The Hansen retrospective concentrates on his early works (from 1912), many from his years with the Secessionists in Denmark. The Creek, Summer House, and most especially Self Portrait, with its green, face straining forward out of a Munich brown gravy, have a Munch-like intensity and economy of statement. Two works from 1916, Snow in the Forest with its fluent brushwork and smoldering color, and Mrs. F., harsh and German in its drawing but with very rich and complex whites, both show his early capacity to use the medium of oil paint. In some of the middle works shown, this mastery of paint tends to dissolve into coloristic nuances and becomes diffused (the Sadakichi Hartmann of 1932 is a notable exception), but in the more recent works the compositional “bite” returns and Young Man and the Grim Reaper of 1946 and the Self Portrait of 1954 bring the richer color to a stronger pictorial focus. The Art Association’s policy of comprehensive exhibits of pioneer painters from this area is a valuable one in that it reminds us that art did not burst on the Southern California scene the day before yesterday, and that even before the Monday Promenades on the Rue Cienega there were men of Hansen’s caliber slugging it out and making things happen.
––Doug McClellan
