Range rovers

A traveling exhibition recently arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art makes an audacious claim. Modernist art in the United States after 1900 was forged in the uniquely urban milieu of New York City, according to conventional wisdom. That’s flat wrong, this show insists. The landscape west of the Mississippi is claimed to be as important to the story as Manhattan is.

The show turns out to be right about Manhattan but wrong about urbanism.

Roughly 100 paintings, watercolors and photographs from the first half of the 20th century have been assembled to make the argument. Before we get to the specifics of the intrepid case being made, something rather odd must be noted.

When a show is stuffed to the gills with mediocre art -- with room after room of paintings largely notable for their snooze quotient -- does it finally matter whether the claim they’re meant to sustain is audacious or not? It’s a pretty long haul to the show’s first flat-out painting masterpieces, down past the romantic cowboy pictures by Frederic Remington and Henry F. Farny, just before the entrance to the third thematic section.

There, two small, nearly abstract 1917 watercolors by Georgia O’Keeffe unhinge color and shape from literal description of the landscape. Their unfurling, puddled lines of yellow, red and blue introduce bodily perceptual experience as nature’s actual territory. Predictably, these landmark works knock your socks off.

The luminous little 8-by-12-inch watercolors that O’Keeffe made in Texas loom larger than all the physically bigger pictures of Yellowstone, the Midwest or the Arizona desert that precede them. And they’re nearly anomalies in the exhibition. If Modernism was not in fact exclusively forged in the crucible of Manhattan -- and really, only the most provincial souls truly believe it was -- should we care if the paintings produced elsewhere are middling or worse?

Probably not. But that’s the strange situation we’re faced with in “The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950.” The show is mostly an uninspiring slog, dotted with moments of discernment. Organized by Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, it comes larded with pictures of more academic than artistic interest.

Almost always, the show’s selection of photographs is superior to the more physically imposing works on canvas or paper. Among them are classic images, as well as less familiar ones by a host of celebrated artists -- Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton E. Watkins, Laura Gilpin, Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, Dorothea Lange and many more. They make up roughly half the exhibit.

With few exceptions, virtually all the photographers are first-rate. The same can be said of only a minority of the painters.

For every Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Jackson Pollock or Clyfford Still, there’s an Alexander Hogue, Victor Higgins, Arthur F. Mathews and Selden Connor Gile. Most of the mediocre works are perfectly pleasant. But the nearly uniform excellence of the photographs, compared with the paintings’ wildly erratic quality, which careens from the occasionally sublime to the sometimes ridiculous, tells us something.

What it tells us is that the exhibition is focused more closely on subject matter than on art’s qualities as a material object. That’s a mistake.

One profound shift Modernist art engineered in the 20th century was to dismantle the physical relationship between object and viewer that had firmly been in place in Western culture for 400 years, ever since the Renaissance. The transformation has many facets. In the simplest sense, it’s a change from viewer passivity and capitulation to active participation and engagement. Attention to the art object’s physical properties, not just its subject matter, made that change happen.

But “The Modern West” pretty much ignores it. How else does one explain the inclusion of a few fine watercolors that John Marin made during a visit to Taos, N.M.? Formally, they’re indistinguishable from the scores of watercolors he also made at home in New York City and coastal Maine.

The show challenges the established view that Modernism was created by the emergence of a new and virtually unprecedented world centered in New York. Marin’s watercolors expose the claim as a red herring.

Manhattan’s modernity is distinctive, characterized by a variety of notable features. Immigrants arrived in successive waves. The economic base expanded to encompass industry. Skyscrapers flourished. Contentious gallery exhibitions of European avant-garde art provided an example for Americans. A bohemian lifestyle emerged, pushing back against bourgeois conformity.

Urbanism is important, even crucial to Modernism. “The Modern West” stakes its contradictory claim right at the outset, getting as far away from the city as it’s possible to be.

Or so it would appear. Appearances can be deceptive.

The show opens with the monumental 1875 painting “Mountain of the Holy Cross” by Thomas Moran. (The timeline 1890 to 1950 is immediately fudged.) Moran was the British-born son of a loom weaver whose handcraft was displaced by the labor-saving machinery of the Industrial Revolution. He brought his family to America, settling near Philadelphia, where young Thomas was apprenticed to an engraver.

“Mountain of the Holy Cross” shows a roaring stream coursing through the rugged Colorado Rockies. The dense, dark foreground is studded with dozens of dead and fallen trees, creating an image of earthly strife.

