Edgar Ewing’s “Bishop and Priest: Greek Wedding Series” (1971).

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Single-minded yet remarkably cosmopolitan, Edgar Ewing represents the best qualities of the great generation of California modernists who came of age during and after World War II. This exhibit, which focuses on the artist’s work from the 1970s onward, features some of his most impressive achievements, in particular three canvases from the Broken Parts series, which are among the most interesting and powerful modern paintings of their era. When seen side-by-side, as they are hung in this show, these works exude the materialist mysticism that powered Los Angeles throughout the period of its explosive expansion.

Multi-figured dreams and Hallucinations 1.

Beginning as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1930s, Ewing sought direct experience of the classical world through extensive touring in France, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Through his service in the Corps of Engineers during World War II, he became familiar with the land and culture of China, Burma, and India. Upon returning to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, Ewing found himself at the core of an extraordinary group of young men and women who were determined to develop their prized community along lines set out by the great civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean. Ewing’s friend Irving Stone wrote Lust for Life and The Agony and the Ecstasy—likely the two best-known popular biographies of painters ever published—during the same era in which Ewing and his contemporaries tasted their first real success at the newly founded galleries and museums of post-war California.

When he met his wife, a Greek woman with an elegant apartment in Athens, Ewing began an extended period of splitting his time between California and Greece. Many of the best images in this show emerge from that exposure to Greek art and culture. "Bishop and Priest: Greek Wedding Series" is at once gloriously celebratory and classically restrained. The figures are assembled from geometric fragments that suggest both the monumentality of stone and the ghostliness of negative space. Two of the latest works in the exhibit, a pair of bronze sculptures, the 1991 series "Multi-figured Dreams and Hallucinations" Nos. 1 and 3, are among the strongest. Full of angular virtuosity and gestural vitality, they suggest that Ewing was an artist of uncommon energy and vigor right to the end.

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