Breakthrough works from the mid-1960s by John Baldessari (1931–2020) owe their success to gestures of removal that paradoxically allowed the West Coast Conceptualist to make his mark. He curtailed his vision, his judgment, and his hand by turning the production of his paintings over to “professional artists.” And when he began in the ’70s to source materials from the film industry for his art, Baldessari made strategic excisions that became even more acute, adopting an approach that might be summed up as “The less said, the better.” Movie stills, publicity photographs, posters, and lobby cards, foraged from California shops in Burbank and Hollywood, were the main fodder for the big, glossy pictures he began to produce in the mid-’80s. He freely erased recognizable signifiers that enabled the identification of characters, narratives, and contexts by painting out figures, obscuring faces with colorful dots, redacting settings, and isolating actions. Indeed, nothing was ever obvious or explained.

Two years after Baldessari’s death, a trove of notational sketches, collages, and maquettes the artist produced between 1980 and 2003 has been released from his studio, pulling back the curtain on his process and thinking. Except for a 2006 exhibition of collages at 1301PE in Los Angeles, the more than seventy-five pieces on display here in “The Story Underneath,” curated by Nana Bahlmann, had rarely been presented publicly. Collectively, the works on paper (plus one of his archival boxes filled to the brim with lists, notes, photographs, and ephemera) gave us access to the artist in ways that were surprisingly personal.

One group of vintage Hollywood public relations stills, marked up by Baldessari in red crayon with crop lines and presentation instructions, documented an initial stage in his method of extracting the parts of pictures that interested him, while marking the rest for elimination. Actors are transformed into generic action figures, and scenery is chopped to oblivion—what once was familiar occupies a slippery realm of indeterminacy.

Numerous paper collages that served as preliminary designs for what would become full-fledged works together formed the core of the exhibition, reflecting the barrage of fragmentation techniques Baldessari developed to detourn and defamiliarize his images—operations designed to empty content and resist closure. For example, much of the collateral material for a major piece, Hope (Blue) Supported by a Bed of Oranges (Life): Amid a Context of Allusions, 1991, was showcased here alongside preparatory drawings, collages, and a model of the final composition. In one frame, a pair of bodies drenched in blue paint and caught in an avalanche of the titular fruits actually belonged to the actors Alan Arkin and Peter Falk in a scene from the 1979 movie The In-Laws, or the “crazy person’s comedy” as it was called in the film’s press materials. In another frame, a cropped image of a man’s fist punching something soft turned out to be a still from National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) depicting Chevy Chase assaulting a giant moose statue’s rubbery snout. Rescued and revitalized by a deft imagination, the altered stills function like cards in a game of Trivial Pursuit, inviting us to romp through the backwaters of schlocky American pop.

That wasn’t the case with another group of collages, beguiling in their simplicity, flashes of dark humor, and incidental beauty. Selections from Baldessari’s “Removal Series,” 1995, produced in wax pencil, gouache, and acetate mounted on graph paper, and “The Lamp Series,” 1994, made from photographs, acrylic, and wax paper on museum board, were atypical for the artist in their painterly, abstract facture. In another group, cropped portraits of men’s faces were paired with prints of tree leaves, the measurements of each penciled on graph paper alongside the work’s block-lettered satirical titles; among these were Man (With One Opinion and One Theory) and Leaf and Man (With Large Thought) and Leaf, both 1993. Baldessari’s collages are packed with his familiar deadpan wit and rife with commentary on humanity, representation, and the all-around absurdity of life. These intimately scaled works deliver big rewards and deserve a prominent place in his oeuvre.

— Jan Avgikos