Mixed Blessings

Twenty years ago, in 1977, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art deaccessioned a large and imposing full-length portrait of an American named John Dunbar, shown seated in three-quarter view and with a carved totemic sculpture standing nearby. The plan was to raise money for other acquisitions of Modern art.

Painted in 1931 by Diego Rivera, probably in the famous “blue house” in the Coyoacan neighborhood of Mexico City where Frida Kahlo lived, the portrait melds the chunky, dramatic forms familiar from some pre-Columbian art with the Cubist sense of space that Rivera had learned as a young artist studying in Paris. A Sotheby’s auction netted $19,000 for the picture, which had been a gift to LACMA from Dunbar’s daughter in 1960.

Through a peculiar twist of fate, that portrait hangs today as a commanding presence at the entrance to “Mexican Masterpieces From the Bernard and Edith Lewin Collection,” an exhibition that opened Sunday of 54 paintings and 38 works on paper. They represent the cream of some 2,000 works acquired with great fanfare just seven weeks ago--by none other than the L.A. County Museum of Art.

Welcome back, Mr. Dunbar. You’re looking good.

And welcome, Mr. Rivera. Your work is a decided strength in an otherwise erratic collection.

The Lewin acquisition is a critical step in a direction the museum should have taken long ago--indeed, one that had even been foolishly undermined, as the deaccessioning of the fine Rivera portrait suggests--both because of the shared history between Los Angeles and Mexico and between Mexican and American Modern art. But even though the first step on a journey is often the most difficult to take, there is still a long road to travel. Titling this show “Mexican Masterpieces” overstates the case, setting up grand expectations that are met only sporadically in the galleries. Look at the show instead as a beginning, which will require significant follow-through to gain significant meaning.

Many individual objects are museum worthy. As a whole, however, the collection more precisely represents the Lewins’ personal enthusiasm for artists whose work they represented at their galleries in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs.

On the plus side is an array of 31 pictures by Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991), especially impressive in paintings produced in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s. The most powerful is “Friend of the Birds” (1944), a seemingly ancient figure shown seated in a garden, with hands outstretched toward a hovering, tightly massed flock of eight magenta birds. Tamayo’s earthy, rich and subtle palette helps infuse a simple genre scene with the spectral mystery of the ages.

The abundance of work by Tamayo, together with a sizable selection of mediocre abstract paintings and reliefs by Guatemala-born Carlos Merida (1891-1985) and a few tedious figurative works by Jose Luis Cuevas (b. 1934) and Rafael Coronel (b. 1931), shows how an increasingly conservative brand of School of Paris painting remained of primary significance in Mexico into the 1950s and far beyond--long after it had ceased to matter in American or European art.

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Indeed, the achievement of postwar painting in the U.S. was conscientiously cast as having shaken off the pervasive influence of the School of Paris, which dominated the century’s first half. In Mexico the story was different. The European standard, which fused with such interests as mexicanidad (indigenous customs) and radical Leftist politics, was absorbed in the 1920s as integral to the foundation--and the stunning success--of a Modern avant-garde. Inevitably, as decades passed, it became an academic manner; only recently has a younger generation of Mexican artists begun to set it aside.

In addition to Rivera’s Dunbar portrait, one of the chief pleasures of the Lewin holdings is the large and often important array of the painter’s works in pencil, watercolor and gouache on paper. They range in date from the mid-1920s to 1956, the year before the artist died. Twenty-four of the collection’s approximately 200 Rivera drawings are on view--an exceptionally significant body of work for LACMA to have acquired, and one that will likely be a trove of future scholarship.

In fact, of the seven galleries devoted to the show, the second, which houses 11 Rivera drawings, is perhaps its most consistently exciting room. Among the wonders are a surreal pencil sketch of a man beneath a giant shell, a gouache of a fleshy archaic nude and two big, gridded pencil studies for later versions of his infamous 1934 mural for New York’s Rockefeller Center, “Man, Controller of the Universe,” which was destroyed because it featured Lenin’s likeness. The simple, clear, sure lines of these impressive contour drawings, which match a patriarchal figure of “Capitalism” with a headless one of “Socialism,” endow the images with a monumental solemnity.

The other two of the “big three” Mexican muralists--David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1975) and Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949)--are poorly represented here, with only late or exceedingly minor examples. Most disappointing of all, though, is the fate of Orozco’s “Revolutionaries in a Landscape,” an iconic image of peasant-soldiers in an angry field of buzz-saw shaped agave.

Touted by LACMA at the time of the collection’s acquisition as among its finest and rarest works, the picture is conspicuous by its absence from the show. Wisely, curator Lynn Zelevansky withheld the picture from the current display, because its authenticity is now in serious doubt. According to the museum, it was first questioned by a specialist retained by LACMA to appraise the holdings and has also recently been doubted by Orozco’s son.

Finally, two paintings noteworthy for reasons more historical than artistic are promised gifts to the museum: Rivera’s rather pedestrian 1939 portrait of his artist-wife, Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), painted in the difficult-to-handle medium of encaustic, and Kahlo’s own small still-life of fruits, crowned by a weeping coconut that easily can be read as a surrogate self-portrait. The sweet little picture was painted in 1951, a grueling time for the famously beleaguered painter, when a yearlong series of spinal operations sent her into rapid decline.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Feb. 16.