The Shock of the Old : Four Figure Artists Who’ve Revolted Against the Modern and Returned to Traditional Forms

It was bound to happen.

About 10 years ago I was trying to figure out what I could do that was completely unlike anything going on. I was looking for something, well, dangerous. Modern art had become so safe. You could get away with anything because there were no rules. Artists could always smirk and say they were just kidding. Irony acted as a kind of safety net. I wanted to do something without a net. Classicism attracted me because you either get it right or you don’t. You aim your arrow at the target and you either hit the bull’s eye or you miss it. You have to take responsibility.

--David Ligare

We should have seen it coming.

Modern art has become an academy every bit as rigid as the French salon system that the Impressionists revolted against in the 1880s. I think those of us today who admire artists like Bouguereau are as much anti-Establishment rebels as the early modernists.

--Randall Lavender

It’s just a bunch of painters acting out a universal law of art.

I don’t pay too much attention to what other artists are doing now. I just try to concentrate on my own work. Jean-Leon Gerome has always been my favorite artist. I love the perfection and beauty of his figures. I love their rationality.

--Jon Swihart

They are just fed up and they won’t take it anymore.

We live in a landscape of broken symbols but we have to live in this time. I want to show there is still beauty in painting the human figure as it is with its knobby knees and crooked nose. I’ve been working for 20 years and yet I feel I’m just beginning. I am still learning to do things any 15-year-old apprentice could do in 15th-Century Florence.

--John Nava

Who are these guys and why are they saying such mean things about modern art? Whence comes this longing for the past with its encrusted traditions and predictable rules?

Well, they are four California painters of increasing note, David Ligare, John Nava, Randall Lavender and Jon Swihart, all concerned with the serious depiction of the human figure.

So what’s so new?

There always have been California artists bravely plugging away at the figure while abstraction reigned unchallenged in the glossy galleries and status museums. Remember Rico LeBrun and Howard Warshaw? Legends in their own time. Joyce Treiman and Donald Lagerberg are still very much among us with their brilliant technical command, adapting history to present concerns and private fantasy. David Hockney and Robert Graham are figurative superstars.

Then what’s so special about this bunch?

Call them the Neo-Revivalists or the Wrong Way Rebels. Say they are nostalgic idealists fleeing into the the past like the English Pre-Raphaelites or the German Nazarenes of the 19th Century. Label them canny calculators practicing the Shock of the Old.

One thing is certain. They operate under at least one unshakable law of modern--not old--art, namely the “Why Did the Kids Put Beans in Their Ears?” dictum.

Why? They did it ‘cause we said no.

The history of Modern Art proceeded as a series of revolts against whatever Establishment, a series of leaps into the forbidden. Fuddy-duddies of the French Academy like Gerome and Bouguereau decreed that art had to be made of plaster-cast myths inherited from the Greeks as a kind of historical group effort practiced in musty studios with calipers. The Impressionists broke the taboo, opting for sunshine and individuality. The Post-Impressionists smashed the Greek phalanx by seeking inspiration in the Orient and South Seas.

The pendulum swung around like the earth clock at the Griffith Observatory, knocking down one calcified cliche after the next. By the time art roosted in New York after World War Zwei it had to be esoteric, densely personal, passionate, bohemian-aristocratic and more-or-less completely abstract. Naturally the Pop artists came along and made it accessible, public, cool, funny and as familiar as soup cans and comic strips.

A few further perverse fillips and it started to seem as if the entire Modernist choo-choo had added so many cars that the engine had its nose in its own caboose.

Time to blow up the gasworks.

The Reaganart Years

The ‘80s ushered in the most daring act in a century. Daredevil art would be shot backwards into the cannon, demolishing the Modernist behemoth. Post-Modernism. A brand-new improved ancient orthodoxy would reign like Zeus in his marble throne. It must have been an idea on target, judging by the amount of creative juice it released. Architecture revived in a welter of historical quotation, glitzy ornament, cornices, entablatures, pediments and impediments. Design flourished, flashy and entertaining as an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.

It was a perfect style for the Reagan years, luxuriously conservative, smugly nostalgic, triumphantly decadent. Makes you wonder if the artists who practice it sneak around reading the National Review and secretly send money to Jimmy Swaggart. Makes you wonder if they are in cahoots, because the Post-Mod thing has itself taken on the proportions of an orthodoxy. There is even a fat new biblical Rizzoli book called “Post-Modernism: The New Classicism” by Charles Jencks, the critical godfather of the movement. Nava and Ligare are included therein.

Last year the quartet sang ensemble in an exhibition at Cal State Fullerton. Does that mean they are an aesthetic Mafia like the old Ferus crowd, hanging out, swapping ideas?

