ART REVIEW : The New and Old California Contrasted : Exhibits: S.D. Museum of Art shows accent transformation from urban tranquility to cars and concrete.

By LEAH OLLMAN

May 31, 1991 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

SAN DIEGO — California is the most populous state in the nation, but you’d never guess it from the two new shows at the San Diego Museum of Art. “Second Nature: Four Early San Diego Landscape Painters” features nearly 100 pre-World War II views of rural serenity, most of them unpeopled. In “California Cityscapes,” 27 contemporary California artists take on the urban landscape in paintings, photographs and three-dimensional works that are also sparing of human presence.

Just what this absence of human life means becomes poignantly clear by the pairing of the two shows, which open at the museum tomorrow. In the early 20th-Century landscapes, unpeopled hills, meadows and shorelines convey feelings of peace, tranquility and even a hushed sense of privacy within the grandeur of nature. In the contemporary works, which date from the early 1970s to the present, empty sidewalks spell alienation and the anonymity of city life. All life here is public life, yet the public is nowhere to be seen.

Hints of human presence are evident in gleaming office towers and teeming traffic, but individuals are an endangered species in “California Cityscapes.” Beside the random pedestrian, the only individuals we see are freeway vigilantes (in Frank Romero’s cartoonish “Freeway Wars”), participants in what appears to be a drug deal (in F. Scott Hess’ chilling “Drive-Thru”) or the sheep-like consumers of culture, blindly herding into the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in another of Hess’s paintings.

Cities, these artists seem to say, are not very user-friendly. Though many describe California’s urban landscape in wondrous hues and elegant compositions, nearly all view it from afar. Hess’s right-in-your-face drug exchange breaks an invisible distance barrier obeyed by most of the show’s other artists with regard to their subjects. Most favor a more remote perspective on the city, as if it is best understood from a distance, where it can be neatly formalized, summed up and sometimes sanitized.

Yet it is those few artists who come in close and focus on the details of the urban environment who have the richest discoveries to share. Douglas Muir’s color photograph of fully grown palm trees being inserted into a bulldozed clearing amid downtown L.A.’s hotel and office towers makes the trees look like clunky pawns of a perverse, misguided human effort.

In another image, he juxtaposes the stucco and mirrored glass facade of San Francisco’s state office building with a poster of the Taj Mahal on a passing bus. Their fleeting proximity points wryly to the difference between two eras’ attempts to suggest, through architecture, the power and splendor of the state.

Gifford Myers and Judy Fiskin both get a chuckle out of the idiosyncratic architecture that lines California streets. Myers constructs clever, ceramic miniatures, wall-mounted fragments of homes, yards and sidewalks measuring only a few inches in height and width. Fiskin photographs individual buildings that, like Myers’ subjects, appear peculiar and comical when isolated and sized-down.

There are few overlaps in style or subject between “California Cityscapes” and “Second Nature,” but the shows make excellent partners for what they help bring out in each other. The four artists in “Second Nature” were among many in the early 20th Century to be mesmerized by the quality of light in southern California. It’s clear upon entering “California Cityscapes” that light is no less of a focus for the state’s contemporary artists.

Wayne Thiebaud infuses a steep San Francisco street with sweet, candy-colored light, while Philipp Scholz Rittermann documents the crisp, efficient light of nocturnal industry in his photograph, “Coronado Bay Bridge Through Pulleys.” James Doolin gives a deep, haunting glow to a litter-strewn industrial neighborhood in his painting, “Tracks,” and Victor Landweber devotes most of the space in his color photographs to L.A.’s ubiquitous, amorphous blanket of smog.

In “Second Nature,” light is a carrier of grace and warmth. When it dances on the lilacs in bloom on Palomar Mountain in one of Maurice Braun’s paintings, the flowers echo the soft lavender of the hills beyond. It evades a range of dark olive mountains in Alfred Mitchell’s “In Evening Light” to pause instead on a cluster of low hills, temporarily smoothing and mellowing them.

Braun (1877-1941), Mitchell (1888-1972), Charles Arthur Fries (1854-1940) and Charles Reiffel (1862-1942) were all plein-air painters, whose outdoor work was inspired as much by the quiet glory of their immediate surroundings as by the direct transcriptions of nature made by late-19th Century Impressionist and Barbizon painters abroad. Although all four San Diego-based artists have been variously labeled “California Impressionists” or members of the “Eucalyptus School,” neither category makes a wholly comfortable fit. Of the four, only Fries and Braun use a consistently short, impressionistic brush stroke, and all four painted a variety of outdoor subjects, not just California’s imported but majestic eucalyptus.

Mitchell, who was also the subject of a one-man show at the San Diego Historical Society in 1988, is clearly the star here. Although he, like the rest, painted his share of sedate, attractive vistas, Mitchell also transcended the muted palette to paint trees aflame with crimson, rust and gold in one small watercolor, and hills of a phosphorous green mist in another. He used color to its extremes, and his work feels far more expressive as a result.

There is a bland sameness to much of the work in “Second Nature,” though nostalgia picks up some of the slack in paintings of local scenes. Fries’ “Looking Down Mission Valley in Summer” (1905) shows a modest, dry valley where a fertile, commercial mecca has since developed. Other views of Escondido or the San Diego harbor document areas once tranquil and now bulldozed and overbuilt. The sedateness of the works may be their downfall, when seen en masse as in this show, but it is also the distinct source of their appeal.

“California Cityscapes” has its tedious moments as well, but even work that may not stand strongly on its own fares well in this thematic context. Both shows are accompanied by catalogues, whose essays aptly reflect the different spirits of the shows. Martin Petersen, the museum’s curator of American art and organizer of “Second Nature,” writes essays that are direct, informative, and as monotonous as many of the works he includes in the show. “California Cityscapes” curator Mary Stofflet, the museum’s curator of modern art, contributes an essay to that show’s catalogue that is as spunky and charged with contemporary urban cynicism as the show itself.

By the time the “California Cityscapes” artists started working, the eucalyptus of Fries, Braun, Mitchell and Reiffel had been edged out by telephone poles. Their dirt roads had been paved over in asphalt, and their golden sunlight veiled by smog. But California remained just as fertile ground for its artists as it had ever been.

“Second Nature: Four Early San Diego Landscape Painters” and “California Cityscapes,” open Saturday at the San Diego Museum of Art and continue through Sept. 29. Hours are Tuesday through Sunday 10-4:30.