California at Midcentury
Contemporary artists tap into the ideals and aesthetics of a simpler time
By Steven Biller
From Palm Desert to Paris, the art of postwar Southern California has enjoyed unprecedented attention in the past two years. Bursting with color and invention, the sleek L.A. style of 50 years ago has been celebrated in Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, SoCal: Southern California Art of the 1960s and 70s from LACMA’s Permanent Collection (through March 30) in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles 1955-1985: The Birth of An Artistic Capital at Centre Pompidou in Paris.
These powerful, important exhibitions have fixed much of the art world’s attention squarely on Southern California, where a generation of artists reaching mid-career appears to be expanding the vocabulary of indigenous California movements, particularly Light and Space, Finish Fetish, and Hard Edge.
Three quintessential Los Angeles artists — Andy Moses, Alexander Couwenberg, and Jimi Gleason — are among the most successful in understanding and pushing the limits of these movements and appear in a dynamic group show opening on Jan. 3 at MMFA in Palm Desert.
Moses, whose acrylic paintings capture the expansive Pacific Ocean in gestural abstraction, works on horizontal rectangles with concave surfaces, which give the work a sculptural quality that envelops and transfixes the viewer. The many blues hold the changing values of light, which manifest in other colors — some subtle, some sweeping mauves as in so many California sunsets. The viewer is left to contemplate the horizons in the axial symmetry. He owes much to his father, Ed Moses, and Light and Space and Finish Fetish artists such as Peter Alexander for his ability to find his own vision and place in the movement.
Likewise, you can trace Couwenberg’s lineage to Hard Edge painters such as Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, Frederick Hammersley, and especially Karl Benjamin, his mentor. His acrylic paintings on polished birch panels have an ultrahip vibe — moving shapes (organic and geometric) that reflect the sensibilities of midcentury modernism; they have an architectural quality that’s playful and richly grounded in the artist’s keen awareness of time, space, and culture.
Gleason infuses his luminous, reductive, and meditative paintings with textures and tones. Forms, often manifesting from nature, emerge and recede as Gleason strikes a balance between space and structure. Viewers’ experiences change as they shift their vantage point.
All three artists came of age in the art world in the 1980s, effectively continuing the exploration of Southern California’s unique schools of expression and immersing themselves firmly in the nucleus of this next generation.
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