Who, What . . . and Why?

The most interesting question posed by “Revealing and Concealing: Portraits and Identity” gets lost in the group show’s unwitting embrace of groupthink. The well-intentioned exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center begins by inviting viewers to wonder: “What happened to portraiture in 20th century art?” (As well as, “Why aren’t very many of the best contemporary artists drawn to this genre?” and “What does this mean about us as a people?”) But ultimately it trots out tired cliches about cultural diversity.

This is unsettling because the 25-artist survey, organized by Barbara Gilbert, the center’s curator of fine arts, opens with such great promise. On the first wall, five portraits from the Skirball’s permanent collection hang side by side.

The first picture, painted by an unknown artist around 1670, is thought to depict a prominent Jewish member of the court in Frankfurt, Germany, Moses Aaron Beer. Contrary to the Jewish custom of the time, he is clean-shaven and dressed in lacy shirt and elaborate wig--as any cosmopolitan businessman would be. The only thing that reveals his Jewish identity is a note with the name Beer on it in his left hand, which adds another layer of complexity to a man who appears to be both debonair and distrustful, as savvy about the treachery of court life as he is sensitive to the suffering it causes.

The next two paintings form a diptych that portrays Rabbi Aaron Chorin and his wife. Painted with crystalline precision in Hungary in the early 1800s by an unknown artist, this pair of vividly detailed close-ups publicizes the power and authority of its sitters.

The final two portraits are more personal, in both style and subject. The brushwork gets loose in Max Liebermann’s 1926 picture of his wife and granddaughter, who are so comfortable in their enjoyment of a quiet moment at home that they don’t bother to look up. Even looser brush strokes and a more limited palette dramatize Lesser Ury’s melancholic “Self-Portrait” from 1928, in which brooding Expressionism and unflinching introspection teeter-totter precariously.

Although these five pictures were painted over three centuries and in several countries around the world, they work well as a group, complementing one another, and at the same time highlighting differences, but always making more sense together than they would individually. In a nutshell, we watch the art of portraiture shift from an objective description of the world to a statement of subjective inner life. Informative wall-labels, written by assistant curator Tal Gozani, provide just the right amount of factual background information.

The curatorial intelligence that brought these works together to make a coherent visual argument is nowhere to be found in the rest of the exhibition. All of its remaining 55 images were made in the United States by artists of various ethnicities. All but two were created in the past 10 years. But few meaningful connections, or resonant points of comparison and contrast, emerge from their juxtaposition.

As a whole, “Portraits and Identity” is remarkably inert, one of the most lifeless shows of its kind in recent memory. Almost no momentum, either visual or emotional, builds as you move through the show. Initially, it’s tempting to attribute this dreary, repetitive quality to the preponderance of less-than-inspiring works.

For example, Ken Aptekar’s four large oils on panel look more like handmade reproductions or oversize wall labels than original works. Each consists of several enlarged and abruptly juxtaposed details of famous paintings to which the artist has bolted thick sheets of glass. Sandblasted into the glass are questions that read as non sequiturs.

Deborah Kass similarly rehashes an art historical masterpiece, substituting a double image of Barbra Streisand from the movie “Yentl” for Warhol’s “Double Elvis.” Kass’ appropriation of Warhol’s style and technique is Idea Art at its thinnest and most opportunistic. Compare her static, screen-printed painting to the Pop artist’s “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century” around the corner (which hardly ranks among his best work) and you will see just how little punch Kass’ bland rehash manages to capture.

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Less aggressive but equally derivative are most of the show’s large figurative paintings. Run-of-the-mill domestic scenes by Ethel Fisher, Dennis Kardon, Arnold Mesches, Jill Poyourow, Joyce Treiman and Ruth Weisberg have the presence of overblown family snapshots rendered in an illustrative, academic manner.

Where many of the painters use our familiarity with photographs to try to give their works a sense of everyday intimacy, most of the artists who use cameras go out of their way to distinguish their images from ordinary pictures. Double exposures, computer manipulation, slides projected on various backgrounds and handwritten texts cloak mediocre works by Donald Bernard, David Franck, Willie R. Middlebrook, Delilah Montoya and Albert J. Winn in the garb of artistry. However, none of these maneuvers is employed with sufficient verve to make it memorable.

Eventually, it becomes clear that the works themselves are not entirely responsible for the exhibition’s monotonous tone. Hung so that the paintings and photo-based images alternate with one another, the installation mimics the stereotypical way of seating dinner guests, with men and women alternating in an orderly fashion. It makes for a disjunctive exhibition, one in which visual rhythms are squelched before they really get going.

Rather than bringing together a selection of outstanding works and letting sparks fly among them, the installation keeps everything under tight control. To walk through the galleries is to feel as if an earnest, authoritarian instructor is leading you around by the scruff of your neck, admonishing you to pay attention to one artist’s work before moving on to the next, where you will do the same thing again.

The four categories into which “Portraits and Identity” has been divided reinforce the sense that its organizers are less interested in art than in using paintings and photographs to help viewers come to terms with who they are as people. The categories ask a couple of childish questions: “Who Are Our Heroes?” and “Can I Hide My Identity?” before turning into headings seemingly stolen from sociology textbooks or self-help bestsellers: “How Do Family and Community Impact on Identity?” and “How Do We Come to Terms With Our Self-Identity?”

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The biggest problem with the show is that it treats individual works of art as little more than evidence of an individual’s relationship to his or her cultural heritage. Self-portraits are the norm. More often than not, however, sitters are not presented as individuals but as mere representatives of types, exclusively defined by the racial or cultural group to which they belong.

Amid such solemnity, a touch of comic relief is provided by Laura Alvarez’s imaginative narratives, Eleanor Antin’s tight-lipped masquerades and Faith Ringgold’s sweetly loaded quilt.

Standing heads and shoulders above the rest of the contemporary works is Salomon Huerta’s life-size rendition of an anonymous person’s back. The figure’s broad shoulders suggest that he is a man, but his skin color, hairstyle and dress prevent viewers from concluding anything specific about his ethnicity. As if turning its back on the therapeutic nonsense all around it, Huerta’s spine-tingling painting catapults viewers back to the show’s introductory section, where you have enough room to ask your own questions, free of the exhibition’s heavy-handed guidance.

* “Revealing and Concealing: Portraits and Identity,” Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Brentwood, (310) 440-4500, through Dec. 31. Closed Mondays. Admission: $8.