Picasso, Pollock and the quirky curator

“Picasso to Pollock: Modern Masterpieces From the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art” is both more and less than its title suggests.

More artists are included in the 59-work exhibition at the Orange County Museum of Art than the mainline Modernists who traveled the established path from Pablo Picasso’s Cubism to Jackson Pollock’s drips via Surrealism’s psychological kinks. To be historically accurate, in chronological terms, the five-gallery show would have to be retitled. But “Maurice B. Prendergast to Joseph Cornell” doesn’t have the same ring to it, and certainly not the name recognition likely to draw crowds.

“Picasso to Pollock” is less a thumbnail sketch of Modern art’s streamlined sweep from Expressionism through Abstraction to their synthesis in Abstract Expressionism than a surprisingly intimate selection of paintings and sculptures. Its focus has less to do with the entirety of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s diverse holdings than with one man’s 18-year tenure as director of the Hartford, Conn., institution.

A. Everett Austin Jr. was 26 when he dropped out of Harvard and took over the directorship of the oldest museum in the United States. From 1927 to 1944, the Sunday painter, amateur actor, stage-set designer and hobbyist magician initiated a flurry of exhibitions and acquisitions remarkable for their quality, quantity and catch-if-catch-can verve. They’re recounted, along with dozens of colorful anecdotes and juicy, behind-the-scenes details in a wonderfully readable catalog essay by curator Eric M. Zafran.

Known by his nickname, “Chick,” Austin made a career that stands in stark contrast to those of most museum directors (and curators) today. Even at small, off-the-beaten-track institutions, these corporate-style professionals behave more like buttoned-down bureaucrats afraid to make waves than courageous, art-loving nuts with a finger on the pulse -- even on a budget.

Fifteen paintings Austin acquired for the Wadsworth Atheneum form the core of the show. There’s not a dud among them. Their impressive range attests to catholic taste and deep curiosity.

Surrealism predominates. Around Hartford in the 1930s, it was called New Super-Realism. Among the 15 works acquired by Austin, there are three oils on canvas by Salvador Dali and one each by Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, Joan Miro and Pierre Roy (a French Surrealist little known today but wildly celebrated in his time), as well as a lovely little gouache on paper by Yves Tanguy, who settled in Connecticut with wife Kay Sage (whose work is also on display).

On a 1931 trip to Paris, Austin saw Dali’s work and was instantly smitten. The next year, he tried to buy the young Spaniard’s “Persistence of Memory,” already famous for its limp watches drooping over tree branches and tabletops. But the board couldn’t be cajoled to come up with $350, so Austin settled for the $120 “La Solitude” (1931). The quiet little picture is the first Dali to have entered a museum’s collection.

Ten years later Austin purchased Max Ernst’s “Europe After the Rain” (1940-42), a Surrealist tour de force that marries devastation and decrepitude with claustrophobic grandeur, for $1,400. (It’s now reproduced in nearly every textbook with a chapter on Surrealism.) In the meantime, he added a great 1939 Matta ($400), a delightfully perverse 1924 Miro ($35) and Tanguy’s 1933 “Dream Landscape” ($35).

Figurative painting is also well represented in Austin’s acquisitions. The earliest is “The General’s Illness,” a 1914-15 street scene by Giorgio de Chirico that’s simultaneously a still life and a symbolic portrait. The most recent is Willem de Kooning’s strangely static “Standing Man” (1942), which pays timid homage to Picasso by filtering the style of his Blue Period figures through a lens of faded browns and dull tans.

An oddly chaste portrait by Balthus and an uncharacteristically realistic bather by Picasso stand out for their fidelity to the visible world. But neither is so simple. A dark sense of foreboding haunts the Balthus, and a streak of mean-spirited humor suffuses the Picasso. No bigger than a notecard, this rock-solid little painting from 1922 depicts a naked bather drying herself with all the grace of a brontosaurus. And Diego Rivera’s mid-size picture of a little girl holding a smiling skull mask suggests that Realism and Surrealism were never far apart in Austin’s promiscuous imagination.

Only two abstract works are among the original 15: a dazzling blue, black and white painting by Piet Mondrian (a steal, in 1935, at $399.65) and a terrific wood relief by Jean Arp.

