Eyeing Madison Avenue

Fifteen or 20 years ago, an exhibition like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s newly opened “Retail Fictions: The Commercial Photography of Ralph Bartholomew Jr.” would have ignited furious debates. Critical lines would have been drawn in the cultural sand.

Conservative observers would have bemoaned a tragic collapse of standards on the part of a great museum, charged with upholding the banner of high art but sinking instead to the lowly level of conferring status on cheap advertising pictures.

Progressives would have cheered, hailing the urgent need to understand a Postmodern culture predicated on the deluge of fragmentary visual images that gush forth from movies, television, advertising and other mass media.

No such fistfights are likely to break out in LACMA’s photography galleries today, though, because a show like “Retail Fictions” is now pretty much mainstream fare. What’s surprising instead about this presentation, ably organized by LACMA curator Tim B. Wride and accompanied by a useful catalog, is who actually won the critical fight.

If you guessed the Postmoderns, you’d only be half-right. “Retail Fictions” is about frankly commercial imagery, but in fact it splits the difference. A Postmodern viewpoint mingles casually with old-fashioned museum standards, resulting in an odd offspring.

The show features 108 photographs by Bartholomew, all but five of them black-and-white gelatin silver-prints, made between 1937 and 1960. Emphasizing the postwar years, the period represents the heyday of mass-media print advertising as a linchpin for contemporary consumerism.

Bartholomew was 30 in 1937 (he died in 1985). Born and reared in Brooklyn, and a student at both the Art Students League and the highly influential Clarence White School of Photography, he is a classic example of what can happen when a talented individual is in the right place at the right time. The show is thoroughly convincing in placing him near the forefront of Madison Avenue’s postwar boom.

Bartholomew was technically gifted. Although he didn’t invent the technique, he mastered the intricacies of stroboscopic photography. Intense illumination, lasting barely 1/100,000th of a second and painstakingly calibrated to the camera’s shutter speed, could freeze a body in motion.

The result: A picture’s carefully stage-directed action, like slipping on a rug or dancing jitterbug, gained a surprising (if deceptive) aura of spontaneity.

Wride points out that Bartholomew wasn’t only a photographer; he was also a gifted art director. He shepherded numerous ad campaigns from start to finish--from initial conception of the story an advertisement should tell, to its public presentation in the pages of a popular magazine.

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The curator has included several of those finished pages in his handsomely installed show. Bartholomew’s pictures are framed and hang on the wall, in the manner of traditional photo exhibitions, while several magazine-page layouts rest on angled shelves beneath corresponding photographs. A number of free-standing gallery walls, also positioned on an angle to the grid of the room, are papered over with enlargements of finished ads.

Take an ad produced in 1960 for Inco Nickel, one of the few color pictures on view. The framed photograph shows two upper-middle-class white women, dressed in cocktail attire but standing in a sleekly modern suburban kitchen.

Behind them, in the hallway, two business-suited white men chat and smoke cigarettes. Presumably this is an evening gathering of upscale husbands and wives, with all the cues of time, place and social roles in plain sight.

The foreground blond in the blue satin dress fingers her single strand of pearls. The beaming brunet in gold beside her holds the brushed-aluminum door of a wall-mounted oven slightly ajar, showing off the spanking-new appliance to her friend.

“Look what I’ve got,” the picture seems to say, as one woman subtly ignites the fires of envious desire in another. And, if the ad is effective, also igniting similar longings in the (probably female) magazine reader as well.

One brilliant detail sets this picture apart. Note the pearl necklace, which the “envious” blond idly fingers. Her “show-off” friend is also wearing pearls--but hers is a double strand, not a single one.

A fine distinction within the cruder contours of a specific class is being inconspicuously pictured here. The nuance acts as a subtle spur to postwar American ideals of upward mobility, achieved through the accumulation of commercial goods.

Beneath this photograph the magazine layout is displayed, complete with asymmetrical design and enthusiastic advertising copy, trumpeting the charms of Inco Nickel for the most prestigious home appliances. Comparing the photograph on the wall and the photograph in the ad, you can pick out differences in areas of camera focus, color saturation, poses of the figures and the like; soon it’s evident that the framed picture isn’t the exact one that was used in the finished ad.

Most obvious is the difference in cropping. The left side of the framed photograph shows that the kitchen in the ad is a stage set. The white brick wall in which the oven is mounted is a fake veneer, while what appears to be a metal rigging for stage lights runs parallel to the photograph’s edge.

The photograph, in short, debunks the lie represented in the ad. The museum surreptitiously asserts the Postmodern idea that art’s role is to critique commercial culture.

I’ve just got one question: Is that what Ralph Bartholomew Jr. had in mind when he made this photograph? As a commercial artist in the 1940s and 1950s, was he in the business of critiquing commercial culture?

Of course the answer is no. Bartholomew wasn’t critiquing commercial culture at all; he was making it. At LACMA, it’s the museum that has assumed the role of Postmodern artist. They’ve done it by privileging Bartholomew’s photographs as art.

In reality, it’s the finished advertisements that are works of art. The photographs function more like working drawings, preparatory studies or elaborate cartoons do in relation to Old Master paintings.

That’s why, when you spend time looking through the show, Bartholomew’s framed photographs begin to seem repetitive and rather dull. Your eye keeps getting drawn to the snazzy ads, in spite of their subsidiary position.

The ads have more verve, more life, more conviction. They are indeed contemporary American “retail fictions”--much the way Nicolas Poussin’s “Et in Arcadia Ego” is a French classical mythological fiction, or Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith and Holofernes” is an Italian Baroque Christian one.

Imagine what might have happened had things been reversed. What if LACMA’s walls were lined with framed magazine ads, presented as full-bodied works of art, while a few photographs were placed in the subsidiary role? Then the show might have made a truly radical leap, the kind that kicks off a furious critical debate and helps to illuminate art.

Instead, “Retail Fictions” is a thoughtful, informative but finally conservative museum show. Inadvertently, the predicament of the art museum in Postmodern culture is what gets illuminated.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through June 15. Closed Wednesdays.