One Man’s Passion on Display

Obsession is always beguiling. Located beyond the clipped and rationally tended territory of reason, it dovetails nicely with art. Put the two together, and art obsession serves pretty well as a working definition of just what grips collectors.

At East Los Angeles College’s Vincent Price Gallery, a show of 125 works from the collection of Robert E. Holmes is a modest yet appealing example of the affliction. The exhibition is nicely overstuffed. Holmes, a former music industry executive, has acquired art for more than three decades. Works jostle one another for attention in a crowded installation, loosely recalling the back corridors and side bedrooms of a house where an inveterate collector inevitably ends up squeezing in just one more drawing or collage.

Sculpture and painting are included, but most of the Holmes collection consists of works on paper--especially drawings, prints and several antique book plates, with just a few photographs. The most compelling of the latter is a casual black-and-white snapshot of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara fishing off the back of a boat, by the late Alberto Diaz Gutierrez, known professionally as Korda. In its easy camaraderie--between the two subjects and between the subjects and the artist, who lingered behind them to take the journalistic picture--the photograph couldn’t be more different from Korda’s famous revolutionary icon of Che as part god, part rock star.

The show opens with a number of engraved book plates by anonymous artists. The earliest, dated 1723, depicts majestic sailing ships in the background and a classically attired figure in the foreground, seen inscribing something on a massive port-side column. Between the ships and the scribe is a scene of abject horror, as white masters shackle and beat black slaves. What the unidentified book’s title is and what its text might say are anybody’s guess; clearly, though, technological power and historical authority are used by the line engraving to frame--and justify--an event of callous violence.

The collection’s earliest drawing couldn’t be more different. An 1880 “Portrait of a Young Boy” by T.S. Moser is a self-assured pencil study of an African American youth wearing a large face-framing hat and seated in a chair. The supple drawing radiates affection.

With the exception of a gestural oil painting and a calligraphic watercolor by Matsumi Kanemitsu, a silk-screen print of brightly colored disks by Sonia Delauney and a composition of angular abstract shapes by sculptor Richard Hunt, all the work is figurative. Art as an emblem and conveyor of social consciousness, especially as displayed in African American, Latino and gay culture, is perhaps the clearest thread that runs through the Holmes collection.

Several lithographs date from the 1930s and were produced under the socially minded auspices of the WPA Graphic Arts Division. They including Saul Kovner’s rural street and David Feinstein’s lamp-lighted outdoor scene, in which young lovers in the background and men playing cards in the foreground juxtapose different games of desire and chance.

Twentieth century black artists are represented in abundance, including works by Hunt, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, William Pajaud, Dox Thrash, Charles White and several others. Among them is a terrific work by David Hammons, one from a series of “body prints” done around 1970, in which actual human flesh was inked and printed directly onto paper.

With black images then still rare in both art and popular culture, Hammons’ method was startlingly blunt. “The Couple” shows a kiss between a man and woman, their lips pressing together much the way their bodies were also physically pressed onto the sheet. Cut out and collaged against multi-patterned wallpapers, as in a latter-day Matisse, the figures embody two mantras of their era: Black is beautiful, and art is love.

Two paintings by Bob Thompson--one featuring languorous nudes on a draped bed, the other a strange pink bird attending to a reclining figure as a ghostly pair of green figures look on--employ brushy oil paint and smeary pastel to evocative effect, in which color becomes the agent of a mysterious, ecstatic vision. Color as quiet rapture describes the crouching figure surrounded by mottled yellow and “crowned” by a slather of paint in a large portrait by Beauford Delaney, an American who worked mostly in Paris. The writer Henry Miller once described Delaney’s work as characterized by “solar radiance,” and this gently hypnotic work shows why.

Elizabeth Catlett, represented by several graphics, appears to be a special favorite of the collector. Catlett sometimes seems to have carved her sitters, given the strength and stony solidity of their features, as if from the lithographic stone on which the print was made. The head in her intaglio print, “Roots,” is backed by the suggestion of a red, white and blue flag, provocatively assembled from African-print cloth.

Among other artists represented by several works, Dan McCleary stands out with two fine paintings, an oil sketch, a drawing and a print, all from the last decade. The most compelling of the five is a double portrait of two young ushers at a generic movie theater, both dressed in a uniform of red jackets and black bow ties. Unlike Edward Hopper’s famous 1939 painting of a female usher--captured unawares in an almost cinematic moment as an urban daydreamer while the movie plays in the other room--these young men self-consciously pose. Your daydreams, not theirs, become its animating force.

The Price Gallery exhibition frames the Holmes collection as having a “cross-cultural” theme based in ethnicity. It also identifies music as a secondary theme. (The collector is a former general counsel at Motown Records, vice president of Arista Music Publishing and executive at Sony; a pair of gold records hang by the entrance.) But, disappointingly, gay culture goes unremarked, even though it’s self-evident in the show.

A certain curatorial nervousness about the subject can be discerned in various wall texts, where, for example, Delaney’s romantic relationship with the great American writer James Baldwin is euphemistically described as a “friendship.” In the process, notable artistic shifts are obscured. A fine ink-wash drawing of two men at the beach by Bay Area figurative painter David Park is a 1950s version of a classic post-Eden subject of secular renewal--bathers by the sea. That Cezanne-esque tradition is given a contemporary spin by Roberto Gil de Montes, whose lovely acrylic wash on un-stretched canvas shows two boys sunning at the beach while hooked together in a casual embrace.

The collection also includes some surprise curiosities, which are what one expects of any obsession. One is a 1973 figure study done in Zaire by Betty Parsons, the legendary New York gallery owner who championed a number of Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors. Van Freeman, the Silver Lake folk artist whose elaborately decorated house became a source of admiration last year after his sudden disappearance (followed by an equally sudden return), is represented by a window-like relief in wood and smashed tiles that spell out “freedom.”

You cannot see through Freeman’s window. But that doesn’t mean art’s not a powerful and poetic avenue of liberty.

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Vincent Price Gallery, East Los Angeles College, 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park, (323) 265-8841, through Oct. 11. Closed Saturdays and Sundays.