The rest of the exhibition builds on these 15 works. Traveling back in time, it features an example or two from such styles as Expressionism, Fauvism and Cubism. Traveling toward the present, it displays fewer works in fewer styles, most notably Realism and Abstraction.

Standouts, among the early works, include a charming country scene Henri Rousseau painted in 1906; Ernst Kirchner’s jauntily ominous “Suburb of Berlin” (1912); Paul Klee’s whimsical 1924 drawing on canvas; Henri Matisse’s mesmerizing 1918 portrait of his 24-year-old daughter, Marguerite; and a pink-tinted winter seascape by Edvard Munch, also from 1918.

Among the more recent highlights are Alexander Calder’s toy-size 1957 sculpture of a brightly colored dragon made from cut metal; a dreamy, domestically scaled, sorbet-tinted Mark Rothko painting from 1949; and a similarly sized Pollock, abuzz with splashes of metallic silver enamel, from the same year. Hung side by side, on the same wall as Matta’s “Prescience” (1939), the two abstract canvases reveal their debt to the Argentina-born painter.

To the left of the Matta hangs Ernst’s “Europe After the Rain.” In this setting, the Surrealist masterpiece looks like that style’s swan song: old-fashioned, illustrative and almost remedial in its evocation of psychological “meaning.”

This point is driven home, albeit unintentionally, by the show as a whole. More than a third of its works are by die-hard Surrealists, both first-rate and second tier. Along with three paintings by Dali and two by Ernst, this component of the exhibition includes two paintings by Rene Magritte, four more by Picasso, four by Tanguy and one each by Graham Sutherland, Charles Seliger and Kay Sage.

In terms of art history, Surrealism is the bridge that takes viewers from Picasso to Pollock. But for a style that was supposed to give form to the unpredictability of the subconscious, Surrealism gets awfully repetitive, especially in the third and fourth galleries, where it seems formulaic. It is as if these painters were mining the same turf, digging up the same symbols and displaying them via the same techniques.

What stands out as truly idiosyncratic -- even perverse in its cockeyed sexuality -- are the works by the Americans. Not those by the biggest names, like Pollock and Rothko and De Kooning, but such non-blockbusters as Florine Stettheimer’s gorgeously wacky “Beauty Contest: To the Memory of P.T. Barnum” (1924), Peter Blume’s hypnotically icy-hot “The Italian Straw Hat” (1952) and Stuart Davis’ “Midi” (1943), a garish, proto-Pop masterpiece in lime green and bubble-gum pink.

Powerfully simplified landscapes by Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keefe fit into this lineage, as does Milton Avery’s deliciously stilted interior, “The Green Settee” (1943). Likewise, Rivera’s “Girl With a Mask” (1939) has more in common with the do-it-yourself circusry of its U.S. neighbors than the dour conformism of its European counterparts.

And even though it’s hard not to chuckle when looking at Arthur B. Davies’ preposterous array of loincloth-garbed citizens in “Protest Against Violence” (1911-12), or the cartoonishly two-dimensional babe in Maurice B. Prendergast’s “Red-Headed Nude” (1902), both paintings embody earnestness and vulgarity that’s far more potent than the manicured traumas and refined shocks dished up by European Surrealism.

Two compact sculptures, assembled from around-the-house detritus by Joseph Cornell, provide a similar contrast to seven tabletop bronzes by four Europeans: Aristide Maillol (French), Gerhard Marcks (German), Marino Marini (Italian) and Henry Moore (British). As a group, the cast sculptures have the presence of tasteful bookends that mimic the look of prehistoric statuettes. The scrappy romanticism of Cornell’s recycled images and objects is far more engaging.

Under Austin’s direction, the Wadsworth Atheneum became the first museum to acquire for its permanent collection a work by Cornell. For viewers, it doesn’t take a great leap to imagine that if Austin were a museum director today he just might organize “Prendergast to Cornell.” He’d probably subtitle it: “American Oddballs Whose Work is Screwy and True to Our Times.” That would put some fun back into a profession that got too boring for Austin and drove him away 60 years ago. And it just might jump-start museum directors (and curators) into thinking for themselves, rather than serving up more of the same.

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‘Picasso to Pollock’

Where: Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach

When: Tuesdays to Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursdays to 8 p.m.

Ends: April 25

Price: Adults, $14; students and seniors, $12; 11 and younger, free

Contact: (949) 759-1122