Illuminating Two Untidy Constellations : Commentary: ‘The Fauve Landscape’ and ‘The Independent Group’ tackle important transitional moments in 20th-Century art.

It’s common to think of the history of art as a lively sequence of discrete “major monuments.” These masterworks, produced through the labor of individual artistic genius, rank as cultural high points that loom above the broad lowlands of mundane historical events. Or, in the concise dialect of an undergraduate’s introductory art history course, the lineup spans “The Pyramids to Pollock.”

As history is in fact much messier than that, the untidy ebbs and flows of cultural life are important to remember. Individual artistic genius certainly plays its part; but, as much as genius might be inborn, it is also constructed by a constellation of events. Museum shows that try to illuminate such constellations, which often constitute transitional phases for art, are therefore of particular note.

Such is the case with two sizable and very different shows in Los Angeles. “The Fauve Landscape: Matisse, Derain, Braque and Their Circle, 1904-1908,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (through Sunday), and “The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary in Little Tokyo (through Jan. 13), tackle two important moments of transition in 20th-Century art. Even if most of the work in these two exhibitions leaves something to be desired, both are notable.

Fauve painting and the art of the Independent Group opened important possibilities for subsequent generations of artists, or for the later work certain participating artists were themselves to produce. If “The Independent Group” is finally the more satisfying of the two, it is hardly because any wild claim can be made that Magda Cordell, Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and the rest are more accomplished artists in our own time than were Henri Matisse, Andre Derain or Georges Braque in theirs. It is because the show of British art has a clear-eyed grasp of the achievement under scrutiny, while the show of Fauve painting makes more of its particular subject than finally is warranted.

“The Fauve Landscape” is immense. More than 170 paintings, installed in the galleries geographically and chronologically, follow the work of 10 artists who shared an affinity for exuberant color not tied to a faithful description of nature. These artists stood at a complex crossroads. They built upon the earlier achievements of the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Symbolists and other artists of the late 19th Century and their efforts opened the way for the Expressionist, Cubist and individual styles that would mark the true beginnings of a 20th-Century art.

Although the artists knew one another, and sometimes painted side by side, it is a mistake to think of the Fauves as a cohesive group or “movement,” complete with clearly defined aims and aspirations. Simply put, they pried color loose from any conventional moorings that remained for art, and they did so for a variety of purposes. Their collective name (which means “the wild beasts”) was arrived at serendipitously, when a critic lumped together the work of several artists in a commentary on a 1905 exhibition.

“The Fauve Landscape” begins with paintings made the year prior to that show, and it ends a scant four years later; by then, even a strained cohesiveness cannot be detected among most of the painters. The brevity of the Fauve period, which really burned brightest for little more than two years, is conspicuously important. The concentrated moment speaks of an intensity and excitement that could not be expected to last. Furthermore, it suggests an exuberance befitting the youth of many of the artists.

Most were not yet 30 in 1905. Matisse, at 36, was the “grand old man” of Fauve painting, but the two most important of the remaining artists were the youngest of the bunch--Braque at 23, Derain at 25. For Derain, especially, the matter of age is significant. He had known Matisse since his teens. Painting side by side with him in Collioure, a fishing village in the south of France, the challenge of an informal master-apprentice relationship was inevitable. Liberated by the example of the older artist, Derain pushed himself to the limit.

Derain’s career as an invigorating painter was truly meteoric. It flashed into view in 1905 and by the end of 1907 was decisively over. In room after room at LACMA, where by far the largest share of the sprawling exhibition chronicles the often dreary paintings of such lesser lights as Othon Friesz, Albert Marquet, Maurice de Vlaminck and the rest, Derain’s canvases repeatedly surprise. He is not, by any means, the painter that Matisse was, nor did he possess the early promise that Braque was to build upon in his Cubist years. Yet, especially in paintings executed in the golden light of L’Estaque, a port town near Marseilles, Derain repeatedly steals the show.

What brought Derain’s painting crashing to the ground? It’s difficult to say for sure. But, judging from the chunky (and clunky) paintings in the show’s final room, the sudden death of Paul Cezanne in the fall of 1906 and the memorial exhibition to him mounted in Paris the following spring were likely contributors.

The effect of the memorial show on French painting is well known. What Matisse was to color, Cezanne had been to form. He had wanted, as the famous aphorism goes, to make of his art “something solid, like the museums.” Cezanne’s death, and the elevation of his art into the pantheon, made committed confrontation with his accomplishments a necessity. For Derain, the urge to monumentalize the otherwise fleeting exuberance of his pastoral landscapes was strong. But when he tried to transform his wide-open, youthful style into something solid and “important,” it deflated fast.

