They proselytized for the avant-garde

IN the current exhibition at the UCLA Hammer Museum there is a marvelous 1924 painting by Heinrich Campendonk that shows a woodcarver at work in his studio. Wide-eyed, his face flushed crimson, he’s deeply absorbed in the mysterious act of creation.

As the long blade of the woodcarver’s tool suggestively probes the void formed between the left thumb and fingers of the doll-like female figure on his worktable, creation assumes a delirious, psychosexual intensity. Faceted planes of sophisticated Cubist painting fracture the space of the studio, merging with the studied primitivism of Russian or Eastern European folk art. This loosely Cubo-Futurist style is executed in an Expressionist palette that infuses the scene with bright, enameled colors.

“The Woodcarver” is the best Campendonk I’ve ever seen. Of course, I only recall seeing six paintings by the relatively obscure Bavarian artist, who participated with Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky in the famous Blue Rider group in Munich and who, after Hitler came to power in 1933, fled Germany for the Netherlands. (He died there at 68 in 1957.) In fact, all six of them are in the Hammer’s exhibition, “The Societe Anonyme: Modernism for America.”

The show was organized by the Yale University Art Gallery, where the celebrated Societe Anonyme collection has been housed since 1941, and is now inaugurating a three-year national tour. “The Woodcarver” hangs alongside exceptional works by Campendonk’s illustrious friend, Kandinsky, as well as a couple of hundred more works by 103 other European and American artists. The galleries are chockablock full.

If you’ve never heard of Campendonk, you will have plenty of company. But his relative obscurity is central to the show’s theme, which is built around an idea of an international community of artists. The show pointedly plays against our celebrity-driven culture.

Among the other artists are household names -- Brancusi, Dove, Duchamp, Van Gogh, Klee, El Lissitzky, Man Ray, Mondrian, Schwitters and many more. Yet also among them are dozens whose names are likely to be as unfamiliar to most visitors as Campendonk’s.

The Belgian painter Marthe Donas brought undulating, organic rhythm to the more crystalline conventions of Cubist still-life. Bela Kadar trained as a locksmith, but a visit to Paris from Budapest sent him on a successful path as a limpid painter of dreamy, folk-inspired narratives -- until his inclusion in Hitler’s notorious 1937 exhibition, “Degenerate Art,” rolled back the avant-garde and wrecked his life.

Finnur Jonsson was a fisherman in his native Iceland, but a visit to Dresden and an encounter with the Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka led to exhibitions of decorative Cubist paintings with rich surfaces in lapis blue and shimmering gold. John Covert became a committed Realist painter after studying in Munich, but when he returned to the United States he encountered work by the international avant-garde through his cousins, legendary collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg. Soon he was making provocative, Cubist-inspired abstractions whose mechanistic structure was enhanced by the addition of sisal rope and wooden dowels painted metallic colors.

Now, it’s true that none of these more unfamiliar artists, from Campendonk to Covert, ever painted anything remotely as exhilarating as Joan Miro’s 1924 “Somersault.” That dusty, earth-toned canvas, just over 3 feet tall, tips a horizontal landscape on its side, sending a horse and buggy and a mustachioed man with a pipe and newspaper tumbling through space. Noises of delight -- hoo! ah!! -- spelled out in thin letters float past them on the canvas. With magical, unprecedented pictures like this, Miro virtually invented the abstract world of ungrounded, fluid space that would later dominate Modern art.

But it’s also true that, as individual pictures, both Campendonk’s “The Woodcarver” and Covert’s 1919 “Brass Band” are more resolved and satisfying than the awkward, even rather ugly late portrait of a young woman posed next to a gummy floral arbor by no less a Modernist genius than Van Gogh. One message this show sends is that, while history may indeed be sprinkled with artists of outsized talent and momentous significance, they always blossom within richly populated fields of artistic activity. “The Societe Anonyme” is a celebration of the fact, and a chronicle of artists’ efforts to spread the word from Europe to the United States after World War I.