Nope. The four men know each other only casually. The frank revivalism they share made showing them together a perfectly legitimate idea but they do not subscribe to a common program and in fact respectfully disagree with each other on many a point of aesthetic doctrine. Each developed his art independently.

What makes talking to them so fascinating is the way they at once confirm the highly quirky and personal nature of making art while proving that isolated activity can reflect similar concerns. It’s enough to make you believe in the Zeitgeist.

The Righteous Classicist

Three of them do agree that the fourth, David Ligare--the oldest at 42--is the most righteous classicist among them and the closest to being a theoretician.

But, he says, “I don’t want to be confused with artists who admire those salon painters like Gerome. I think they were the decadent end of the classical tradition just like Jon Borofsky is the overblown end of the Modernist academy. Borofsky is the Thomas Couture of the present.”

Ligare appeared on the gallery scene a dozen years ago painting fluttering pieces of white drapery momentarily suspended above the sea. More recently he took to making what some wags call “toga paintings,” figures in landscape, nude or clad in classical garb and often directly reminiscent of the work of the 17th-Century French Neo-Classicist Poussin, whom Ligare frankly reveres along with Jacques Louis David, the 19th-Century Neo-Classical revolutionary. Anybody who thinks Ligare’s historical concoctions are pure make-believe should drop up to Salinas where he lives. The drive to his anonymous industrial park studio from the Monterey airport leads through tranquil Arcadian country that is obviously the backdrop of his paintings.

“I like to go out sketching,” he remarks, “See those cows over there? They’re in a couple of my paintings.”

The bachelor artist is slender, medium-tall with a professorial beard and glasses. He looks younger than his years and has the slightly otherworldly aura of a poet, which alternates with flashes of toughness and a taste for intellectual confrontation.

He sketches out his background as his little Toyota truck perks along. Maybe the most important event of his life was a trip to Greece, where the ancient world came alive for him. Born in Oak Park, Ill.--Hemingway country--he wound up in Steinbeck country. Nice metaphor of the narrative implications of his art. He doesn’t read much these days. Too busy, and he reads slowly. It’s hard for him. Grew up in Manhattan Beach with a brother and sister. His parents are dead. University graduates, they encouraged his artistic leanings. Father worked a variety of jobs, the most interesting of which was as a curator of a museum devoted to electric lighting in Chicago. Ligare remembers him as a bright guy who really came into his own after he retired and began reading. He liked broad theoretical subjects like population growth and loved plants.

Ligare went to the Art Center with the notion of being a commercial illustrator but became disenchanted, dropped out and was drafted.

“My favorite part was basic training. The physical part was easy for me. I’d never known any black guys and my platoon was full of them. Tough guys who’d just been in the Watts riots. I guess we got along so well because I was so completely naive and open to them.”

Stationed in New York, he started doing small landscapes and was showing in a modest Manhattan gallery by the time he was 21. Discharged, he moved to Santa Barbara and painted the flying drapery paintings. Invited to teach modern art history at the community college in Salinas, he moved there in 1974. Now his art sells well enough that he no longer teaches.

“My needs are fairly modest so I get by. I’m interested in the idea of stoicism. I decided if I wanted to paint, it should be about something I think is important. All through history the idea of people being responsible to one another and to their surrounding world has been important. That’s not so much a moral question as just one of doing the right thing. I think classical art encourages that.

“I look at Neo-Expressionism that’s based on subway graffiti and to me that is a metaphor of pollution of the cities and of the kind of rampant individuality of the Reagan years. You can do anything, aggrandize yourself or your own ego.”

Ligare’s studio is spare and spotless. A few small paintings hang on the wall, paints and brushes are laid out neatly. A young studio assistant is preparing to leave, a curly headed blond kid who would do as a model of a Greek athlete.

It turns out Ligare works a lot from photographs.

“I think Titian would have worked from photographs if he’d had them. Painting groups of figures is very tough without photographs. I don’t reject the modern world or modern art, it’s all around us. Some of the artists I feel temperamentally close to are avant-garde Minimalists like Robert Irwin. There’s a purity and risk about his work I feel very close to.

“People say you can’t use classical art forms today because it is irrelevant or even because the Nazis polluted the forms with their Neo-Classical style. I reject that. They didn’t even touch the spirit of Classicism. Classicism isn’t about plaster casts, it’s about a moment of suspension and balance between two actions, like the statue of the discus thrower. The flying drapery paintings were about that moment of hovering balance between the time the thing rises and descends.”

