West Coast Surreal - various artists, UCLA-Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California

Art in America, Jan, 1996 by Michael Duncan

Our culture's assimilation of psychoanalytic principles seems to have guaranteed a lasting interest in psychologically charged, dream-like imagery. Many contemporary artists - including Robert Gober, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Jim Shaw and Jane Hammond - continue to mine subject matter seemingly wrested from the unconscious, using forms not dissimilar to those of the classic '20s and '30s Surrealists. The recent revival of figurative art in works by artists such a Kiki Smith and Mike Kelley seems to have made its impact through reconfiguring surrealistic ideas about the fragmented body and fracture identity.

As MTV videos, advertising and movie dream sequences can attest, the definition of surrealism long ago lost touch with Andre Breton's original dicta circumscribing its limits. Of all 20th-century movements, it is the most free-form and open, inspiring regional adherents around the world. The last decade has seen surveys of surrealist Belgians, Spaniards, Czechs, Mexicans and Britons. In this country, Jeffrey Wechsler's 1977 exhibition at Rutgers University, "Surrealism and American Art 1931-1947," reintroduced a wildly diverse group of artists who stin seem ripe for reappraisal, including Jared French, Louis Guglielmi, Frederico Castellon, Enrico Donati, Julia Thecla, Leon Kelly and Kurt Seligmann.

Recently, with only a few overlapping inclusions, curator Susan Ehrlich gathered a fascinating crew of mostly lesser-known West Coast practitioners in "Pacific Dreams: Currents of Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art, 1934-1957" at the UCLA-Armand Hammer Museum. Despite the relative isolation of California from art-world centers during these years, West Coast artists were eager to stay abreast of international currents and avidly followed the development of Dadaism and Surrealism through catalogues and magazines. Most of the work in Ehrlich's show reflected their familiarity with artists such as de Chirico, Miro, Picasso and Ernst. However, California artists did eventually, develop certain stylistic traits which seem unique to the region.

Ehrlich was wisely circumspect in her generalizations about California as a natural landscape for surrealism. Obviously, the movie industry in Los Angles makes the realization of fantasy seem an everyday occurrence. Fantastic architecture exists not only in the movie studios and at Disneyland but in the amazing variety of structural styles offered in commercial and residential districts, all artificially implanted in a basin that was, only a century ago, a desert. Northern California has its own tradition of self-sufficiency-a homespun, organic idiosyncracy that seems temperamentally in tune with the Bay Area.

Underlying the L.A. surrealist work was the presence of the renowned connection of Walter and Louise Arensberg, whose tenure in Los Angeles (1927-54) roughly matched the time span of this exhibition. Without the benefit of supportive museums or galleries, select local artists were able to see works by Brancusi, Duchamp, de Chirico, Magritte, Dali, Tanguy and Pierre Roy. Although they remained somewhat aloof from local activities, the Arensbergs befriended Lorser Feitelson and Edward Weston and bought several paintings by Knud Merrild.

In 1934 Feitelson and painter Helen Lundeberg, his wife, ambitiously proclaimed themselves ringleaders of a new movement, Post-surrealism, begun seemingly as a reaction against the wilder, psychosexually charged imagery of Dali and others. Post-Surrealism intended to rein in the outlandishness of the European movement, tempering dreamlike imagery with rational thought. As described by Lundeberg, it was based upon "the normal functioning of the mind ... ordered, pleasurable introspective activity." Post-Surrealism doesn't seem interested in employing or depicting elements taken from the unconscious; its thoughtful arrays of symbols are like poetic rebuses which spell out complex psychological messages.

The clunky symbolic structures of these hardedge paintings may be contemplative and esthetically ordered, but their subject matter can be just as kinky as that of Dali. Feitelson's Genesis #2 (1934) presents a logically connected chain of bizarre symbols of religious, sexual and intellectual births. These overripe, burgeoning images include a bird's nest, a dove signalling the Annunciation, a mask sucking at the Virgin's breast, and a vaginal seashell and halved cantaloupe. In Plant and Animal Analogies (1934), Lundeberg creates tension between the organic and the schematic by juxtaposing illusionistic painting with diagrammatic textbook drawings. With their cool execution, her paintings seem like illustrations for some esoteric sect, demonstrating odd relationships between the real and the fictive, the object and its symbol.

With his classical training and first-hand exposure to European modernism-he had lived for extended periods in Paris and exhibited in the Salon d'Automne-Feitelson quickly became the kingpin of the tiny local art scene. For younger artists, Feitelson and Lundeberg seemed to be in touch with international currents. The Post-Surrealists quickly gained acolytes, including the young Philip Guston and Harold Lehman (both high-school classmates of Jackson Pollock). In the crisply executed Nude Philosopher in Space Time (1935), painted when he was only 22, Guston surrounds a nude with an array of elements cribbed from his mentors: a pelvic skeleton, an egg, a hanging light bulb and an assortment of elliptical shadows.