Life of the abstractionist party

WATERGATE, “All in the Family,” the energy crisis, Patty Hearst, streaking, the American Bicentennial -- the 1970s are remembered for many things, but painting is not one of them. In fact, just the opposite. In the ‘70s, painting was art’s whipping boy.

Odd as it might seem today, when robust painting is everywhere you look, colored pigment smeared on cloth stretched taut between strips of wood was then being caustically regarded as an establishment badge. Painting, especially abstract painting, was claimed to be a grandiloquent symbol representing the old guard, the system and the Man.

The man even had a name -- Clement Greenberg, the art critic who championed Color Field painting and its offspring, Lyrical Abstraction. On avant-garde issues, Greenberg was the foremost dismissive voice of establishment culture. Young artists were offering Conceptual and Post-Minimal art in opposition to his narrow doctrines, busily squashing the restrictive status quo, and painting got caught in the squeeze.

Enter Mary Heilmann, beatnik-surfer-hippie-chick and California transplant to New York, who launched her career as a painter there in 1970. Despite what appears to be a case of truly terrible timing, Heilmann’s decision to paint turns out to have been ideal.

One could even go so far as to say that her considerable importance as an artist today derives precisely from her contrarian choice to paint in the 1970s. “Extending tradition” was not on her mind, as it was on Greenberg’s. Instead, Heilmann saw the artist’s job as being unruly, whatever the chosen medium. She successfully appropriated abstract painting -- the high art language of establishment power -- for rebellious ends.

Heilmann’s paintings from the last 36 years are now the subject of an eagerly anticipated, delightfully absorbing retrospective at the Orange County Museum of Art. The Museum of Modern Art should be so smart. The show is an indulgence for the eye and a pleasure for the brain.

It is also a convincing education in how the best artists are not limited by prevailing trends -- establishment or progressive. They don’t dismiss either side of any argument out of hand, as those who simply claimed that painting was dead were foolishly wont to do. On the contrary, the best artists thrive on a recalcitrant mix of establishment resistance and progressive challenge.

‘Grape Vent’

IN Heilmann’s case, abstract painting, claimed as the purest and highest form of Modern art, collides with popular culture, even today readily dismissed by many as low and vulgar. Heilmann seems to be of a very different, very admirable mind. Art is art, high or low, and the question for a democratic culture is not where it ranks on some aristocratic scale but how rich, provocative and compelling it is.

Her work injects vernacular juice into abstract art, which after half a century of astounding diversity and refinement had become mandarin, esoteric and dull. In the 1960s Pop artists had done something similar with figurative painting, which had been declared all but a criminal artistic enterprise. Heilmann’s abstract painterly contradictions, like crossed electrical wires, emit an illuminating jolt.

The show’s first bracing work comes right inside the entry -- the eccentrically titled “Grape Vent (The 4th Jalousie, Purple),” made in 1975. It’s an easel painting. A vast acreage of mural-size canvas was then deemed essential to serious art, so the modest size -- a bit over 4 1/2 feet high and 3 feet wide -- already sets a contradictory tone.

Heilmann’s entire output, judging from the 58 paintings selected by curator Elizabeth Armstrong for the retrospective, is noteworthy for embracing a domestic scale. The fact that men dominated the art world surely has something to do with this distinctive difference, a notion implied by the savvy inclusion of a few Heilmann paintings in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s current landmark ‘70s survey, “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.” This is art meant to be lived with, rather than works painted at an institutional scale.

At the Orange County Museum, where institutional reality is inescapable, the canvases are displayed in galleries scattered with brightly painted chairs designed by the artist. Cubes of plywood feature seats and backs woven from multicolored plastic webbing.

The design crosses the classic form of austere Minimalist sculpture -- think Donald Judd -- with the Pop element of an inexpensive, mass-produced patio chair. Each one is fitted with casters, so a visitor can wheel himself in front of any painting with which he’d like to spend some time. Sociability prevails, in a manner not often associated with abstract art.

