NOT THE LAST PICTURE SHOW HAMMER EXHIBIT SUGGESTS THE DEATH OF PAINTING HAS BEEN GREATLY EXAGGERATED.

Byline: Steve Rosen Correspondent

The war cry ``painting is dead'' first was raised in the 1960s, and has proved remarkably resilient in the contemporary-art world.

At a time when artists - like everybody - wanted to transform a society they found soulless and materialistic, museums were part of the enemy with their admission fees, security guards and hushed, ornate galleries filled with paintings by dead European males. To these rebellious artists, their whole culture seemed corrupted by greed and irrelevancy, as well as by the desire of the rich to own expensive paintings.

Whether painting is - or should be - dead as a meaningful contemporary medium is the subject of the current exhibition at UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood. ``The Undiscovered Country'' seeks to establish that representational painters since the 1960s have tried to stay relevant.

It brings together some 65 works by 23 U.S. and European artists, both up-and-comers and established (and, in some cases, deceased) painters like Gerhard Richter, Richard Hamilton, Philip Guston, Richard Prince and Fairfield Porter. There are plenty of names missing - especially world- class figurative painters like Lucian Freud, Alex Katz, Chuck Close and Eric Fischl - but then they're hardly undiscovered, and the show is trying to balance the famous with the obscure.

The show, however, isn't so much a reappraisal as an attempt to show that painting can be as challenging and tough on bourgeois sensibilities. As a result, many of the paintings depict a world of vague dread. They have a David Lynch-like sense of unease and disassociation and flirt with minimalism in their depiction of place. We're not with Norman Rockwell anymore, Toto.

Take Germany's Richter, for instance, among the most recognizable artists alive for the controversial ideas inherent in his work - such as paintings that trace photographs or whose blurry look approximates the effect of cataracts. His 1964 ``Untitled'' is a photograph of two young girls in matching play outfits smiling, but he has painted over one's face with thick white paint. It's like a death mask.

In a similar creepy vein, Prince's 2002 ``Nurses' Dormitory'' and 2003 ``Holiday for a Nurse'' both use inkjet print and acrylic paint to create large-scale paperback covers like the sleazy dime-store crime novels of old. But there's a difference.

With his canvases swathed in deep, thick crimson, they reek of violent murder - as if painted from a demented serial killer's point of view as the bloody deed is being imagined. (The catalog tells us that Prince was inspired by a Richter painting of the eight student nurses murdered by Richard Speck in 1966.) The attitude is pointed and acknowledged: We should be nervous in this world - beauty is to be exploited and slaughtered.

There is other work presenting variations on a theme of modern-world alienation. Especially impressive is the 1998-99 ``City Entrance'' by the Scottish-born Trinidadian Peter Doig. It's a large oil painting in which he uses rusty shades of brown to provide an overhead view of train tracks, a highway and a large brick building. The more one examines the canvas, the more the carefully outlined figuration seems to dissolve before the eyes and becomes suggestive gestures. The painting seems symbolic for how the romance of the city - the big picture - can disappear into the reality of dreary, worn-out infrastructure.

Another exciting discovery is the contribution of Kirsten Everberg - two masterful 2003 oil paintings of a deserted hotel's interior, ``Bar'' and ``Lobby.'' She varies colors, alternating lots of industrial-strength shiny blacks and browns with the sparkling white of light fixtures and tabletops. As a result, she simultaneously achieves a kinetic energy and a sense of melancholy.

These paintings show the interior of an old hotel in the Czech Republic city of Brno, once an outpost of 20th-century modernism. As a result, it's a statement on how modernism, and any art movement, gets old with time.

This show's greatest value is in giving us a chance to appreciate the work of Porter (1907-75), an American painter with the same eye for portraiture and societal detail as Hopper but with a sense of gentility instead of Hopper's Depression-era sadness.

``Undiscovered Country'' is blessed with two museum-quality paintings by Porter, including a great 1968 ``Self-Portrait.'' Soothing in its flatness and in calm applications of gray and white paint, it was done at exactly the same time that so many art rebels were challenging the primacy of painting. Yet the work has an unsentimental sense of detailed, painterly observation of self and environment that is as modern in its way as, say, great architecture. Indeed, the grayness and flatness reminds you of Disney Hall.

Such work never really has gone out of style and never will. Thanks,

Hammer, for reminding us of that. Now, how about a Porter retrospective?

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd.

When: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Through Jan. 16.

Tickets: $5 adults; parking at museum. Visit hammer.ucla.edu or call [phone] or [phone] (TTY) for more information.

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) ``Nurses' Dormitory,'' Richard Prince, inkjet print and acrylic on canvas, 2002.

(2 -- color) ``Soft Pink Landscape,'' Richard Hamilton, oil on canvas, 1971-72.

(3 -- color) ``Amherst Campus No. 1,'' Fairfield Porter, oil on canvas, 1969.