Surprise sprouts from a 'Seed'

Twelve of the show's 59 artists are first- or second-generation Asian Americans, mostly Japanese. Aside from downtown proximity, the Art Students League was composed of artists who stood outside establishment social precincts, which made for a seamless fit with Angelenos of Chinese and Japanese ancestry. When Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the loathsome Executive Order 9066 in 1942, artists Benji Okubo and Hideo Date even continued teaching Art Students League classes while incarcerated at Heart Mountain Relocation Center, a concentration camp near Cody, Wyo.

Date's 1930s "Still Life" shows a jade porcelain fruit dish and a vase with a dragon design, both on a tabletop set before an atmospheric landscape. The pale palette is starkly different from Brigante's, while the pigment is oil rather than water-based. Most important is the distinctive space; rather than being traditionally Cubist, it's transparent. Every solid form -- the peach in the foreground, the vase in the middle ground, the mountain in the distance -- reads simultaneously as a void.

In Western art a void tends to be associated with the abyss, a chasm of emotional darkness. In Eastern painting a void is typically the spiritual complement of the material world, as full and sensuously mysterious as any physical object.

A sizable number of works include the depiction of Asian artifacts or subjects, such as cats and flower arrangements. But, for what Art Students League painters called Asian-fusion art, the conception of spatial fullness is most meaningful. After World War II, it became the linchpin for McLaughlin's truly radical brand of geometric abstraction.

The show is divided into useful sections. They include the school's beginnings, the variety of Asian influences, participation by artists in the WPA, and traditions of portraiture, still life and figure drawing. Because many works are undated, specific chronology can be difficult to sort out.

A poignant segment chronicles Heart Mountain, anchored by a remarkable little canvas showing an aerial view of the camp. The barracks are blunt gray bars lined up across a gray-brown field, while the distinctive mountain in the distance is seen in pale pink profile. It's as if the artist, Shingo Nishiura, was floating in the sky at the pinnacle's height, getting his bearings and leaving behind the grim reality below. As a work of imaginative flight, it's quietly gripping.

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christopher.knight@latimes .com

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'A Seed of Modernism'

Where: Pasadena Museum of California Art, 490 E. Union St., Pasadena

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays

Ends: April 13

Price: $6

Contact: (626) 568-3665