Landscape Exhibit Spans the Pacific : Art: Exhibit of New Zealand landscape paintings shows relationship to art in the United States.

SAN DIEGO —  The San Diego Museum of Art’s new exhibition, “Pacific Parallels: Artists and the Landscape in New Zealand,” introduces landscape art of the South Seas island nation as having evolved on a course parallel to that of North American art from the mid-19th-Century to the present. First there are the 19th-Century picturesque odes to nature, those glorious, fairly faithful visions that owe much to the British painting tradition. More personal interpretations of the landscape follow, images that bear the faint stamp of Cubism and the modernist touches of Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Entering the 1960s, New Zealand artists, like those in the United States, became disenchanted and disappointed as they began to comprehend how estranged their culture had become from nature. Their art, and the art that has followed in the past few decades, either critiques the industrial world’s divorce from Mother Earth or lays the foundation for reclaiming that lost love through a more spiritual, reverential approach to the land.

The route traced in this show’s roughly 100 paintings and photographs is a fascinating one to follow for its generalized insights into the nature/culture divide, though many of the works included are far more interesting as vehicles illustrating the history of that relationship than they are aesthetically rich in themselves. New Zealand’s art is not only parallel in many ways to the art of its American and European cousins, it is also often derivative of it. Although most of the work here is quite respectable and competent, it feels too literally earthbound. Only a handful of paintings transcend the curatorial scaffolding erected to hold them and soar, on their own, into the realm of truly vital expression.

The most impressive of these are the paintings of Colin McCahon. “Tomorrow Will Be the Same But Not As This” (1958-9), a densely glazed image of a river bisecting two dark masses of land, has a mesmerizing, metaphoric power. Its surface, while glossy, is also gritty with sand. The painting is of the earth, both literally and figuratively. In a direct yet profound manner, it asserts a fundamental truth about the natural world and its subtle, ever-changing face. The material and the mystical worlds are essentially one and the same, McCahon’s painting suggests, when they are perceived with the wonder appropriate to them.

Leading up to McCahon’s paintings and following them in the galleries are numerous sequences of both paintings and photographs that are instructive in piecing together the history of the landscape genre in New Zealand, but are otherwise unremarkable. London-born John Kinder made topographical photographs and watercolors in the 1860s and ‘70s akin to those made concurrently by other British and American artists surveying unfamiliar lands. Other photographers in the show follow well-trod paths as well, especially that of the clearly delineated and well-ordered landscape popularized by the f64 group in California beginning in the 1930s.

Because of the camera’s central role in 19th- and 20th-Century society’s knowledge of the physical world, the decision to include photographs alongside paintings in this show was a wise one. Unfortunately, that choice was more insightful in itself than most of the beautiful but bland photographs that curator and University of Kansas art historian Charles Eldredge included.

Rural views dominate the first half of “Pacific Parallels,” and Rita Angus’ painting of burning scrub stands out as one of the most animated images in the show. Like O’Keeffe, whom Eldredge compares her to, Angus endows the forms of nature with preternatural sensuousness. Unlike O’Keeffe, however, Angus often paints clumsily, as if unable to strike a comfortable balance between graceful generalizations and finicky details.

The artists here tend to represent the rural landscape, while they respond to the urban. Robert Ellis paints city streets and highways like so many tightly knit skeins. Together, the roads comprise a modern, functional unit--the city--yet they also have a slightly organic character, as if the trails of burrowing animals. Ruth Watson reworks conventional images of New Zealand on maps and board games, giving them slightly subversive subtexts. Her work calls attention to the subjectivity of perspective--how political, social and even sexual identity determine how one sees the world.

Curator Eldredge examines each of the artist’s individual perspectives thoughtfully in his catalogue essay, and sets each within the context of New Zealand’s social, environmental and political history. He also discusses the Maori, New Zealand’s native population, as they and their richly carved works have influenced (or not) the planar works of these “pakeha,” or European-derived artists.

Eldredge’s journey into the art history of New Zealand evoked simultaneous feelings of discovery and familiarity, he writes, for much of what he encountered sprung from the same family tree as the art of this country. With “Pacific Parallels,” he has succeeded in recreating those mixed sensations for viewers, except that his discoveries may not feel as fresh for others as they did for him.

* San Diego Museum of Art, through Jan . 31. Hours are 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Tuesday - Sunday .