ART : Recently Acquired Disappointments : Most of the Contemporary Work at the Exhibit at the Laguna Art Museum Is Very Minor

LAGUNA BEACH —  As part of its 50th anniversary celebration, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has persuaded a group of big-time art collectors, dealers and artists to hand over major works for the permanent collection. This news, trumpeted from coast to coast, must have made many a museum director weep for the sheer chutzpah of it all.

Beyond that, in a recent New York Times story, one Manhattan collector called the National Gallery “such a pleasant place to visit and so friendly to deal with,” while snubbing the hometown Metropolitan Museum of Art as “so huge and hard to connect with.” Another said she enjoyed all the attention the National Gallery offered--a special dinner and a reproduction of the work in a catalogue.

That kind of talk should be heartening news for smaller institutions. At the Laguna Art Museum, for example, which focuses primarily on the art of California, curators are happy to come down to the lobby any day of the week to take a look at potential donations brought in by visitors, says Bolton Colburn, curator of collections.

Some of what they’ve gleaned is on view through June 16 in a show featuring a small haul of newly acquired works.

Taking the long view, “Beginning the Decade: Recent Acquisitions,” is just a tease. It includes 26 works (if the nine drawings by John Altoon are considered one piece)--nearly two-thirds of the works donated to the museum since January 1990. There are a few very nice things, mostly works from the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. There are a few older pieces. But most of the contemporary work is very minor and distinctly disappointing.

Those Altoon drawings, donated by Tom Kenneth Enman, are a joy. They’re from about 1955, when the 30-year-old artist’s work had not yet crossed the line to the skittering, lyrical quasi-abstractions for which he is best known. These sketches--of a wayward dog, a horse, groups of people and the likeness of a woman that bears a strong resemblance to Rembrandt’s portrait of his wife, Saskia--display an insouciantly brilliant energy and linear grace.

Enman also gave the museum David Simpson’s “Red/White and Blue Stripes,” from 1959, one of the artist’s earliest abstract paintings. The pileup of irregular horizontal bands on the canvas is based on the flat, big-sky landscape of the Sacramento delta, but with the colors of the American flag supplanting realistic landscape hues.

Sometimes letting bare canvas show through, sometimes squeezing out glistening white paint directly from the tube, sometimes letting a dry brush leave a faint trail of color, Simpson makes clear his debt to the impulsive actions of the Abstract Expressionists. In a few years, he would change direction and turn out impeccably machine-tooled flat bands of color.

Ronald Chase, who has worked in the realms of underground and feature films, is not a well-known artist. But his black-and-white painting, “The Darkness,” from 1968 (a gift from the estate of Michael Monahan) is a haunting piece that reflects the troubled mood of the year--in which both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated--through a series of film-like “jump cuts.”

An array of images painted on variously sized box-like constructions massed on the canvas are all taken from a photograph of a rampaging crowd at a collapsing soccer stadium. One image of a man apparently dangling from a tier of seats has a tragic, desperate quality that is isolated and monumentalized by its presentation. Others are enlarged so greatly that they are almost unreadable. In this way, Chase seems to underline the random cruelties of tragedy and the sense of a world powerless against a rolling tide of disaster.

Another piece with a sociological outlook--on American consumer habits, in this case--is Edward Kienholz’s “Jerry Can Standard” from 1979 (a gift from 12 donors). The piece is an Army-surplus oil can fashioned into a TV set sitting on a wheeled cart covered with an Israeli-made doily. The set glows blankly while it plays the soundtrack of a TV Western, from syrupy opening music to grunting cattle and gunplay.

One of the most important new pieces is Lorser Feitelson’s untitled painting from 1968 (a gift of the Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeburg Feitelson Arts Foundation, which is run by art dealer Tobey C. Moss, a member of the Collections Committee). The museum already owns Feitelson’s “Magical Space Forms,” from 1950. The later work, painted a decade before the death of this major figure in Southern California abstraction, is a liquid streak of black that twists ecstatically across a flat ground of red “squeezed” on each side by two red bands.

Older historical work is quite sparse in this group. A watercolor from 1900 by Paul de Longpre of flowers growing on a fence is a gift of Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, a member of the Collections Committee. De Longpre, who came to Los Angeles in 1898 from his native Lyons, France, was, according to art historian William H. Gerdts, the first Southern California painter to establish a national reputation.

That may be, but de Longpre is little more than a footnote in the history of Southern California art, which didn’t have a serious national contribution to make until fairly late in our century. His work is ploddingly academic, even for his era.

“Neighborhood Theater,” a loosely brushed painting from about 1938 by Dan Lutz, was a gift of the Historical Collections Council. A mood of emptiness settles over this Depression-era scene outside a theater in Los Angeles showing a Greta Garbo film. The painting is a sober and personal view of a despondent time, but not representative of Lutz’s best work. Was it the wisest choice for the museum’s first painting by this American Scene painter? One wonders what other possible acquisitions the council passed up before they decided on this one.

It is odd to see so little action on the photo front, considering that photography is the particular area of expertise of museum director Charles Desmarais. The show’s only new acquisitions in this medium are two works by Linda Connor (gifts of Kristen Paulson). They are sensitive pieces but--in common with other acquisitions of contemporary art--very safe. Too safe.

Other contemporary work in the show is too minor or too vacuous to count for much. When members of the Contemporary Collectors Council decide to buy a Lita Albuquerque painting with their hard-earned dollars, it is tempting to believe these folks are never going to get with the program, never going to understand what’s really happening in today’s art.

Then again, it is startling to look at the museum’s own exhaustive list of “collecting focus areas” and read, under the heading “Contemporary Art” . . . no artists’ names at all! Couldn’t anybody think of any?

Listed under “Los Angeles Photography 1960 through 1980,” there are some names: Douglas Huebler, John Baldassari, Robert Heinecken and so forth. But there is no awareness that contemporary photographers of the first rank don’t think of themselves as photographers anymore. The distinction is artificial. Most amazing of all, there is absolutely no recognition in this “wish list” that such a thing as conceptual art exists, even though it has been around for decades.

What the Laguna museum desperately needs--besides millionaires ready to shower the place with no-strings-attached bucks--is a group of involved members who are willing to stretch themselves to see the point of art that isn’t pretty “designer” stuff, pap by unoriginal emerging artists or pieces by artists who have already been “sanctified” by museums all over the world.

Members of the Contemporary Art Council should think of their job as an opportunity to catch a rising star and put it in your pocket . . . gladdened by the feeling that you were smart enough to spot a wonderfully original approach to making art--even if it is only a doodle on a scrap of paper.

“Beginning the Decade: Recent Acquisitions” remains through June 16 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours are 11 am. to 5 p.m. daily, except Mondays. Admission: $2 general, $1 students and seniors, free for children under 12 and museum members. (714) 494-8971.