The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 330

i. Painting, sculpture and photographic work3 by 11 contemporary Mexican artists are on view in "Espfritu" at the California Center for the Arts Museum in Escondido. Right: detail of Graciela Iturbide's Art Review A Poetic Visionary Ripe for Rediscovery The work of Anne Brigman, a long-neglected California photographer, comes back brilliantly to life in a new exhibition. By Christopher Knight SANTA BARBARA Anne Brigman's 1910 photograph "The Bubble" shows a nude young woman on bent knee at the edge of a still mountain pool, her illuminated right arm outstretched in a graceful effort to scoop up a large, translucent sphere that floats serenely atop the water. At the left, above the fragile orb, a mysterious curve of light glows from behind a rock.

The open landscape behind the kneeling maiden seems bathed in fog, which slides imperceptibly into a cloudy sky, while an arc of tree branches at right echoes her kneeling pose. The soft focus employed by Brigman diffuses the picture's light in a radiant way, making the young woman's facial features indistinct. The girlish figure, posed in profile, seems an otherworldly pictures, which she also altered in the darkroom, often have the feel of charcoal drawings. But "The Bubble" also shows that, rather than simply aspiring to a generic idea of art for her evocative pictures, Brigman had a specific aim. Her pictures are distinctly Symbolist.

Although the term was coined to describe a kind of painting that flourished in Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, laying a foundation for Expressionist and abstract art, Symbolist ideas spread so thoroughly into the culture that their embrace by a California photographer would not be surprising. In fact, it is common to other intriguing artists of the period, including painters such as Henrietta Shore and Agnes Pelton. In Brigman's pictures iconic forms lose their concrete ties to ideas and emotions and instead become ambiguous suggestions of them. Subject mat Santa Barbara Museum LOST AND FOUND: "The Bubble" (1910) is part of "A Poetic Vision: The Photographs of Anne Brigman," a major show that is bringing renewed attention to the once well-known Pictorialist. Left: a 1909 portrait of the artist by Mary Brisbee.

nymph captured in a mythic Olympian frieze. She is fully of this dreamy, inexplicable landscape, where nature merges silently with an antique cultural vision. The nymph herself seems born of the watery bubble, which holds a mysterious promise of genesis. "The Bubble" graces the cover of the catalogue that accompanies "A Poetic Vision: The Photographs of Anne Brigman," an engrossing 76-print survey of the California photographer's work that opened recently at the Santa ter is evoked rather than understood. Brigman's is a highly subjective art that asserts an intellectual alternative to the purely visual qualities of contemporaneous painting and as such stands as an important precedent for much art that would follow.

At the time it was made, "The Bubble" was published in Camera Work, the influential magazine produced in New York by Alfred Stieglitz. A towering figure in the early history of American photography, Stieglitz was determined to see artistic legiti Bubble," nine other photographs by Brigman appeared in Camera Work before the magazine ceased publication in 1917, and except for a hiatus during the 1920s, she was among Stieglitz's most prolific correspondents. Especially through the teens her most common subject matter female nudes in the landscape was largely unprecedented in photography. Despite this noteworthy list of accomplishments, though, Brigman is nowhere close to being as widely known today as she ought to be. If she is not exactly forgotten, especially among historians of photographs that date from the first half of the century, neither is her work even mentioned in standard photographic references, such as Beaumont Newhall's "The History of Photography" or John Szar-kowski's "Photography Until Now." When considered at all, she is typically regarded as having been a skillful practitioner of Pictorialism; but she is only one such Pictorialist photographer among many.

The exhibition in Santa Barbara shows that Brigman's work is ripe for reconsideration. One big hurdle, however, may be its association with Pictorialist tradition. Brigman is not among the younger generation of California photographers who began as Pictorialists but who eventually abandoned the style in favor of so-called straight photography. Today, for eyes taught to see Pictorialism as sentimental, weak and unready for the bold, crisp, modern rigors of straight photography, her work can be difficult to look at. But look you should.

Although Pictorialist photographs still tend to be regarded as a class, without much differentiation made among photographers, the differences among them can be critical. As an artist Brigman was a Symbolist, plain and simple. Her pictures telegraph a cerebral other-worldliness, which laid important foundations of subjectivity for what we now think of as modern art. (Ironically, after Brigman moved south to Long Beach in 1929, her studio in Oakland became the gathering place for Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Wil-lard Van Dyke, Edward Weston and other photographers associated with Group f64. Their commitment to unmanipulated photography, which contradicted the Pictorialist aesthetic, soon became a rigid dogma.

Its success was instrumental in lowering 1 Please see Page 64 Barbara Museum of Art. Brigman has been seen in other group exhibitions lately her picture of two veiled and haloed women glimpsed as an apparition within a juniper tree was on the catalogue cover to last year's compelling survey of California Pictorialism, jointly organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Huntington Library but this retrospective is the first fresh consideration of her work in 20 years. Brigman is commonly regarded as a Pictorialist photographer, one of many in the early decades of the 20th Century, who sought to manipulate style and subject matter in a conscious effort to gain for photography an equal stature among the other arts. Technically, her softly focused 1 macy conferred upon the medium.

He had invited Brigman to become an associate member of the Photo-Secession, his adventurous group of art photographers, barely two years after she first picked up a camera in 1901; by 1906 she was a full-fledged fellow of the group. Anne Brigman (1869-1950) was one of the few women, and the only artist west of the Mississippi, to be counted as a fellow of the pivotal group. She made photographs for more than 35 years, until she was 70, and she showed them internationally, picking up numerous prizes along the way. Vanity Fair dubbed her "one of the seven most important photographers in the world'" in 1916; In addition to fThe t.v.i,-,.