Lost in the shadows


“Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction,” a retrospective exhibition

When: Through May 24

Where: Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach

Tickets: $10; $8, seniors and students; free, under age 12

Phone: (949) 494-8971

Online: lagunaartmuseum.org

LAGUNA BEACH – You can't separate the history of pop art from the history of art in California. One famous case in point: Andy Warhol had his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in 1962. Another: Some of the most iconic works of 1960s pop can be credited to the Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha, like his

Standard Station paintings and prints or his images incorporating the Hollywood sign.

Four decades ago, Roger Kuntz was considered to be pivotal to the rise of California pop, too. But unlike Ruscha or other fortunates such as Wayne Thiebaud and Vija Celmins, Kuntz's work is virtually unknown. Yet critic John Coplans, then editor of the cutting-edge West Coast art magazine Artforum, featured him in a groundbreaking survey exhibition of pop art in 1963. Three years later, Lucy Lippard included him in her seminal book on pop art.

The artist, who grew up in Point Loma and had his first solo show in 1951 at the Fine Arts Gallery in San Diego (now the San Diego Museum of Art), was a quintessentially Southern California figure. After graduating from Point Loma High, he earned his bachelor's degree in art at Pomona College in 1948 (interrupted by World War II service) and a master's degree at the Claremont Graduate School in 1950. He lived in La Verne (near Claremont) until 1964, when he and family moved to Laguna Beach.

Kuntz's slide into obscurity happened for complex reasons, some of his own making and some due to the way art history gets shaped. But at this moment, 34 years after his death, Kuntz seems to be rising from the historical ash heap. His art is the subject of a large exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum, “Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction.”

It's a fascinating show, even if all of the art isn't enthralling. But when Kuntz was good, he was very good – even innovative.

His pop period was relatively brief, lasting from 1961 to 1962. His subject was paintings of freeway architecture and signs. The most seductive of them is “Arroyo Seco,” with its angled view of an overpass casting its large shadow on a section of flood channel. The painting heightens your awareness of the depicted architecture while creating its own elegant structure.

At the same time, Kuntz is a different sort of painter than Warhol or Ruscha: He sought a middle ground between traditional figuration and modernist rebellion against it. Where Warhol and Ruscha wedded new subjects to new approaches, Kuntz took the new imagery and subjected it to older concerns for the nuances of color, detail and light. In this respect, he is probably, among artists first associated with pop art, most like Wayne Thiebaud.

Freeway lanes and tunnels were excellent “platforms” for Kuntz's considerable virtuosity with the brush. He could render the intersection of light and shadow with the best of them. He also made paintings that cropped and altered freeway signs as well as making sculptures out of discarded traffic signals (now destroyed).


