ART / CATHY CURTIS : Housecleaning Yields Few Treasures at Bowers

The myth persists that anything hidden away for a long time is likely to be wondrous and valuable. And when a museum cleans house, the stakes are especially high: Who knows what treasures are likely to float to the surface?

Alas, reality is not always so rosy. When Bowers Museum personnel rooted through the storerooms in preparation for the massive packing effort required for their forthcoming building expansion, they found a number of late-19th- and early-20th-Century paintings that are now on display (through Dec. 31).

But only a tiny handful of these works was worth unveiling. Too many are sentimental, formulaic duds, embarrassments to any museum seriously interested in collecting art.

Probably the best of the lot is a late work by George Inness, the Tonalist master of nature-bound moodiness. In “Evening on the River,” from 1883, the banks of the river are a vaporous green suspended between yellow-tinged sky and water. A tiny figure (perhaps a dog) stirs in the misty distance. The thin application of paint in this atmospheric tone-poem reveals the way the artist used black to add depth and a touch of mournfulness underneath the spongy stretch of green.

Other important or even noteworthy names in American art are few.

Arthur B. Davies is known for his eccentric, dreamy, late-19th-Century images of figures in nature. “A Cornish Village” is an anomaly among his works: Roughly painted in threadbare tones of brown, the scene is a road winding past sad, gray houses in an English village. A faint rim of pink in the sky marks the end of a short winter afternoon. The viewer can sense the chill in the air and the chill in the hearts of the few indistinct figures who linger outdoors.

The Childe Hassam piece, “Church at East Gloucester,” is a minor work from 1919, when his once-ebullient style had begun to harden. The small painting shows a hillside overview of a yellow church rising above a cluster of houses and trees, with Hassam’s tight, dry brush strokes battening down all the salient forms.

Thomas Dewing was another member of the Impressionist group exhibiting together in the 1890s as “Ten American Painters.” Dewing’s specialty was dreamy upper-class women. “The Dance at Twilight” takes place on a veranda surrounded by a dark-green blur of landscape: A woman poses with an out-thrust arm, as if at the decorous conclusion of her dance, while another woman plays the cello. In “Standing Woman,” a whisper of white pastel on brown paper--touched here and there with color--limns one of Dewing’s bloodless heroines.

William Joseph McCloskey and his wife, Alberta, were portrait painters based for a while in Los Angeles; they also specialized in still lifes of fruit wrapped in tissue. The unusual subject matter allowed for virtuoso treatment of the dramatically contrasting textures of thin, dry paper and gleamy, rough-surfaced oranges or tangerines.

The couple’s work (each is represented by one still life) actually is hard to tell apart, although Alberta seems to have gone in for a slightly more complex treatment of the reflections on the polished table top and a greater exactitude in detailing exactly what crumpled paper looks like. One also might be tempted to find psychological meaning in the fact that some of her fruit is cut open while all of his is intact. (Actually, still lifes of half-eaten or otherwise tampered-with fruit are part of a long--and male-dominated--tradition in art.)

But fondly as we might think of Alberta McCloskey as a still-life painter, her pedantically literal portraits are a disappointment.

For those interested in Southern California’s provincial band of Impressionists, good pickings are virtually non-existent. A few of the “names” in landscape are represented--Edgar Alwyn Payne, William Wendt, William Keith--but by mediocre work. There’s a cozy “Winter Landscape” by George Gardner Symons and a couple of pleasantly conventional paintings of women by Guy Rose.

There is also some incredibly awful stuff, like the doleful portrait of a “Mexican Newsboy” by one John Hubbard Rich, a painting of somebody’s confirmation at the San Juan Capistrano mission by one Fanny Eliza Duvall and the kitschy nonsense of “Guardian of the Trail” and “Moonlit Trail” by other hack painters.

A couple of tiny architectural panels that used to be part of a 19th-Century church in London seem to be included for no other reason than that someone gave them to the museum.

And that’s the crux of the problem with the show. No one seems to have been in charge, weeding out the chaff, augmenting the few worthwhile pieces with loans from other collections and making some kind of curatorial point.

It isn’t enough to simply hang whatever’s on hand and provide a brochure that briefly rehashes The Story of Impressionism in Southern California. Orange County viewers have seen scads of this stuff at the Laguna Art Museum during the last few years. If we aren’t going to be bored out of our minds by Southern California Impressionists, we need new approaches and a much firmer curatorial hand.

At this turning point in the Bowers’ history, it seems fair to ask whether whether the museum is really interested in--shall we call it the Caucasian tradition of American art?--as distinguished from anthropology, history and Native American art, which has been its forte. The lack of curatorial staff with a specific background in art history and the diffuse, lackluster art exhibition program suggest that the Bowers’ heart simply isn’t in this line of work.

Maybe it’s time for the museum to sell off the painting collection and get out of the art business. Perhaps some of the works could be used as props in a period room or as educational devices in an exhibit retelling the history of Southern California. But in the increasingly sophisticated art community of Orange County, a show like “Rediscovered Treasures” is the wallflower at the party.

“Rediscovered Treasures: American Paintings From the Bowers Collection” continues through Dec. 31 at the Bowers Museum, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Admission is by donation. Information: (714) 972-1900.