Ligare believes that his Arcadian paintings can act as metaphors of modern experience even though they contain no direct modern references. His serene landscapes, for example, might encourage good care of the environment.

He points to a small canvas.

“That’s the only picture I’ve ever made with a contemporary reference.”

It is a classic vanitas or memento mori format depicting a skull atop a block on which hangs a crown of laurel leaves. Resting at the base in a Polaroid snapshot of a man’s rather Greek profile, it immediately appears to be a wretchedly timely rumination on AIDS.

“The man in the photo has been my friend for 15 years. He is still alive. AIDS was on nobody’s mind when I painted it in 1980 but there is no denying that implication today.”

One leaves brooding on cliches about the prescience of artists and the inescapability of one’s own times.

Live Models Only

John Nava’s industrial studio building in Redlands could be swapped with Ligare’s without anyone much noticing, except that Nava owns the building. He recently bought a house in Ojai and a new car. He longed for a Porsche but settled for a Volvo station wagon as a concession to his wife’s concerns over safety, since they recently had their first child after some 20 years of marriage.

“You notice that when artists make some money they don’t buy art, they buy real estate.”

There is only one new piece in work in the studio but it reflects Nava’s characteristic method. He is unique among the four in working only from live models. No photographs are around except some classic figure studies by the likes of Weston and Lynes that hang in the john.

A quintessential Nava depicts a standing nude female figure in front or profile. It is often the only fully painted part of the composition. She is likely to be boxed in a rectangle surrounded by other windows showing drawings of furniture or details of classic architecture. Nava pieces together compositions in a fashion that simultaneously recalls Old Master technique, movie montage and cubism. They put one vaguely in mind of a painted version of Robert Graham’s sculpture, both by their careful detailing and their emotional distance.

Nava, 40 and nervous about it, looks like a Spanish grandee educated in an Ivy League college. Dark hair, noble nose, delicate chin and slightly beetled brow float amiably above a rumpled gray sweater. “Just a Chicano from San Diego,” he smiles, “The family roots are Basque and Mexican.”

The impression of refined intellectual background, however, is reinforced by a feature rarely seen in artists’ studios, a wall of classic books on art and art history, hundreds of volumes lining one wall.

“They’re just here temporarily. It was the library of my father-in-law Karl Birkmeyer (the highly regarded UCLA art historian). Most of them are in German, which I can’t read. It’s an amazing collection. There’s even a catalogue of Hitler’s infamous Degenerate Art exhibition of all the modern artists in 1936. We’re having them catalogued so we can donate them to a college library.”

Nava’s mom was a mom, his dad a Ryan aircraft engineer, the family devoutly Catholic. He has fallen away but thinks the religion left him with a mind-set that allows him to take art idealistically as a kind of devotion.

“The family was not especially artistic or intellectual but they were tolerant. I won a prize for drawing a cat in grammar school. I liked the strokes I got for art and never looked back. I’ve drawn and painted the figure ever since.

“When I was 12 my brother and I discovered ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ at the library. We were fascinated with the mythology and the armor. We’d act out scenes in the backyard which my parents watched patiently. Later we got a little camera and filmed them. My brother had the good sense to stick with the movies.”

John smiles wryly. His brother, Gregory Nava--along with his wife--made the recent classic film “El Norte” and is about to release a new effort, “Destiny.”

“Greg is two years younger but was always intellectually precocious. We were rather isolated and made a little world of our own around books and ideas.”

John takes pleasure in his brother’s success but the high public profile of movies and movie makers makes him thoughtful about the role of visual art in this society. He thinks art has to inspire contemplation that is historical, philosophical and mindful of tradition.

“I think I have profited from the atmosphere of acceptance for figurative art created by Post-Modernism but it hasn’t influenced me. I guess its ambiance can be seen as conservative or even right wing but that has nothing to do with my own attitudes. It’s even funny to be placed in that position. I mean you are talking to a guy who used to have hair down to here and was a conscientious objector in the Vietnam War.

“I studied at UC Santa Barbara with Howard Warshaw. He was baroque and I was tight with all my little details. Then Jennifer and I traveled around Europe for a long time before I came to San Bernardino to teach. I was really impressed with old master art, especially in Florence. I revere the old masters but I am no way a revivalist artist.

“I’m a modern artist. I believe in being serious about what you do. I know a figurative painter who has all the talent, intelligence and skill in the world but he can’t resist playing games with his art. It drives me crazy.

“I am looking for a way to paint the figure seriously in the 20th Century. I admire Lucien Freud, Balthus and Francis Bacon. They found a way to make the figure say something in our times.”

