Silent sorrows

It’s not hard to visualize Hannelore Baron making her small, absorbing collages. She was known to suffer from anxiety and depression, severe enough at times that she feared venturing out of the house. It’s understandable, then, that her art would seem slightly obsessive, hermetic, and it becomes easy to imagine her in the quiet space of the night, huddled over her kitchen table or in her attic studio, patching together scraps of frayed cloth and crinkled paper, drawing letters and numbers and figures across them in fine, high-strung lines.

Baron’s tentativeness in life took form in her work. Drawn shapes and swatches of cloth and paper abut and stack like building blocks, each placed carefully next to or above another. Rarely does one shape venture out on its own and float freely in space. Literal connections between Baron’s psychic state and the character of her art go far in accounting for the work’s visceral urgency, but her collages are ultimately more far-reaching than was her relatively confined adult life. In the two decades leading to her death in 1987 from breast cancer (she was 61), Baron created prolifically, tenaciously and with modest brilliance. Give her works -- now on view at the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach -- close attention and you too will find yourself lost in them, huddled over them, tracing paths through their tight, musty spaces.

The show’s 40 collages, all the size of a sheet of notebook paper or smaller, and five box-like assemblage sculptures date from 1969 to 1987. During those same years, Baron endured two nervous breakdowns and three cancer surgeries, and yet the energy driving the work never feels spent. She’s as heroic in her persistence as her work is intimate, burrowing as it does into a kind of private reserve. This psychic resourcefulness mirrors a resourcefulness with materials, her attraction to remnants, bits and pieces.

Baron’s own younger years were marked by fragmentation. A German Jew, she was 7 when Hitler took power in 1933 and 10 when required to attend a segregated school for Jewish children. Amid the horrors of Kristallnacht in 1938, she witnessed the beating of her father, a shop owner, and the vandalism of her family home. Both of her parents were incarcerated for a time, and Baron and her brother lived briefly with an aunt in Luxembourg. In 1941, the family made its way to the U.S., where they settled in the Bronx, her father working as a dishwasher and carpenter, and her mother as a seamstress.

By age 20, Baron had experienced her first nervous breakdown. She had already started to make art -- paintings on paper and, later, paintings mixed with collage. These early efforts aren’t included in the Long Beach show, which doesn’t function as a retrospective. (Ably organized by independent curator Ingrid Schaffner for Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Services, it was done in cooperation with the artist’s estate and the Manny Silverman Gallery, where a complementary exhibition of Baron’s work remains on view through July 17.) What appears at the University Art Museum is a concentration of profoundly mature work, collages churning with the twin forces of disintegration and re-integration.

Baron said that she introduced color into her work only when her despair was most intense, perhaps to glean a bit of its buoyancy for herself. A handful of pieces here are tinged with blue, and one is dominated by faded cherry. Mostly, Baron’s palette ranges from dishwater to dun to rust, with drawn elements and smudged imagery in black ink or paint the color of dried blood.

There’s a vague geometry at work in the collages, an architectonic subdivision of space into squarish blocks and broader bands, but the sense of order is tenuous, jittery. Edges waver out of alignment. Threads meander out of their weave to droop or curl or jut across neighboring surfaces.

If the work exudes a sense of being wounded, it’s largely because of the materials Baron chose. They’re not just worn and old but distressed. The papers are fibrous and often yellowed, rubbed and scratched, veined with furrows from being glued down less than smoothly. The fabrics -- ticking, small prints, fragments of flour sacks -- look faded and tired, stain-mottled, sweat-soaked. Damage comes to mind, and violation, abandonment. The materials feel steeped in grief, embedded with memories of trauma or at least sorrow. When Baron sews swatches together, she does so with large, crude stitches as if closing a wound.

Numbers and reversed letters scrawl across the surface of the collages like part of a nascent alphabet, pictographic and primal. Baron draws just a few recognizable forms -- humans, birds, flowers -- and these too appear schematic, more symbol than representation. In a stirring 1981 collage, a hand is outlined in negative on a patch of paper streaked in black ink. It jolts the mind to Baron’s account of returning to her house some weeks after Kristallnacht to see her father’s bloodied handprint stamped upon the living room wall. In the collage, Baron sets the small paper bearing the hand atop a swatch of fabric patterned with a cage-like grid. The cloth rubs up against a slightly offset square the deep red hue of blood, but abraded and rubbed raw.

As shabby as the individual ingredients of these pieces are, as a whole they have the preciousness of relics, the sacredness of testaments. They give the impression of having been made in captivity from scavenged scraps, and indeed, Baron stated in an unpublished interview that she felt imprisoned by her fears.

Missing from the catalog essay is a discussion of what other art Baron was looking at. (A decade-old essay by Peter Frank does the most complete job on the subject.) The wrapping and binding in her box constructions relate to her interest in mummies and burial shrouds, as well as the sight of body bags returning from the Vietnam War. Her collages invite a wide range of comparisons -- to Kurt Schwitters, Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet, Adolph Gottlieb. Baron was self-taught and limited in her ability to soak up the New York art world, so fertile in her formative years as an artist. She came to the idea of mixing collage with painting not from exposure to Picasso, say, but by visiting a show by a little-known friend of her brother-in-law’s.

The aura of the outsider artist certainly clings to Baron and is nurtured, for better or for worse, by scholarship that emphasizes her tragic personal history and mental instability. It is easy to see these fascinating works as the products of a scarred, isolated soul, yet Baron herself saw them as gestures of activism and protest -- against inhumanity, injustice and environmental destruction. On both personal and material levels, they are acts of salvage and renewal. They whisper of the larger world and its damage, but they originate in Baron’s private pain. The artworks aren’t illustrations or chronicles of her efforts to integrate memory and experience; they are enactments of the process itself in potent physical form.

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‘Hannelore Baron: Works From 1969 to 1987’

Where: University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday; closed Sunday and Monday.

Ends: July 31

Price: $4

Contact: (562) 985-5761