A New Series by Joseph DiGiorgio Offers Tucsonans A Slice Of The Big Apple. By Margaret Regan IN THE MID-19th century, as Manhattan's green spaces were being crowded out by bricks and brownstone, and its dirt lanes replaced by hardscrabble paving, the city powers-that-be had a felicitous thought. They would take a huge tract of land at the northern end of the borough and turn it into a park for the people. Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) was the visionary designer selected to mold this piece of somewhat damaged landscape into the romantic idyll of Central Park. Considered the father of American landscape design, Olmsted and his colleague Calvert Vaux set out to convert the tract's shanty farms and meadows and woods into a democratic retreat for harried urban dwellers of all classes. It would be an edifying patch of nature, carefully controlled and cultivated, unexpectedly thriving in between the skyscrapers. Central Park's reputation has suffered in succeeding years, not the least because Manhattan's millions use it heavily, and the streets' crime unhappily follows them there, but it's still one of world's best-known urban parks. Although there are those who consider Central Park merely Olmsted's practice run: Prospect Park in Brooklyn, which he and Vaux designed in the 1860s, is less well known but nevertheless ranked by some as the most beautiful city park in the world. The many glories of Prospect Park, replete with Olmsted's trademark ponds and water lilies, snow-drifted hillsides and delicate pink cherry blossoms, are made vividly larger than life in Joseph DiGiorgio: Prospect Park, a show now at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. DiGiorgio is a native Brooklynite, the son of Italian immigrants who first saw the park on a visit with his mother in 1936 when he was 5 years old. A landscape painter now for some 40 years, he's painted other major series inspired by locales as diverse as Alabama and the Southwest. (His work was last seen in Tucson in 1989, when his 127-foot long Grand Canyon painting was exhibited at the Tucson Museum of Art; another landscape painting is now on view at the TMA in the big Small show.) But a couple of years ago, DiGiorgio turned his attention to the first landscape he ever knew: Prospect Park. For a period of 24 months, he worked intensively, making some 200 brilliantly colored oil pastels of the park in all seasons, all lights and all weathers. More than 120 of these unnamed pastels, each about 30 by 41 inches, are tacked to the walls in the museum, exhibited "salon-style" for maximum effect, lined up in long rows, and stacked three and four deep. When you enter the gallery you find yourself unexpectedly immersed in a gorgeous landscape. (The museum staff has whimsically heightened the effect with a couple of park benches placed here and there.) Prospect Park is distinct from DiGiorgio's earlier series of wild places. DiGiorgio's pastels here are at two removes from "real" nature because they evoke an artificial landscape, designed by another artist. Olmsted's park has little to do with untrammeled nature of the sort DiGiorgio found in the Grand Canyon. Characteristically 19th century, the place is full of "prospects," deliberately staged views with, say, a knobby tree in the foreground, a green knoll rising beyond it, a curving path meandering metaphorically off around the bend. Olmsted's park is a created Eden, nature in the service of visual ideas, and his sensuous design resurfaces in DiGiorgio's undulating compositions. Nor does DiGiorgio pretend to record the actual park: He made sketches and photographs on site, then returned to his Manhattan studio to work. His dreamscape pictures show a park devoid of loiterers and litter, an ideal landscape of artificial light and color, in shades more pink, more lime and more screaming autumnal orange than anything found in nature. He "marks" them on his rag papers with short energetic strokes that seem somehow related to the broken colors of both the Impressionists and certain Abstract Expressionists. Particularly beautiful are a near-abstraction of a pond, a diagonal of orange light crossing its deep blue-green waters, and spare wintry scenes of black tree trunks set against muffled white snow fields. DiGiorgio, like Olmsted before him, loves the rhythms of trees, and he puts them billowing along curving hills, or sets their branches slicing jaggedly across the paper. If Olmsted was the epitome of the 19th century romantic, DiGiorgio is a bit out of joint with his own times. His lyrical work is too decorative, too lovely and at times too cloying for late 20th century tastes. Like the classic 19th century landscape painters, such as Bierstadt and the Hudson River artists, he unashamedly finds the sublime in the land. But our own little piece of earth is disappearing, just as surely as Manhattan's did, ours giving way to dead-ugly stucco shopping emporiums and grave-like houses row on row. DiGiorgio's art of the land refreshes us in the same way that Olmsted's prospects still bring a little bit of Eden to nature-deprived New Yorkers trapped in bricks and mortar. Joseph DiGiorgio: Prospect Park continues through January 28 at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Hours are noon to 4 p.m. Sunday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, closed Saturday. The artist will give a free talk in the gallery at 12:15 p.m., Thursday, January 18. For more information call 621-7567.

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