Yet Nava’s admired artists are all intensely psychological, exposing their most intimate obsessions and fears in their work. Nava shares their intensity but the work, like the man, is well-mannered, analytical and detached.

“I think when people don’t respond well to me it’s because they find me arrogant and elitist. I am analytical. A few years ago I felt something like a crackup coming on. I was gambling, playing the ponies a lot. I started reading Freud. I kept reading until I analyzed myself out of it.

“I worry about living in a kind of aesthetic intellectual ghetto full of nothing but art, books and ideas. I think about Woody Allen in his film ‘Manhattan.’ His teen-age lover Mariel Hemingway has left him and he is thinking about writing a novel. To get an idea he lists all the things he likes--jazz, Louis Armstrong, this book, that movie and the girl. It turns out she is the only real thing in the list.”

He looks over at the new work. It is different. A nude woman starts up anxiously out of sleep. Her man continues to slumber, his head cradled on her thigh.

Slow Down to Get It Right

Randall Lavender’s studio is east of Skid Row not far from downtown Los Angeles’ 7th Street bridge, with its aura of being a border crossing to another country. He’s gained a little weight since he married last year, looks fractionally more comfortable with himself, but he’s still lean and wound up inside. A caricaturist might draw him as the old comic book hero Submariner or Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock, sans the pointy ears and more normal-looking.

There’s a noticeable generational difference between him, Nava and Ligare. At 32 he is the only one of the four whose art took a radical turn from its beginnings. He grew up in Riverside in a family where artistic aspirations were normal. His father started as a classical composer, then wrote film music for Air Force movies. Wearying of that, he moved on to writing children’s musicals and finally settled into historical fiction. In that ambiance, Lavender says, it would have been considered odd to want to be a lawyer or businessman.

He graduated from Cal State Fullerton where he was noted--among other things--for a hilarious class photo project called “Tasty Pants,” a mordant and sexy sendup of pornography and the animal appetites of young bucks. Precociously successful in art academia, he taught at the University of Tennessee when he was barely older than the students. He decided not to stay. Academia was too comfortable for comfort.

His first gallery exhibitions included small tableaux of geometric objects laced with symbols of cool sensuality and redolent with references to modern art history. Probably influenced by the oblique art of Roland Reiss, they were intellectual, vaguely erotic and hip.

Last year he startled his audience with big, frankly revivalist figure paintings of nude men and women in elaborate frames that made them look like architectural fragments from some imaginary McKim, Mead and White Newport mansion out of the American Renaissance. But they were different. There was a twist on the ball that gave them distinctly contemporary overtones that seemed both conceptual and autobiographical.

“The change probably came after I visited Rome for the first time. There are three civilizations stacked up there. People actually live their daily lives in medieval buildings.

“Back here everything seemed to move too fast. The freeways and the television are stimulating but the excitement is shallow. In the end that isolates everyone until all we have in common is a shared aloneness.

“I decided people are not attentive to things. I taught a drawing class at Otis/Parsons. I made the students draw close-ups of folds of drapery for three hours. Talk about right wing. I’m not a political conservative. I believe in a social agenda but in that class I was worse than Reagan. No breaks, you can’t go to the bathroom. The students hated me but in the end their boredom turned to real attentiveness.

“I thought a lot about Leona Battista Alberti (the 15th-Century Italian Renaissance architect and theorist) who said, “Don’t think about completion.

“Maybe it’s as simple as the idea that you can’t find a decent mason anymore. We have to slow down again to get things done right.” Lavender’s small, comfortable studio is punctuated with new paintings. They are smaller, simpler and more emotive now. Lavender had never drawn the figure before and sometimes it shows in awkward passages or irrational placements, but they have strong symbolic presence. A nude male crouches, brooding, or cowers, clutching a pole that could be either a bar on a cage or a defensive weapon. They are unmistakably self-portraits.

“Actually some are me and some my brother, who is a dancer and makes an excellent, handy model. I’m not interested in the idea that it is me or that it is nude except so far as it talks about our vulnerability. I used myself because I want the poses to reflect certain emotions and I had to take the poses to be sure they tallied with the feelings.

“The paintings are about isolation and vulnerability. I feel ambivalent about it because I partly treasure isolation but I want to get the feelings out there where I can see them. The figures aren’t me but a kind of double, a kind of ‘other.’

“They are a reaction against the modernist academy that’s grown up since Abstract Expressionism. I feel close to a lot of contemporary artists, Jim Morphesis who is in the A. E. tradition, Robert Helm who used to take 2,000 hours to make a box, John Frame. Joyce Treiman is a sort of godfather of what I’m doing. But I wanted to pose the care and attentiveness of even a Bouguereau against the shallowness and predictability of what modern art has become.

