COURTESY PHOTOS Above, Ray Strong's untitled painting of the Central Coast hills. Below, his 1939 mural "The Choice."

Strong's strengths, continued

REVERED PAINTER RAY STRONG'S OFFBEAT WORKS AT CHANNING PEAKE GALLERY

STRONG VISION, STRONG SPIRIT
When: Through June 24
Where: Channing Peake Gallery, 105 E. Anapamu St., County Administration Building, first floor
Gallery hours: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday
Information: 568-3990

Josef Woodard
NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT

Santa Barbara's art scene gets a potent new-year kickoff with the new show in the UCSB's University Art Museum, "Out of Site: Selections from the Marsha S. Glazer Collection," one of those pinch-yourself exhibitions in a city unaccustomed to finding such a gathering of celebrated names under one roof.

In any well-stocked cosmopolitan art museum, you might expect to see a show sporting the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter and many other Modernist powerhouses. But finding them in a local gallery can leaves a visitor a bit breathless.

In this rare public showing of Glazer's acclaimed collection, whose normal "site" is in an art-enriched home in Washington state, we're led through a balanced and smartly-built collection that manages to lead us on a shorthand tour of 20th century art, particularly the American variety. Glazer worked her way in and out of the Abstract Expressionist and other New York schools, and has taken detours according to taste.

You know something special is afoot in the museum when the sculptural "greeter" for the show, perched in all her modern-primitive glory at the exhibition's entrance, is Picasso's bronze assemblage piece "La Femme en Robe Longue," circa 1943. Uneven parts smooth metal and rough-hewn, hand-kneaded, the figure reflects Picasso's blend of the primal and the futurist, a quality further demonstrated in his fine painting of a few years later, "Nu Couche et Femme Se Lavane les Pieds." Here, in the fragmented and fruity planes of his "synthetic Cubist" style, the image of a nude on a couch and another female washing her feet is at once erotic and anti-erotic, sophisticated and brusque: the Picasso paradox in action.

One downside to the atypical value of the art on display is a heightened state of alert in the space. On the afternoon of a recent visit, campus police were on hand, with real guns. The big Johns work, "According to What" (1964) is equipped with perimeter alarms, preventing too-close encounters with the art. This scribbling, mild-mannered critic was accosted by a guard, who insisted "No pens allowed!" Full disclosure: This review was written with the lowly and noninjurious pencil.

Such tense circumstances are hardly conducive to the calmly reflective, sanctuarylike atmosphere one expects of an art gallery.

Mediating the discomfort, though, is the impressive nature of the all-star show itself, which makes for a fairly tidy art history lesson, and with plenty of intriguing cross-currents.

Johns' massive work, for instance, is an epic, multipaneled, crazily eclectic barrage of stimuli. After four decades and the endless parade of artists swiping his ideas, the piece looks a bit old-fashioned and quaint, but it's important to note the date and the freshness of its audacity at the time of its creation. One also follows the logical through-line to his predecessors, including seminal assemblage maverick Kurt Schwitters, whose 1945 piece "Das Schuhsonlenbild" similarly mashes up painting and found objects, including a shoe sole. This example of Schwitters' "Merz Pictures" draws energy from the blend of materials from the real, concrete world and the art world's idea bank.

Other connections between artists are wisely played up through their placement in the gallery space. Influential early abstract expressionist Arshile Gorky's sensuously biomorphic abstract painting "Year after Year" was created in 1947, a year before his suicide. The piece resonates sympathetically with the adjacent 1954 abstraction by Joan Mitchell, whose kinetic and virtuosic vocabulary of lines and colors are placed in the service of subconscious energy flow.

While this exhibition is dominated by the work of male artists, as in the general ranks of accepted art world icons, she also takes heed of important female artists. Glazer collected the intuitively expressive abstractionist Lee Krasner, for instance, before she decided to acquire Krasner's more famous husband, Jackson Pollock. The Pollock here in this selection, the densely-layered '40s era "White Horizontal," predated his classic drip-and-splatter model.

Rauschenberg, an ally and friendly competitor of Johns' in the pop arty '60s, is seen via his massive 1988 sculpture "Braggard," a dazzling hulk made of acrylic paint, rubber, metal and mirrored aluminum. Also connected to the massive relief sculpture is an actual, mangled shopping cart, summoning up echoes of consumerism gone awry.

Other real life injections appearing the show include Claes Oldenburg's weirdly witty little assemblage "Souvenir of Venice, California," Wayne Thiebaud's chunky realism confection, "Black Shoes," and the gnarled car part sculpture of John Chamberlain's "Waller." David Hockney's clumsy "California Art Collector" isn't one of his better paintings, while Jean Dubuffet's smallish "Black Beauty" nicely typifies the quasiprimitive charm of his "Art Brut" style.

One wall in the gallery hosts dynamic examples of late, great Modernists who split the difference between abstraction and figurative art impulses. Roy Lichtenstein's massive yet somehow light-spirited "Figures in a Landscape" can be appreciated on multiple levels, depending on the beholder's distance from the piece, and one's recognition of the combined elements of figure, landscape and more purely abstract intention.

A related abstract-cum-figurative gambit can be seen in Willem de Kooning's "Woman in Landscape IV," the finest artwork in the exhibition. We're effectively lured into the interpretive vortex of de Kooning's strange vision, one that is both of this world yet suggesting another world entirely. One contemporary artist in this show who straddles the last century and the current one is the inherently restless German artist Gerhard Richter. His eye opener, "Abstract Painting 584-1," done in 1985, seems to reflect on the rest of the show while carving out its own niche. A complex bombast of visual data, at once personal and coolly objective, Richter's painting relies on his unique abstract painting lingo Ñ with bursts and sprays of color over cloudy foundations. Richter's painting is both a powerful statement in itself, and a sly reinvention of - and rebellion against Ñ older abstract expressionist role models of the 20th century. It's the most forward-leaning and future-affirming piece in a show otherwise taking justifiable comfort in old school "radical" conventions.

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