“The Fauve Landscape” is an important show (the catalogue’s minutely detailed chronology, assembled by curator Judi Freeman, is a remarkable contribution in itself). But it disappoints, too. The decision to focus on landscape painting, at the expense of figure studies and still-lifes, skews the presentation in puzzling ways. We now have a full accounting of who painted what, when, where and with whom. Yet no reason is persuasively offered to believe that the direct encounter with the French landscape, often by small groups of artists, had more to do with Fauve ideals than working alone in the studio.

The result is a show with an exceedingly odd demeanor. It presents a definitive comparison of the paintings of a few major, but of mostly minor, artists working with just one aspect of a larger transitional moment, whose most abundant fruits came later. The show feels misshapen.

By sharp contrast, “The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty” presents its assembly of minor artists working in a transitional moment in ways that mingle insight with balance. (The show could use a more graceful installation, but that’s another matter.) The Independent Group--a kind of artistic think tank of 15 painters, sculptors, photographers, designers, architects and writers--was as short-lived as the Fauves, brainstorming and mounting exhibitions between 1952 and ’55. But one never senses that curator Jacquelynn Bass, director of the University Art Museum at Berkeley, where the show travels next, is making outsize claims for the art. By featuring reconstructions of parts of exhibitions organized by the Independent Group, the show exudes a documentary feel. It says, simply, “This is what happened.”

To be sure, the presentation benefits enormously from an element of unfamiliarity. Because the Independent Group included prominent writers--especially the architecture critic Reyner Banham and the art critic Lawrence Alloway--the so-called “proto-Pop” art produced in London in the 1950s is a standard part of the contemporary literature, although rarely seen in the flesh. Indeed, just a single image from the period comes readily to mind: Richard Hamilton’s famous small collage of gross suburban consumerism, “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?”

Ironically, this 1956 collage is not in the exhibition (a color photograph fills in for the absent piece, which currently hangs at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the egregious “High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture”). What will be found at MOCA, however, is a whole wall filled with like-minded collages by Eduardo Paolozzi, the Scottish-born son of Italian immigrants. Many pre-date the Hamilton by at least a half-dozen years. With their evident debt to the earlier classic collages made from ticket stubs and such by Kurt Schwitters, Paolozzi’s works provide eye-opening context for the one famous image from the period.

“The Independent Group” is in fact a show very much about context, and about artists who sensed a radical shift occurring in postwar life. They tried, albeit without much immediate success, to fashion a visual language with which to come to terms with the change.

Great Britain, like the Continent, was staggering under the rebuilding effort that followed the horrible devastation of World War II. In the process of reconstruction, both sides of the Channel were being “invaded”--not by bombs or troops, but by products and images from the burgeoning United States. In contrast to the rest of Europe, Britain shared a common language with its all-American colonizer. And in an exploration of a social revolution whose consumerist values were borne by images created in magazines, movies, records, advertising and other narrative mediums of mass culture, this was no small advantage.

Within the hidebound class-structure of Britain, mandarins did not take kindly to the sudden inundation of uncontrollable foreign trash. Of course, this was precisely the quality the receptive artists of the Independent Group recognized as holding the capacity for a certain liberation. Making “high art” from the raucous artifacts of “popular culture” explains the prominence in the show of cut-and-paste collage. Furthermore, it suggests how a group of mostly working-class artists meant to have a say in reshaping a new England.

There was, however, an insurmountable contradiction to the process of transforming ostensible kitsch into art, by making paintings and sculptures from Intimate Confessions magazines and concrete construction blocks. Whether “elevating” artifacts of popular culture to the level of high art, or “dragging down” high art to the level of popular culture, a traditional concept of hierarchy remained the operating principle. The unresolved dilemma for the artists of the Independent Group was how to do more than merely tinker with traditional categories.

One productive approach lay in regarding the whole modern pile-up of images, high or low, as if cultural artifacts of a mysterious civilization. The business of the artist was thus akin to being an archeologist of contemporary life. The artist who, more than any other, was able to harness this archeological motif to compelling, if modest, effect was the sculptor William Turnbull.

Turnbull’s “Head 2” (1955) is easily the standout in the show. A small, scarified, oval lump of blackened bronze lying on its side, “Head 2” contains within it decisive echoes of the sculptural perfection of Brancusi; yet, this sleek idealization is wedded to both the ancient geology and the working-class pressures of the coal yard. A scant eight inches long, and begging to be cradled in the hands, the sweet, compact little oval form is part life-bearing egg, part grisly hand-grenade.

Transitional phases may not necessarily result in the immediate production of major monuments of art. But a sculpture like this one is really quite enough.