Art Review: Exhibit celebrates an Arts and Crafts master
Fans of the Arts and Crafts movement have rightfully held Pasadena as the stronghold of the Southern California expression of that century-old style. It’s fitting, then, that the Pasadena Museum of California Art is showing prints and watercolors of William S. Rice, a Northern California graphic master. The impressive array showing is yet another fascinating offering from Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, and it’s a harmonious counterpoint to the adjacent exposition of tile and ceramic pottery, “Of Cottages and Castles: The Art Of California Faience.”
“The Nature of William S. Rice: Arts and Crafts Painter and Printmaker” reveals Rice (1873-1963) and his art as the work of a great regional artist with a profound love and reverence for the California landscape. The exhibition is open through April 3, 2016.
Arts and Crafts was an artistic and artisanal response to the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution: cheaply made, mass-produced products. Rice’s work investigated and celebrated the varied Northern California terrain in its pristine form. From his California arrival in 1910, Rice’s artistic vernacular remained constant to his death. Though his wind-swept Carmel coastlines, placid lakes and stoic adobes must have seemed quaintly dated after World War II, the subsequent years have proven them quintessentially Californian.
He began his studies at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Arts before coming under the tutelage of the famed illustrator Howard Pyle. There’s nothing of Pyle’s dynamic figures — of bloodthirsty buccaneers and towering knights — in Rice’s California work. But Pyle’s storybook castles parallel the affection of Rice’s almost medieval houses, churches and barns of early 20th-century NorCal.
Rice worked as a newspaper illustrator — racing to the scene of fires and accidents and recording what he saw in time for the next day’s paper — and it was a formative experience. He learned to draw quickly and accurately, achieving facility that he combined with a keen eye for nature.
His friend Frederick Meyer brought Rice west and the state gave him a lifetime’s worth of inspiration and subject matter. He settled in Alameda County, teaching and working in watercolor and block printing.
The PMCA carries Ellen Treseder Sexauer’s gorgeous and authoritative book on her grandfather’s work “William S. Rice: Art & Life” (Pomegranate 2013). Her niece, Marie-Clare Treseder Gorham, one of the show’s curators, says, “Growing up, I would sit in front of one of his prints and wonder wistfully how he did it.” The 26-year old Davis native now has a degree in art history. Rice’s oeuvre was her introduction to art.
Like many Arts and Crafts practitioners, especially on the West Coast, a knowledge of Japanese ukiyo-e imagery and composition surfaces in Rice. He was able to achieve gradations of light and dark similar to the mist in the aquatint medium. “I assume that he’d come across Japanese prints early in his life,” Treseder Gorham says, “because you see asymmetry in his pre-California work. Nature was very important to the ‘floating world’ printmakers of Japan, as was craft, and those are elements of Rice’s prints.”
The show is limited to landscapes, plant studies and still life — very much in line with Rice’s larger body of work. “His early work was more people-focused,” she points out. “But my grandfather was an avid naturalist and he knew all the names of the plants and trees.”
Rice was by no means the only East Coast artist who was captivated by the Golden State; his colleagues were Gottardo Piazzoni, Armin Hansen and Frances Gearhart. “California transformed his outlook,” she states. “He was surrounded by such natural beauty.” She thinks she knows his appeal: “He captured the California that so many of us choose to remember.”
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What: “The Nature of William S. Rice: Arts and Crafts Painter and Printmaker”
Where: Pasadena Museum of California Art, 490 E. Union St., Pasadena
When: Through April 3, 2016. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.
Contact: (626) 568-3665, www.pmcaonline.org
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KIRK SILSBEE writes about jazz and culture for Marquee.