“I was angry inside. I decided to pursue this even if it left me completely alone. The funny thing is that the angrier and more isolated I became, the more people got interested.”

No Place Like Home

Jon Swihart would be a rarity in Los Angeles even if he had never painted a picture. In this land of shifting fortunes and drifting domiciles Swihart lives in the house where he was born in Santa Monica, a pretty 1927 Spanish bungalow in white plaster that has a parabolic arch in the living room.

The artist’s mother died when he was 15. Two brothers went off to fight in Vietnam and made their own lives after the American withdrawal. His father remarried and moved out, leaving Jon to run the house.

“Dad was an elementary schoolteacher and a Sunday painter. He started teaching me art when I was a kid. I studied at Santa Monica City College and Cal State Northridge but basically I am self-taught.”

Stocky and medium-short, the 33-year-old painter looks like a healthy young musketeer with shiny cheeks, thinning reddish hair and a guardsman’s mustache that splatters over his upper lip like rusty iron filings on a magnet. He appears amiably free of the intellectual baggage toted about by the other three, talking intelligently but simply about his art. There is a touch of the naif about Swihart but a visitor gets the impression of castellated defenses, a drawbridge that tilts down just enough to send out messages and slams shut at any close approach.

He paints in a small room at the back of the house. Pictures are near-miniature in scale and with a microscopic detail that rivals the Flemish primitives, French academicians or American Magic Realists. He’s been working about 10 years but his oeuvre is small since each piece requires six months of labor starting with sketches and going on to miniature-scale maquettes and finally live models--friends Swihart photographs in great detail. When a work is finally done, he has his friends in for a merciless critique and makes changes in the work when criticism seems right to him, a rational practice virtually unknown in the avant-garde mystique.

“I get so close to the pieces I miss things. See that guy’s foot there? I had it in an impossible position until a friend pointed it out and I fixed it.”

Despite numerous exhibitions he has never agreed to sell a painting and develops photographs at the Getty Museum to support himself. Just before the opening of a current show at Tortue Gallery he was anxious about the possibility of a sale.

“On the one hand I would like to make some money. On the other I don’t know how I will feel about letting go of a picture. I get attached to them.”

A corner of the room is festooned with post cards, mainly of paintings by Swihart’s idol Jean-Leon Gerome, whose academic scenes of Turkish baths and muscular Moors were popular with the French bourgeoisie until modernism cast him on the dust-heap of history. Swihart sees him as “Perfect, never awkward, rational and clear.”

The estimate has to be based mainly on reproductions since Swihart has never been to Europe and has not traveled in this country since childhood. There is something of Joseph Cornell’s sweet, closeted imagination in Swihart’s miniaturized art.

Although throbbing with narrative implications, his paintings are untitled. A characteristic composition shows a ramshackle classical temple in a sparse but beautiful dusky landscape. A bearded young man in jeans and jogging shoes stands in the portico making a “touch me not” gesture in the direction of an attractive nude girl who stands beyond a pile of rubble.

“I don’t like to be specific about what is going on in my paintings. Usually I get an idea but I don’t know where it came from. When the painting is finally finished it seems perfectly obvious that it is about something that was bothering me in my life at the time. In this one I was having trouble with a girlfriend. We were estranged and there was a lot of junk between us. I don’t want to say more than that. A psychologist lady looked at them once and she was able to say pretty accurately what they were about.”

Most paintings include a small gold object, a votive goddess, a golden calf. The real props stand around the house as decoration.

“I’ve always been attracted to the idea of the sacred. I’m not a believer myself but born-again Christians have called me up sure that I was one of them. One critic thought each painting represented a specific story from the Bible, like the temptation of Saint Anthony or the raising of Lazarus.”

Religious overtones are nonetheless inescapable. Some early paintings are spoofs, showing yuppies as saints against gold backgrounds. The humor was inspired by David Hockney, about the only contemporary artist Swihart will acknowledge as an influence. The paintings are odd and compelling with their fever-dream clarity and oracular allegorical mystery. Their combinations of classical trappings and modern dress throw the centuries out of whack and their combinations of idealism and psychological disturbance are like a Cecil B. DeMille production of “Waiting for Godot.”

They look like perfect Post-Mod style art but Swihart says they are simply the product of the way he has always painted, the things he has always cared about. You cannot look around his house or think of him working in the neo-classical precincts of the Getty and not believe him. This art is about the enigma of the obvious.

In the end it does not appear that the four artists climbed aboard the Post-Modernist bandwagon, but rather that the times finally caught up with them trudging lonely paths where the past meets the future.