Review: ‘The Big 3-0! Thirty Years of California Modernism’ at Tobey C. Moss Gallery
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A little more than 100 artworks by 57 painters, sculptors and printmakers are crammed into the Tobey C. Moss Gallery to celebrate the venue’s 30th anniversary. “The Big 3-0! Thirty Years of California Modernism” is a lovely hodgepodge of generally terrific things. Not one is diminished by the works crowded around it, and many actually benefit from the chaos.
In the entryway, a 495-year-old engraving by Albrecht Dürer and a 246-year-old etching by Giovanni Battista Piranesi hang on the same wall as “The Golden West,” a funky folk landscape painted by John Roeder around 1950. The combination is crazy, guaranteed to make the heads of strictly rational visitors spin.
The nuttiness continues nearby: a plaster bust from 1928 by Ejnar Hansen and a 1960s assemblage by Gordon Wagner. It’s interrupted by an inspired pairing: Ynez Johnston’s “Reflections” and Lee Mullican’s “Fall of Icarus” complement each other nicely.
To the left, the most conventionally installed gallery showcases L.A.’s first homegrown style of painting to gain international acclaim: hard-edged abstraction. Standouts include works on canvas and paper by John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley, Helen Lundeberg, Lorser Feitelson, Oskar Fischinger, June Wayne, Emerson Woelffer and Leonard Edmondson.
Two back rooms, both of which do double duty as offices and display areas, are treasure troves that make you feel as if you have fallen into an artistic version of “Where’s Waldo?” This part of the show is truly loopy. Pieces by Dorr Bothwell, Peter Shire, Rico Lebrun and George Herms clash. Others, by Claire Falkenstein, Peter Krasnow, James Heuter and Joyce Treiman, do not add up to any kind of whole yet form something greater than the sum of its parts.
Some of the pleasure resides in the feeling that you have stepped into a living time capsule. This curious sense has less to do with the age of the works and more to do with the style of presentation: The jam-packed cornucopia defies the Minimalist efficiency that characterizes so much of modern life. Like an eccentric aunt’s attic, “The Big 3-0” is stuffed with a lifetime of loves and discoveries that refuse to be shoehorned into tidy categories.
-- David Pagel
Tobey C. Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 933-5523, through Jan. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
Above: Gordon Wagner’s assemblage ‘The Mexican Night Clerk’ (1960-65). Credit: Tobey C. Moss Gallery