The Societe was the brainchild of Katherine Dreier, a talented painter born in Brooklyn to a wealthy German immigrant family. She studied art in Europe and later developed friendships with Kandinsky and the influential Berlin art dealer and publisher Herwarth Walden. Dreier also embraced theosophy, the philosophical system of divine wisdom that claims a unity among the creations of nature and humanity. When she returned to New York she became a proselytizer for avant-garde art in America, joining the board of the Society of Independent Artists.

That’s where she met fellow board member Marcel Duchamp, the French iconoclast who caused a ruckus by submitting to the society’s 1917 exhibition a store-bought porcelain urinal as his own “ready-made sculpture.” The jury, supposedly composed of committed avant-gardists, promptly rejected it -- whereupon Duchamp quit. Dreier tried to coax him back, to no avail.

But through that encounter a friendship developed -- and so did a commission. Duchamp painted the mural “Tu m’,” usually considered his farewell to oil on canvas, for a wide, rather skinny space above a bookcase in Dreier’s Connecticut home. The mural is a compendium of sight gags -- including a painted illusion of a rip in the canvas, visually held together by three actual safety pins -- and it anchors a group of 11 works by Duchamp in the show.

Together Dreier and Duchamp, enlisting the help of Man Ray, decided to forget about the Society of Independent Artists and start their own crew, which they named the Societe Anonyme, Inc. The French term literally translates as “private company” and is still used today to identify a corporation. Dreier and Duchamp’s “Corporation, Incorporated” got underway in 1920, with a two-room show on the third floor of a Midtown Manhattan brownstone.

The inaugural show included, among others, paintings and sculptures by Brancusi, Van Gogh, Juan Gris, Francis Picabia and the Americans Joseph Stella, Morton Schamberg and Patrick Henry Bruce. The 1917 dust-up over the urinal-as-sculpture had shown the degree to which context controls an object’s meaning, so Duchamp designed the show’s installation to further illuminate the point.

He painted the walls a very pale blue, conferring an almost metallic light appropriate to an age of industrial manufacture, and covered the floor in sheets of ribbed rubber. The urban brownstone was dressed as a refined factory shop.

Most audaciously, given the dainty sense of aesthetic propriety then surrounding art in bourgeois American society, he framed all the pictures with lace doilies. Even grandma would approve.

The Hammer show begins with a partial re-creation of that inaugural exhibition, right down to the rubber flooring and doily frames.

Next comes a room that samples six of the many solo shows the Societe organized, including especially fine groups of work by Kandinsky, Klee, Campendonk and Fernand Leger.

The Societe was meant to promote avant-garde art in the mostly conservative artistic world of American society. A small breakthrough came in 1926, when Dreier’s hometown Brooklyn Museum allowed her to present a sprawling international exhibition, which is also recalled here in a partial reconstruction.

It includes the great Miro. There is also Lissitzky’s incomparable metallic abstraction of a floating cube, “Proun 99,” Duchamp’s machine for spinning optically dizzying glass plates and -- not least of all -- the strangest of Picabia’s paintings to date. A landscape of the sunny South of France, worthy of Raoul Dufy, is decorated with macaroni and feathers and encased in a snakeskin frame.

Critics eviscerated the 1926 show, which suggests the limitations of the Societe’s educational mission, chronicled in the next gallery. Following a section dedicated to the productive relationship between Dreier and Duchamp, the exhibition ends with a large room of diverse paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and prints. At the instigation of John Covert, Dreier and Duchamp assembled a museum collection of avant-garde art of the 1920s and 1930s, later given to Yale.

That, I suppose, is the other provocative point the exhibition means to underscore. Unlike the collector-driven 1921 Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., or the 1929 Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Societe Anonyme, Inc. was a museum organized by artists. Ours is not only an era dominated by celebrity, it has also become an age of corporate-minded art museums of a different, mostly timid and frequently stultifying kind.

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‘The Societe Anonyme: Modernism for America’

Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood

When: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays; closed Mondays

Ends: Aug. 20

Price: $5 adults, $3 seniors

Contact: (310) 443-7000, www.hammer.ucla.edu