whose execution as Soviet spies Mesches had decried.

It didn’t occur to him at first to suspect the Federal Bureau of Investigation, although he long had known the FBI was watching him.

Since the mid-1940s he had attended rallies and meetings for an assortment of leftist causes. He belonged to the Communist Party for a time, thinking its aim was to perfect American democracy, not imperil it. From his beginnings as a student at the Art Center School in Los Angeles (now Art Center College of Design), he made no separation between his politics and his art.

“I decided to become ... the Jewish Goya of the 20th century,” he once wrote. “I wanted to try to attack war and the makers of war.”

The burglary didn’t traumatize or deter Mesches. But the memory of shattered glass returned during the 1990s when friends showed him their own FBI files, acquired under the Freedom of Information Act.

Maybe if he got his files, it would reveal who was behind the break-in and lead him to his vanished works. He also found pure aesthetic beauty in the shapes of the inky slabs where redactors had blotted out things the FBI wanted to keep hidden. Even if his files didn’t solve any mysteries, he sensed, the pages -- 760 of them -- were likely to smolder with thematic and visual possibility that he could fan into art.

Mesches’ file arrived in 1999, and by the end of 2002 he had created a sequence of 57 paintings. They are, for the most part, collages in which passages from his FBI record are juxtaposed with images he made to accompany them. Some spring from his imagination; others are culled from historical photographs, movie posters and magazine advertisements of the time. “Arnold Mesches: FBI Files” opened last year at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, a branch of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He rates it the most prestigious exhibition of a career that unfolded in L.A. from 1946 to 1984, leaped to New York when his first show there, when he was 61, was a critical success, and continues now from a new base at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Mesches, 80, and his wife, novelist Jill Ciment, began teaching there last year.

“FBI Files” opened Friday at the Skirball Cultural Center. Last month, the U.S. chapter of the International Assn. of Art Critics honored its New York showing as the second best of 2003 by an “emerging/under-known artist.”

“This remarkably-timed exhibition was at once a warning and a revelation,” stated the award citation.

People who know Mesches say he is extremely gregarious, and his voice crackled brightly as he spoke over the phone recently from the Manhattan hotel where he was staying while in town to accept the art critics’ award.

“I’ve had 107 solo shows, but I’m still under-known,” he said wryly. “But I don’t mind being under-known when I get awards for it.”

He wasn’t under-known to the FBI. Mesches says its agents and informants carefully monitored the meetings he attended, kept track of such personal minutiae as the date and place of his son’s birth, and sketched and surreptitiously photographed him -- including pictures one of his students took with a hidden necktie camera.

“Every time I sneezed they had it down. I would say they were right on the button” when it came to amassing accurate information about his doings. But there is, Mesches says, one big gap in the file the FBI sent him, which stretches from 1945 to 1972. He received no entries for the six months bracketing the ransacking of his studio. To him, it confirms that the FBI was involved.

“I would find it highly surprising that we were party to a break-in and stole some guy’s artwork,” said Matt McLaughlin, an FBI spokesman in Los Angeles. “I’m not aware of the FBI having ever stolen anything, particularly artwork.”

Despite the prevalent black blots, Mesches says, he could glean enough from the files to tell who informed on him. The list includes neighbors, friends, students and people on the L.A. art scene.

“You get goose pimples when you read this stuff. It’s like having mice in the closet,” he says. But all these years later, he has no wish to confront anyone who spied on him.

“At the time, I would have screamed and hollered. At this point, who needs it? All I can do now is expose the horrors of the Patriot Act as being the same kind of thing.”

Mesches, the grandson of Lithuanian Jews who fled pogroms a century ago, traces the beginnings of his social conscience to his father, Benjamin. Growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., the son saw -- and has painted -- the father on his door-to-door rounds during the Great Depression, trying to persuade desperate families to part with gold heirlooms for cash so he might resell them in a bid to keep desperation away from his own door.

