ART REVIEWS : ‘Wrapped in Glory’: Folk-Style Images on Quilts

If you have a soft spot, prepare to be charmed by “Wrapped in Glory,” an unusual show of quilts just opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This spread of 30 foldable works constitutes the first encompassing look at a fascinating subspecies of the genre, quilts and bedcovers whose abstract patterns are interlaced and punctuated with pictures.

The folk-style imagery of the quilts suggests the preoccupations of the 18th- and 19th-Century women who lavished time and care on them as ceremonial objects and intimate icons of their lives. Quilts did, after all, drape the bed, that most private piece of furniture. There, people were born to dream, weep, love and--if they were lucky--to die peacefully at home. Quilts are both celebratory and solemn.

Quilts became artistically fashionable in the 1970s when they were associated with the feminist movement. They have gone on to attract appreciation as fascinating repositories of cultural history and sometimes embody considerable aesthetic merit.

Speaking of feminism, “The Suffragette Quilt” uses an amusing alternating format of circles and squares to frame scenes later thought to allude to women’s rights. One shows a rather cross gent in the kitchen preparing dinner. In a nearby scene, a perky and proud lady drives a horse cart all by herself. According to a warmly informative catalogue by associate curator Sandi Fox, quilts were commonly produced in support of important social movements such as temperance and anti-slavery.

Feminists, however, were known to shun quilts as symbolic of subjugation. This one--ascribed to Emma Civey--craftily refuses to tip its hand. Looking, you simply cannot tell if it is wry protest or sly satire.

Proper playing of gender roles obviously loomed large then, as now. “The Old Maid Quilt” is an otherwise attractive pattern of orange, white and deep green. At its center is drawn a rather pinched image of a stereotypical spinster. It was fashioned for one Susan Daggett by sister members of her church society when she reached the advanced age of 30, still single. Daggett apparently took no offense. She remained unmarried, leading a worthy life as a school principal and dedicated church worker.

Men, of course, were expected to be men. The last of the bare-knuckle heavyweight boxing champions was John L. Sullivan, who reigned for 10 years until Jim Corbett trounced him (with gloves) in 1892. After the Civil War, a ballooning urban population grew increasingly flabby and, then as now, an athletic craze grew and muscles were considered moral. Sullivan was the main hero of the fad. He is depicted mustachioed and bare-chested in the midst of a kaleidoscopic crazy quilt embroidered with everything from himself in formal dress to headlines from the Police Gazette. It’s a wonderful proto-Pop icon.

All of which is not to create the impression that the show is some manner of masked polemic. Generous and good-natured, it offers everything from breezy port scenes and galloping horsemen to the humorous symbolism of the “Hat and Heart Quilt,” which has to be about a gentleman in love. For aesthetes, there is the elegant minimalism of the white-on-white “Rachel de Puy Quilt” or the verdant, spring-like effect of the lovely red, white and apple-green “Ackerman Quilt.”

On the whole, the world depicted is a storybook idyll. An unsettling exception is “The Asylum Quilt,” which seems to adumbrate the dislocations of modern art and society. It was made around 1850 by an inmate of Baltimore’s Maryland Hospital. Said to have been a disturbed girl, she came to the asylum pregnant and out of wedlock. She eventually died there.

At first, her quilt seems a cheery, neat collection of ranked figures. Closely observed, it bristles with pre-Freudian phallic snakes and figures in postures of threatening ambiguity. The style is that now associated with the art of the mentally disturbed. It seems there never was an Eden.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., to Jan. 13 .

Visual and Poetical Art: After all the strident polemical art we’ve been seeing of late, the exhibition “Visual Poetry” wafts an agreeable gentleness. Installed in the art gallery of the Otis/Parsons school, it presents the work of an international group of 11 artists who are little known in these parts but now introduced with appropriate, but frustrating, bardic vagueness.

According to a catalogue essay by guest curator Peter Frank, they are part of an informal movement to combine visual and poetical art that harks back to the ‘60s. According to the artists’ biographies, they range in age from 55 to 68 so they’ve been at it for a while.

At what?

Evidently, plying their trade somewhere between the arcane arena of modern poetry, the esoteric precinct of artist’s books and the refined confines of the art gallery. Sounds like a good way to guarantee oneself honorable obscurity. In recent results shown here, they bear generic resemblance to noted word-works artists like Ed Ruscha, or for that matter Joan Miro or Guillame Appolinaire, to get down to the historical nitty-gritty.

Actually, the Scot Ian Hamilton Findlay is appreciated by pilgrim cognoscenti and readers of art journals for his picturesque Stonypath Garden at Dunsyre, which he’s worked on since 1967. Here he’s represented by the phrase, “Diamond Studded Fish Net” spelled out in rose-colored neon. You have to like a man who thinks like that.

Like their verbal ancestors, the French Symbolist poets, this lot wants to use words to evoke visceral sensations. They give themselves the additional challenge of harmonizing words with visual art that is another language. Not all of them speak it well, so there’s marked amateurishness about the work of Alain Arias-Mission and others even though you can tell their hearts are in the right place. We viewers are in trouble if we don’t speak the artist’s tongue. Italian is required to penetrate the art of Jean-Francois Bory and Ugo Carrega.

All the same, the show leaves a nice afterglow. Mirella Bentivoglio lives in Rome where she shaped the Coca-Cola logo into a valentine and called it “The Heart of the Obedient Consumer.”

Paris’ Julien Blaine gets a frisson from combinations of playing cards, leaves and a printed French language exercise.

All this stuff is an attempt at delicate transformation of meaning. German Carlfriedrich Claus gets it right in abstract lithographs that look like sounds, visualized. The Italian known as Sarenco transmutes a banner of Pop art comma shapes into a gentle shower with the motto, “Raining Season . . . Calligrame.” Japan’s Shohachiro Takahashi does it with nothing more than a framed sheet of particularly lovely postage stamps and Eugenio Miccini does it with two small cases of miniaturized books.

This bunch wins us over with modesty and lyric spirit. They aren’t out to impress anybody, they just want to get the rhyme right.

The Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, 2401 Wilshire Blvd., to Nov. 3 .