“Grape Vent” is purple and gold, liturgical colors that put you in mind of the cleansing renunciations of Lent. (Heilmann was a Catholic schoolgirl in the 1950s.) The painting reveals the process by which its composition was produced. A horizontally brushed gold ground has been loosely over-painted in vertical purple brushstrokes. This crisscross pattern invokes a grid, hallmark of rigorous Modernist art, but Heilmann’s grid, which turns up in various guises throughout the show, is never machine-like nor idealized. It revels in the handmade and quotidian.

Using a blunt tool about the width of a finger -- which might in fact have been the tool she used -- Heilmann scraped away purple paint in 10 horizontal lines to reveal the gold underneath. Then, using another tool, about the width of a hand, she scraped off the purple paint along the right and left edges, as well as in a single stripe down the center. That was followed by swipes across the top and bottom edges.

You can tell the sequence by the ridges of purple paint left by the scraping and how they overlap. The result is an objectified image that suggests a wall vent, which Heilmann names in the title. An outlet that allows fresh air to circulate through painting meets the free play of expression that Heilmann’s artistic venting encourages.

“Grape Vent” materializes a visual pun, of the sort that Pop art brought into the mainstream. The late-1960s sculpture, drawing and video of Bruce Nauman -- a young, then-emerging artist Heilmann knew when they both lived in San Francisco -- was a veritable fountain of puns. To find this word play at work in abstract painting, however, was virtually unprecedented.

Heilmann’s image also looks like a jalousie window, popular in moderate West Coast climates, whose louvers are made from glass slats. It’s an obvious reference to Marcel Duchamp’s 1920 Dada object, “Fresh Widow,” in which the glass panes of a small French window were covered over with vision-obscuring black leather.

Heilmann’s “Grape Vent” lets a California breeze blow through Duchamp’s windowpane. And since the Frenchman’s grim pictorial pun alludes to the multitude of widows left behind in the disastrous wake of World War I, her 1975 painting, with its solemn Lenten colors, leaves you thinking of the Vietnam War.

Bright beginnings

HEILMANN became a painter by design, not accident. Born in San Francisco in 1940 and raised there and in Southern California, she took her graduate degree in 1967 at UC Berkeley.

She studied with ceramic artist Peter Voulkos. Voulkos also made paintings and sculptures -- in fact he was working mostly with monumental bronze forms when Heilmann was a student -- but Heilmann’s interest in ceramics is telling for her later paintings. A clay cup, bowl or vessel is a common object whose colored surface-glazes are akin to paint. “Kachina,” a 1985 wall work made from two stacked ceramic boxes glazed in Good & Plenty colors of pink, white and black, invokes the ancestral spirits of Voulkos and 1950s fashion.

David Hockney was also a visiting instructor at Berkeley, and his Pop vernacular of swimming pools and tract houses resonated with a young woman who spent her youth at Southern California beaches and learning to high dive from the outdoor tower at Exposition Park. Heilmann’s paintings often exude airiness and liquidity, but the only thing that’s organic about their flow of colored pigments is that a controlling human intelligence has guided them.

The limpid blue brushstrokes of “Sea Wall” and “Lupe” and the multicolored marks of most any other canvas are typically marked off by remnants of her handmade grid. Culture, not nature, is what her art intensifies.

To be sure, it’s a relaxed intensity -- but that blend of casualness and focused skill is central to the gratifying pleasure of her work. Heilmann is a sort of artist-as-consummate-athlete, one who is in complete control of an activity that requires physical exertion and an understanding of relative significance. Art, like baseball or surfing, is not rocket science.

Abstraction is play, these paintings insist, which is not to say trivial. On the contrary, art’s gratuity -- something given without claim or demand -- is one of its most cherishable attributes.

One result of Heilmann’s contrarian aesthetic is that it became a shining exemplar for many of the best younger artists of the last two decades, including Lari Pittman, Jim Isermann and Laura Owens. Her art exerted itself in ways that work by more prominent 1970s abstract painters like Brice Marden and Jennifer Bartlett did not. Their paintings seem like the culmination or conclusion of something, while hers announce a bright beginning.

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christopher.knight@latimes.com

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‘Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone’

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

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday and Friday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday

Ends: Aug. 26

Price: $8 to $10, free on Thursdays

Contact: (949) 759-1122