“He once said to me, ‘There are two things you must learn in life: Learn what is evil, and learn what justice is.’ ”

At 19, Mesches came to L.A.. to study advertising design. But he decided that painting was his calling. He dropped out of school and began to teach himself by studying masters of socially trenchant painting, including Goya, Daumier and Max Beckmann. He got a job painting sets for a Tarzan movie until studio workers went on strike in 1946.

“It was a political education,” Mesches recalls. “Just walking the picket lines, talking to people, and learning who really runs the culture of this country.”

He began selling his paintings and branched into teaching as a part-time instructor at USC, UCLA and Otis Art Institute. His first wife, Sylvia, joined him from Buffalo and gave birth to a son and daughter in the early 1950s.

Artistry reborn

Mesches says his artistry had a rebirth when he fell in love with Ciment, one of his students. She was 17 and entering CalArts. He was nearing 50, concerned that his spark as a painter was flickering and that he might be better off writing novels.

“I got an education in the contemporary world when she went to CalArts -- conceptual art, all the things my education was sparse on. It inspired me to get back into painting.”

Critics began to find a new maturity and fresh vibrancy in his work. “Mesches ... has been demonstrating enormous creative potential for years. But it is only with his present unqualifiedly excellent exhibition of recent paintings that he has fulfilled it,” Los Angeles Times art critic Henry J. Seldis raved about a 1976 show.

Mesches has been hailed for uninhibited brushwork and a vivid use of color. His paintings have incorporated a menagerie of recurring symbols, among them horses and clowns. Besides clearly political subject matter, he has painted portraits of his family and memories from his childhood -- including wild, ominous canvases of the Coney Island amusement park in Brooklyn.

He finally had his first New York show at the end of 1984. “Though his work looks like the latest thing to come down the New Wave Expressionist pike,” Mesches deserved respect as a forerunner of the trend away from pure abstraction and toward art with identifiable subjects, Grace Glueck wrote in the New York Times. Charlotta Kotik, chairwoman and curator of the contemporary art department at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Nina Felshin, curator of exhibitions at Wesleyan University’s Zilkha Gallery in Middletown, Conn., have kept close track of Mesches’ work since his arrival in New York. They say Mesches matters because he outfits political meanings in metaphoric images, vivid colors and a forceful, surprising style that gives viewers a striking sensory experience and leaves them room to ponder, speculate and come to their own conclusions.

“Instead of hitting you over the head with a single meaning, he allows the viewers to bring their own experiences to it,” Felshin says. “The paintings stand totally on their own, apart from what they’re about, as beautiful paintings.”

“His personal experience translates into larger themes that speak to all of us,” Kotik says. “It’s not about heroes or special people. It’s about every one of us.”

“I didn’t want them to be political propaganda,” Mesches says of his “FBI Files” series -- and of his work as a whole. “I wanted them to be a piece of art.”

At 80, still consumed with issues of war and peace, civil liberties and justice, Mesches clearly is not an artist who has outlived his time.

“Years ago, any of us who were seen as political artists felt that we would never have a chance to be seen in a dignified way,” says L.A. painter Martin Lubner, a friend of Mesches since the 1950s.

“What’s wonderful for Arnie is that culture finally has a need for that. The culture turns around, and it’s his turn.”

Today’s turbulent events may be good for Mesches’ career, but not for his peace of mind. He has laid groundwork for his next series of paintings, aiming to render on canvas his fear that American liberties will be among the dearest casualties of the war on terrorism.

“The rise of this horrendous right-wing movement is scaring the hell out of me, and how to make it into art is my problem,” he says. “I think I’ve found the form. I’m going to lay the drawings on the floor and do some heavy thinking.”

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‘Arnold Mesches: FBI Files’

Where: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A.

When: Tuesday-Saturday, noon to 5 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Ends: March 28

Price: Adults, $8; seniors/students, $6

Contact: (310) 440-4500