ART REVIEW : Surrealists Who Changed Their Scenery

A flavorful blend of mysticism, science, psychology and social commentary surrounds “Pursuit of the Marvelous” at the Laguna Art Museum. The exhibit offers a sampling of paintings and prints by three Surrealists from foreign parts who all touched down for long or short spells in California during the 1940s: American expatriate Charles Howard and Englishmen Stanley William Hayter and Gordon Onslow Ford.

San Francisco was a temporary base for Howard, a summertime hangout for Hayter, and an adopted home for Onslow Ford. As lecturers, exhibitors and colleagues of local artists, the trio apparently helped to invigorate an art scene that was in the process of throwing off its allegiance to realist painting and beginning a brief love affair with abstraction.

But, oddly enough--except for some preliminary remarks in the catalogue by associate curator Susan Anderson--the California context remains shadowy. The show, which includes work from the 1930s, ‘40s and early ‘50s, does not dwell on the question of whether the change of scene made any impact on the three artist’ work, and it includes no examples of their legacy in the Bay Area.

On the positive side, the exhibit offers a glimpse of the output of three mystically inclined individualists, at least two of whom--Howard and Onslow Ford--still have significant claims on our attention.

Howard was born in 1899 in New Jersey to a family of artists and architects who resettled in Berkeley when he was an infant. In his early 30s he married a British painter and moved to London, where the tense prewar climate gave his work a new sense of foreboding. He spent the war years in the Bay Area, putting in a stint as a muralist for the Works Progress Administration, exhibiting widely and lecturing at the California School of Fine Arts.

A buddy of mobile artist Alexander Calder, Howard was also intrigued by making abstract forms move in space; a critic once called his work “dynamic architecture.” But his mature paintings, dating from his years in London, also reflect unresolved tensions between chaos and order, between the mystical energy of natural forces and the limpid clarity of intellectual theory.

Howard’s delicate compositions consist primarily of flat and subtly modeled curving forms jiggered into pinpoint balances. His “architectural” finesse lends an air of tension and mutability--an urgency--to shapes that might look whimsical in another context.

In “Generation” (1940), crisp orange, brown and white shapes simultaneously suggest natural imagery, organic matter viewed under the microscope and the tools of a chemistry lab. “The First Hypothesis” (1946) has more Orwellian overtones, with its web of fine, nervous line, its contrasts of blood red with buttoned-up gray and white, and the two huge leaf or blade forms that almost touch, enclosed within a vaguely mechanical, pulley-like framework.

Onslow Ford left England for the artist’s life in Paris in 1936, when he was in his early 20s, and became a member of the official Surrealist group. Under his and Chilean artist Matta’s influence, a new wave of Surrealists rejected the type of “dream” imagery associated with Salvador Dali’s figurative work in favor of abstract explorations of the cosmic unknown.

In 1948, after he had resigned from the group and sojourned in New York and Mexico, Onslow Ford settled in San Francisco. There, his interests came to embrace Zen Buddhism, Japanese calligraphy and the notion of art as a way of meditation. In 1951, he and fellow painters Lee Mullican and Wolfgang Paalen formed the Dynaton group, dedicated to locating rhythms and forms suggestive of the great cosmic beyond.

Floating through the luminous spaces of his pre-San Francisco paintings was an eccentric but orderly landscape of concentric circles, angular floating planes, grid lines, light beams and blobs of protoplasm--in his view, an image of “the secrets contained in the universe of the human mind.”

In some paintings, rhythmic patterns of dots aerate the canvas in a visionary way. “Migrators with Birds” (1944) is somewhat reminiscent of Australian aboriginal art, for instance.

Onslow Ford’s California paintings in the exhibit are markedly bigger and baggier, with imagery veiled behind irregular “vertical blinds” of broken color. The artist believed such works actively promoted a meditative experience for the viewer.

Serious-minded as it was, this effort is harder to appreciate. In the next decade, the “light and space” artists would evoke meditative states without interposing the static of specific imagery.

Hayter, born in 1901 to a family of artists, studied chemistry and geology before concentrating wholeheartedly on art. Printmaking was his passion and challenge. In Paris in the 1920s he founded a print workshop where he developed several innovative processes and became intrigued by the subconscious investigations of the Surrealists. San Francisco lured him only briefly, in the ‘40s, for teaching gigs.

Hayter’s big goal was to merge “the unconscious element from which inspiration comes, and extremely rational control of the methods of execution.” Using clashing, acid-toned colors (considered very bizarre at the time), deliberately ambiguous superimposed images, and intricate webs of line, Hayter aimed to fuse the concepts of space and time. Viewers who entered the energized fabric of his prints were to find themselves peering into their “own internal reality.”

Although his evident fascination with women in extremis might give rise to pop psych queries about his relations with the opposite sex, most of Hayter’s works in the exhibit seem ingrown and precious, too fussily concerned with technique to register on an emotional plane. The major exception is his painting, “Ophelia,” from 1948, in which fiercely ricocheting thick black line and radiating bursts of red and yellow create a terrifying mask of a face twisted by madness.