Retrospective Examines Rueda’s Suave Abstractions

Art lovers tend to believe that there needn’t be a reason for showing an artist’s work as long as it’s interesting. The current exhibition at Pepperdine University’s Weisman Museum of Art asserts the wisdom of that article of faith while suggesting a couple of necessary caveats.

Titled “Gerardo Rueda: A Retrospective,” the exhibition presents about 50 geometric abstract paintings, prints and small sculpture surveying the career of a Spanish artist who died last year at age 70. The work is suave, accomplished and consistent. The earliest is a Cubist-derived 1948 still life that includes such standard props as a bottle, grapes and a checkerboard. What makes it notable is a particularly harmonious sense of color and a curious architectonic flying wing shape that seems to have forced its way into the composition without the artist’s permission.

Such intrusions into youthful work are not uncommonly harbingers of future core preoccupations that the artist doesn’t himself immediately recognize. By 1960, Rueda was making rather fuzzy gray abstractions suggesting houses on hillsides. They slightly resemble the work of Nicholas de Stael, a School of Paris artist Rueda admired. Soon after, Rueda produced a series of squarish, one-color canvases with gloopy outcroppings. Fortunately that didn’t last.

By the mid-’60s Rueda had clearly found his personal idiom in works like “Rose Painting.” It’s made like a shallow bas relief using juxtaposed lengths of what appears to be painted lumber. Composed in what was then called “dynamic symmetry,” the work becomes a distinctive blend of sculptural and architectural ideas without losing the painterly. Rueda’s gentle color blushes with atmosphere fulfilling the artist’s stated aim of fashioning an idiom at once “rigorous and sensitive.”

By 1970, Rueda was relaxed enough to introduce a bit of wit in works like “White Collage” that are made up of painted flip-top cigarette boxes. They have a quality of closet Pop Art. They may also be an oblique homage to another artist he admired, Robert Motherwell, who liked to collage used Gauloise packets.

Enjoyable as this all is, one takes one’s pleasure against the nagging question of why this work is being shown. While prominent in Spain, Rueda was virtually unknown in this country. He’s never before had a solo exhibition here, but neither have thousands of others. Why Rueda and why now? The fact is nothing here is generically unfamiliar. L.A. had its own school of hard-edge abstraction.

Well, gallery director Michael Zakian says that it was precisely the affinities he felt between Rueda and L.A. art that attracted him. That’s fair enough and it’s interesting. And evidently Zakian isn’t the only local museum professional who feels that way about Rueda. UCLA’s Hammer Museum will open an exhibition of his collages in July. Both shows come with serious and substantial catalogs.

Pondered in those terms, Rueda’s work of the ‘80s and ‘90s plays out like a gentlemanly series of variations on a theme and proves that an artist can be polite without being boring. Between Rueda’s wonderful orchestration of vertical moldings in “Greens of the Forest of Alhambra” and his Constructivist “Relief, Red, White, Black,” there is more variation than between, say, the individual canvases of Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” paintings.

Rueda never pushes the optical envelope as hard as Ed Moses, but his work does make reverberations of another kind. Its built character causes one to think of affinities between, say, the painting of John McLaughlin and the architecture of Richard Neutra, not to mention more recent absorptions of the L.A. fine art sensibility by architects in the circle of Frank Gehry.

Needless to say, Rueda’s work would trigger other reactions in another town, but I think the color palette that makes it look proto-Post Modern would travel. All that is interesting but equally so are the subtextual demands of the whole enchilada. Basically, the exhibition asks us to do nothing more radical than to pay close attention to an artist whose work appears so familiar as to have virtually no novelty value. It asks us to function like connoisseurs and appreciate a particular artist for his fine-tuned variations on an established international style.

In short, it wants us to look at art recently valued for its newness and innovation in the way we are accustomed to looking at old master art. This shift in the zeitgeist quietly adds evidence that modern art is now a fixed, traditional idiom.

* Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu. Through Aug. 10. Closed Mondays. (310) 456-4851.