Hammer Offers After-’Dinner’ Treats

Summer’s supposed to slow us down. That means museum visitors may have the leisure to meander after they’ve seen what got them into the galleries in the first place.

At UCLA’s Hammer Museum, the big show is “Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’ in Feminist Art History.”

It’s likely to leave some viewers feeling that the present is an excessively complex and contentious time. It may cheer them up to visit two concurrent smaller Hammer exhibitions that, at least, reassure us that ours is not the only confusing period in modern history.

Both concern French art in the latter part of the last century. They’re easier to look at than is suggested by the cumbersome titles, “Spirituality and Decadence: French Symbolist Works From the Permanent Collection” and “The Armand Hammer Honore Daumier and Contemporaries Collection.”

The first is a smattering of about 20 works by Symbolist artists. The very title seems self-contradictory, because matters spiritual usually suggest a striving for good, while decadence is seen to signal decline and evil.

In the 19th century, thinkers like Baudelaire and Nietzsche pondered how good and evil might be combined into a third way. Symbolist artists and poets alike reflected on this in a quest for art that would evoke tangible sensations.

The most impressive works here are two Xanadu fantasies by Gustave Moreau, a renegade academician who was a teacher of the important Modernist Matisse. His ornate, literary paintings “Salome Dancing Before Herod” and “King David” look like jewel-encrusted opium dreams. They seem a little quaint today, but they also carry an authentic romantic fascination with things exotic and forbidden.

Rudolphe Bresdin’s wonderfully tactile lithograph “The Comedy of Death” pushes pictorial illusionism to the edge of hallucination. Its micro-miniature detail reveals an old man sitting at the mouth of a cave haunted by skeletons, devils and monkeys. Squint and the whole thing dissolves into a grotesque head swallowing the scene.

A more realistic image of two “Morphine Addicts” by Paul Albert Besnard shows two attractive but desiccated women who prove that our culture was not the first to use drugs to blot out reality. By contrast, images by Maurice Denis and Maurice Dumont long for the pure innocence of born-again Christianity. Symbolist art, various as it was, largely represented an expedition into inner worlds.

In even more marked contrast, the show devoted to Daumier’s art finds him completely involved in the pathos and paradox of everyday reality.

A generation older than the Symbolists, Daumier was grounded in a tradition of observation. Most of his 50 works on view are well-known lithographs lampooning lawyers, doctors and politicians. They leave a general impression of an artist profoundly derisive of people who posture as helpers of humankind while lining their pockets and parading their egos.

Daumier’s disgust with such characters is never clearer than in his masterful “The Parliamentarians.” Quick clay sketches translated into bronze, the heads of the 30-odd legislators cast them as everything from suave hypocrites to potential ax murderers.

Yet one is finally less struck by the artist’s disdain than by the amused suppleness of his rendering. Such deft characterization somehow bespeaks an artist putting himself in his subject’s shoes. A small shadowy painting of barristers in their gowns is pensive. One cartoon shows a lawyer embracing a client on winning their case, while the defendant picks his pocket. In the end, Daumier does not judge. He witnesses the human comedy and lets us pass our own verdict.

So past and present are not so different save in one regard. Daumier and the Symbolists are clearly united by a shared visual language. Today artists reflect a world fragmenting into a babble of communications so various as to exclude one another.

* UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd. Daumier through Sept. 8, Symbolists through Oct. 6. Closed Monday, (310) 443-7020.