An exhibition titled California Scene Paintings has just opened at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. For those of you that have not visited this downtown museum, the structure was designed and built specifically to show art. It has a modern architectural design with clean lines, high ceilings and an excellent lighting system which shows paintings very well.

From the beginning the idea for this exhibition was to select outstanding art, with the added interest of depicting scenes relevant to the understanding of California’s history, and especially its cultural history. While California Scene Paintings have been produced since the state began in 1850 and are still being produced today, this particular exhibition focuses on the period between 1930 and 1960. artes fine arts magazine

The term California Scene Paintings has been developed to identify art in which the subject matter focuses on people, or signs of humanity. Often these works capture engaging scenes of cityscape subject matter or views of suburban communities and include buildings, automobiles, trains, street lights, and other manmade objects. In other cases they focus on farming or ranching operations in the country, with barns and tractors. Occasionally more subtle works are included in this category, where humanities influence on the landscape is not as prominent. An example would be a rural roadway winding through a sublime California landscape with telephone poles and mail boxes lining the road. Whether humanities influence is obvious or subtle, in all California Scene Paintings the purpose of this art has been to capture scenes of everyday life in California in an artistically engaging manner.

In the late 1920s when the group of young California artists featured in this exhibition began finding inspiration for this type of art, they looked back at what a few outstanding California artists of the past had done. Early artistic examples included paintings depicting scenes of 1850s era gold miners in mining camps or along stream beds. Others include people standing around in busy produce markets on the streets of San Francisco and depictions of sailing vessels unloading people and goods on the docks of Sacramento. The young artists did not want to paint like the pioneer California artists, nor did they want to paint subject matter from another time, but they did find inspiration in the idea of visually capturing scenes of everyday life in California, which was the same idea as the older artists had done during their lifetime.

Agricultural and land booms followed the California Gold Rush in the mid-1800s. Railroads were built which brought droves of new settlers. Farming, ranching, and tourist businesses exploded. In the early 1900s the Hollywood motion picture industry grew rapidly, as did amusement park construction in small beach communities along the coast of California. The Great Depression Years played out quite differently in California, than they did in many other parts of America. This was due to the fact that food was still in demand and California was a key producer of fruits and vegetables. Also, business like the Hollywood film industry actually thrived and expanded during this time, which gave local people job opportunities that were not available elsewhere. This was the time when the artists in this exhibition transitioned from being amazingly talented student artists, to being recognized as professional artists.

In the years since World War Two, California has been the matrix for many cultures and sub-cultures . The California surf culture, along with the car culture, motorcycle and hot rod cultures developed rapidly. Through the 1950s and into the 1960s and 1970s the Beatnik Culture, a West Coast Jazz Culture, the hippie culture, the Jesus People Movement, the college student protests and the teenage riots on the Sunset Strip all became part of California culture and social history. Aspects of all these events and movements were visually captured by artists of their respective eras. Together these California Scene Paintings help form an overall picture of what has happened in the somewhat distant past and as the tradition of producing scene paintings continues, scenes of everyday life in California continue to be produced by talented artists today.

The particular exhibition now on display at the Pasadena Museum of California Art features 75 carefully-selected California Scene Paintings from the 1930 to 1960 era. In some ways this was a Golden Era for this type of art. During that period this type of art was the most popular type of art being produced in California. Large numbers of talented artists were engaged in producing these works, which created a very stimulating artistic environment. The California museums and art galleries fully supported the artists working in this manner in the 1930s and 1940s. A number of the key artists including Millard Sheets, Phil Dike, Emil Kosa Jr, Lee Blair, Milford Zornes, Hardie Gramatky, and Dong Kingman received National acclaim through the many annual museum exhibitions in large cities including New York City, Chicago, Boston, and Baltimore. All of these artists not only had good gallery representation in Los Angeles and San Francisco but they also had gallery representation in New York City during this period.

While the exhibit features many watercolors, oil paintings, drawings and lithographs by some of the more well known artists listed above, it also includes outstanding works by artists who did not receive much acclaim during their lifetime. This is especially true for those who painted during the post World War Two era, when the museums, galleries and much of the general art community, rejected California Scene Paintings as too provincial. Among these artists are Elsie Palmer Payne, Vernon Jay Morse, Ralph Baker, and Collin Campbell. Others who attained greater exposure for a short period of time include Roger Kuntz, Ralph Hulett and Jack Laycox.

Most of the California Scene Painters working during the 1930 to 1960 era were best known for the watercolors they produced. The title California Style Watercolors has been used to describe these aquarelle works since the artists first began exhibiting them in the late 1920s. Prior to this time the watercolor medium was primarily used to colorize carefully planned pencil drawings or for quick field sketches from which oil paintings were later produced. During the 1930 to 1980 period a group of artists pioneered a whole new way to use the watercolor medium. Members of this group included the above mentioned artists Sheets, Dike, Kosa, Zornes, Gramatky, Blair, along with many others including Edward Reep, Robert E. Wood, Rex Brandt, Barse Miller, Joseph O’Malley, Elmer Plummer and Paul Sample. Select examples of art by all these artists are included in the exhibition.

Above, left: Joseph O’Malley, Tube under the Hill (1946), casein on board, 15 x 20″. Private collection. O’Malley worked at RKO Pictures, Columbia and Universal producing art for film noir. For the Hollywood film industry, he produced high contrast, black and white pencil drawings, providing a visual storyboard reference for the director and cameraman. Additionally, he produced related art in color, such as this.