As the view recedes, climbing into the mountainous distance, light switches on and hazy clouds swirl in, fashioning a heavenly kingdom. Two snow-filled crevasses in the highest mountain peak intersect, forming a pure white cross at the summit.

Moran’s painting is not a topographical view, even though the crevasse-sliced mountain does in fact exist. Instead, the nearly 7-foot-tall canvas is an extravagant invention, cobbled together in the artist’s Philadelphia studio from small sketches he made during a government-sponsored Colorado trip. (The image was probably influenced by pictures taken by William Henry Jackson, the expedition’s photographer. Two Jackson photographs hang nearby.) “I place no value upon literal transcripts from Nature,” Moran once wrote -- and this remarkable picture proves it.

Instead, art claims dominion over the natural landscape. Urbanism is the culture of city dwellers, and Moran transforms the Rocky Mountains into a virtual cathedral. There’s nothing more citified than that.

His painting, in its sympathies and motives, is about as urban as Claude Monet’s Impressionist paintings of haystacks. The city might not be pictured, but urban power is what the Philadelphia painter asserts in his manufactured image of a luminous snowy symbol of spiritual salvation, high above a dodgy temporal realm. Its vision of Manifest Destiny is perfect for the dawning of the rapacious Gilded Age.

“The Modern West” mistakenly conceives of America beyond the Mississippi River as being composed of the Great Plains, assorted mountain ranges, various deserts and the Pacific shore. Typical is Thomas Hart Benton’s 1928 canvas, “Boomtown.”

Borger, Texas -- a dusty Panhandle locale where oil was discovered in 1926 -- went from Nowheresville to a population of almost 45,000 in three short months. Benton’s aerial view looks out over a rough-and-tumble little village to the oil fields beyond. A train chugs by, and black smoke from a derrick fire billows into the sky.

In reality, though, America’s true 1920s boomtown was not some rustic burg in the boonies. (Borger’s population has dwindled to about 15,000.) The real boomtown was Los Angeles -- a city. At the century’s start, L.A.’s population was slightly smaller than that of Omaha, Neb. By 1930, it had grown twelvefold, mushrooming into the nation’s fifth-largest urban center -- and the only one in the top 10 located west of the Mississippi.

Needless to say, L.A.’s rapidly industrializing horizontal sprawl is not “the Modern West” that this pastoral landscape show had in mind. It speeds past the single 1919 color-abstraction by L.A. artist Stanton Macdonald-Wright, whose prismatic rendering of optical space interlocks mountaintops with rooftops.

Photographs in the show’s California section depict Marin County and rural Lone Pine, not Hollywood back lots. The single work by Eadweard Muybridge depicts the wilderness splendor of 1872 Yosemite, not the tangled urban density of 1877 San Francisco, shown from the roof of Mark Hopkins’ mansion in the artist’s technologically sophisticated (and justly famous) city panorama.

The exhibition catalog unwittingly states the show’s ultimately limiting problem. Early 20th century American Modernism is said to be “a cultural response to modernization and industrialization.” That’s only partly correct.

Great art is not just reactionary; instead, it creates the world we eventually inhabit. The West looks the way it does because O’Keeffe painted those organic watercolors, not because Moran represented a fever dream of Manifest Destiny concocted by East Coast oligarchs, or because Benton got caught up in regional claims of authenticity as the core of Heartland experience.

But “The Modern West” falls for Benton’s provincial notion. Paintings by Native American artists are included, and they’re a welcome addition because they expand our perception of Western art. But like Benton’s “Boomtown,” many of them aren’t really landscapes. They’re genre scenes of daily life or sacred icons like the “God of Germination” by Riley (Quoyavema) Sunrise. Their inclusion is more puzzling than revealing.

One of my favorite parts of this otherwise confused exhibition is that the gallery’s back walls have been removed, opening up the Hammer Building’s usually concealed floor-to-ceiling windows. The view out across Hancock Park’s bubbling tar pits toward Park La Brea’s clustered apartment blocks turns out to offer the more involved and rewarding image of the Modern West. Feel free to turn your back on the wince-inducing paintings.

christopher.knight@latimes.com

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‘The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890--1950’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; 11 to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; closed Wednesdays

Ends: June 3

Price: $5 to $9

Contact: (323) 857-6000, www.lacma.org