A HEARTFUL COMPENDIUM OF MODERNISM

In historical terms, modern art is certainly by now a middle-aged personage if not a senior citizen. It has been around the entire lifetime of everyone now living, and those who pay attention can claim deep familiarity with it--the kind of cozy relationship one has with a parent or spouse, deeply affectionate but hardly ever surprising. That’s the down side, that sense of knowing the subject so well, it has turned predictable.

Well, encountering the exhibition “Degas to Picasso” at the County Museum of Art to June 28 is a little like finding that your Helen Hokinson wife is a nuclear physicist in her spare time or that her stockbroker husband goes sky-diving on the weekend. The show upsets more preconceptions than a Marine sergeant who is a burlesque queen.

Everybody knows there are no substantial private collections of classic modernist art on the West Coast because if there were, the contagious Hollywood exhibitionism that infects the area would cause the collectors to employ slick publicists to make social and media celebrities of them. Well, the 100-odd works on view belong to Nathan and Marion Smooke, who have lived hereabouts for virtually ever, avid for art since the ‘60s, supporters of the museum since the ‘70s and never to my notice guilty of the slightest act of self-aggrandizement. Before the rather sudden appearance of their collection, they were unknown outside art circles. The collection has never before been put together for public view.

Fine. That’s nice, but 99% of the people agree that when collectors get into such an established arena as early modernism, they amass a brace of big names, but the work is not necessarily of high quality, and, if it is, it doesn’t embody any binding ideas or themes, especially when selected from a broad swath that brackets everything from Impressionism to Cubism.

A winceable hunch that this should all be called “Fingernail Parings From the Titans” is immediately allayed upon walking into the intimate, vaguely cramped installation in the new Anderson Building. A brace of lively Degas horses and dancers surround a cast of the famous “Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer,” a work as tough as it is endearing as is it historically crucial. Here is a work that launches everything from assemblage to modern objective close-focus realism leading right up to Robert Graham and John De Andrea. I often wonder how she would look painted up to the life and with a new tutu to replace the wan old muslin we always see. She’d look like a Degas, but die-hards would raise hell the way they’ve been doing about the cleaning of the Sistine ceiling.

So the tone is set. Textbook examples. Sure enough, the next thing we encounter is Fauvism with a couple of Matisse sculptures to demonstrate the link back to Degas. It is going to be (yawn) very correct. Wait a minute. Are the Smookes and LACMA curator Carol Eliel having a little fun with us here? That 1906 textbook Fauvist landscape is by Georges Braque. His early association with the Wild Beasts is rarely demonstrated. This is more recherche than we expected.

And the two Andre Derains. The Seine landscape and his self-portrait in a soft hat are among the best things he ever did before turning conservative, but they are more than that. They are hot. Oops, there is a Matisse that looks like a Rouault and another one that looks like a Bonnard. Before you can metabolize that, four stunning pile-driver paintings by Maurice de Vlaminck loom up and you are thinking the unthinkable.

French Expressionism.

No, no. The term doesn’t even exist. The French are rational and stylish. They do la belle peinture . True, the early German Expressionists were influenced by the Fauves’ strident color and staccato brushwork, but it was a mistake, a misinterpretation.

The Smooke collection is too polite to say “bunk,” but if it weren’t, it would.

Vlaminck’s “Nude in Black Stockings” looks like something straight out of Munich or Dresden. To punctuate the point and make the transition, there is Kees van Dongen’s steamy “Girl in Blue Earrings” and Albert Marquet’s “Woman in Red Stockings” like something straight out of a stylish Berlin bordello.

Now, just to prove it’s not kidding, the exhibition moves into German Expressionism proper. But wait, not kidding about what? The thesis seems to be that Expressionism was based on an international and temperamental impulse that soaked the fabric of European art before World War I and maybe was an agitated prelude to it. Expressionism is also, in the gospel according to the Smookes, an outpouring of human energy that is basic to the success of a work of art. A special kind of vitality informs every work on view. Even a few borderline things like a couple of rattled Modiglianis have a vital elan that saves them.

The Germans, getting back to that, were superbly and shrewdly selected. Three Emil Noldes have such brutal directness, we rock back on our heels. The Smookes consistently display a knack for picking works that resonate beyond their immediate excellence. Two large paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner may represent the aesthetic summit of the trove, but they do more: They bracket the sensibility of the style.

“Tea at Fehmarn” uses an unsettling harmony of green and blue to encapsulate volcanic tensions lurking under conventional social ritual. “Negro Dancer” broadcasts the exotic longings of a cold-weather people as they spread from the South Seas to biblical Babylon.

There is a Munich-period Kandinsky landscape that links the past--Edvard Munch--to the future of the Russian’s own non-objective abstraction. The exhibition reaches a crescendo of pure energy in the German section, establishing the idea of liveliness as basic to the collection, then moves on from there with a series of juxtapositions that are always intelligent, often witty.

A mixed bag of Picasso, Beckmann, Lipschitz, Klee and others fires off a series of ideas that find their best expression in Fernand Leger’s “Yellow Constructors With Chain.” It depicts four workers teetering perilously on the girders of a new skyscraper, obviously enjoying the danger, the immanence of the unexpected.

We are treated to an unexpectedly early 1906 Picasso sculpture, a head of a woman. Its tender romanticism caroms off tougher Cubist sculpture, a weird Beckmann of women eating oysters and comes to rest on Oskar Schlemmer’s hilarious, gilded, “Grotesque” a kind of fetal succubi.

The idea seems to confirm the animated--that is the Expressionist--element in art where we do not expect to find it--in four little Cubist Picassos or non-objective sculptures by Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner that look--quite suddenly--African.

Finally, the show settles into a variation of its unstated theme--the humanizing of form.

There is an inescapable sexual metaphor in the grouping of works--mainly sculpture--with rounded shapes like smooth stones from a river bottom. There is no getting around the fertility theme in Miro, Henry Moore or Max Ernst’s goony “Moonmad” but we balk at putting Hans Arps suavely scatological “Owner of the Heidelberg Cask” in juxtaposition to Maillol’s rather corny figural allegory, “Flora.”

Maillol is an odd artist to survive into the modernist tradition. He seems fundamentally old-fashioned, cold and schematic, yet, we can never quite take our eyes off him. The exhibition strains credulity by keeping him, but does explain that his begrudged fascination lies in a muffled use of the same biomorphic shapes as his more radical colleagues.

This exhibition is to be seen. It will be many a long California summer’s eve before a modernist compendium will again be put together with this degree of intelligence and heart.