These artists believed watercolors could be used as a primary painting medium and that they could teach themselves to paint spontaneous works on large sheets of paper which were sometimes 22 x 30 inches and larger. They rarely put down any pencil lines before starting to paint. For most of these artists the discipline included totally visualizing the final painting before starting. They had great reverence for the high quality hand-made paper they used and planned certain areas where the white of the paper showed through to form a certain shape or for highlights. Transparent paints were almost always used and rarely do you see opaque white paint ever used. Capturing the sight and feel of strong warm light and deep dark shadows they experienced in California was a priority for many of the scene painting artists and while viewing this art that fact becomes apparent.

As these artists progressed, the bold California Scene images they produced won major awards at the annual art exhibitions sponsored by the National Academy of Design and American Watercolor Society. A number of the California artists exhibited with, became friends with, and served on juries with their Eastern peers which included Charles Burchfield, Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Henry Gasser, Harry Leith-Ross, John Pike and Ogden Pleissner. A number of watercolors which were exhibited in these early period exhibitions and some of which received top honors are included in the Pasadena Museum of California Art exhibition.

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, when museum exhibition entry forms specified that they were receiving only oil paintings, the California Scene artists were more than ready to produce works in that medium too. Since most of these artists were fiercely competitive, they did their best to produce top quality art so that they could receive the prizes and recognition. Some of the most outstanding California Scene Paintings of the 1930 to 1960 era produced by Ben Messick, Phil Paradise, Phil Dike, Ralph Hulett, and Fletcher Martin are included in the exhibition.

A third section in the exhibition features finished drawings which were produced and exhibited as final works of art, and stone lithographs, several of which were produced for W.P.A.-era art relief programs. These works show how important drawing skills were to the artists included in this exhibition. Their ability to reduced complex imagery into strong black and white patterns and design, attests to the high level of artistic academics these artists understood and practiced. Drawings and especially black and white value studies, similar to those in the exhibit, were produced for each oil painting or watercolor before it was painted. That is why many of the final works have such incredibly strong patterns of dark and light which give the compositions visual power and authority.

Finally, let me note, as curator of the exhibition, that these works were selected from the best examples I have located in the past 43 years of tracking down this type of art. Much of the information on the wall tags—and which accompanies each painting reproduced in the book, California Scene Paintings—came directly from the artists or their families, who I interviewed back in the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art runs through July 28, 2013. If you can’t attend the show, the book of the same title, California Scene Paintings, written and designed by myself and my son Austin, will be available soon on Amazon.com.

By Gordon T. McClelland, Contributing Writer

_________________________________________

At The Santa Barbara Museum of Art:

California Dreaming: Plein-Air Painting from San Francisco to San Diego

The story begins at the Santa Barbara exhibit with the presentation of twenty early-modern paintings that celebrate the topography of California. By the end of the 19th century, landscape painting had become the primary vehicle for depicting national identity in American art. California provided breathtaking scenery of newly integrated lands for painters working en plein air, or outdoors. This was an approach employed by cutting-edge artists in Europe, particularly in France, which artists in America then adapted to create a style that has become the hallmark of what is commonly termed Californian Plein-Air Painting or California Impressionism.

Above, left: William Keith, Loma Prieta, Morning in the Santa Cruz Mountains, 1874. Oil on canvas. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of the Bard Family in memory of Beryl Bard.

In Northern California, an atmospheric, poetic and decorative style called Tonalism was established by the artistic community of San Francisco. Southern California was a mecca for young, modernist artists influenced by French Impressionism, a movement preoccupied with capturing the immediate effects of light and color under ever-changing climactic conditions.

Right: Colin Campbell Cooper , California State Building, San Diego Exposition, 1916. Oil on canvas. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of the Family of the Artist.

The regional style of California Plein-Air Painting was created by a group of cosmopolitan painters, whose mobility was facilitated by the new railroad lines to the West Coast. These locals and transplants traveled throughout the state of California as well as to artist colonies and metropolitan centers nationally and throughout Europe. They were in search of artistic inspiration, both from nature, and from exposure to the art of the past and present. While technically varied, all of the artists represented here were utterly devoted to depicting the effects of light and atmosphere that so specifically characterize the natural settings of California.

An example is Francis McComas, who was born in Tasmania, Australia, and after working briefly as an advertising illustrator in Sydney, set sail in search of formal art training. In 1898, he arrived at the port of San Francisco, where he enrolled in classes taught by Arthur Mathews. From there, he traveled to Paris and studied briefly at the Académie Julian. The Californian landscape had clearly enchanted McComas, so by 1900 he was back in San Francisco and eventually settled in Monterey. Taking cues from his teacher Mathews, but with a somewhat more austere approach, McComas depicted Northern California in a Tonalist idiom, with stylized volumes and a muted, harmonious palette.

Left: Francis McComas, Old Oak (Landscape), 1900. Watercolor. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of Tia and David Hoberman.

Other artists represented in the SBMA exhibition include William Merritt Chase, Colin Campbell Cooper, Clarence Hinkle, George Inness, William Keith, Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel, and more. While technically varied, all of the painters associated with the California Plein-Air movement were utterly devoted to the indigenous landscape and sought to reproduce faithfully the effects of light and atmosphere that so specifically characterize the natural paradise that is aptly described by the moniker of the Golden State.

Right: Clarence Hinkle, Coast Line, Laguna, n.d. (ca. 1924). Oil on canvas. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of Mabel Bain Hinkle.

California Dreaming: Santa Barbara Museum of Art,  through June 16, 2013

Visit Pasadena Museum of California Art at www.pmcaonline.org

and Santa Barbara Museum of Art at: www.sbmuseart.org