ART REVIEW : UCSD HONORS LONGTIME S.D. PAINTER

“Commonplace people are at every moment the chief and essential links in the chain of human affairs; if we leave them out, we lose all semblance of truth.” Only an uncommon artist would write this memo to herself on a preparatory sketch for a painting. The finished work of art is “Virginia,” an expressive portrait of a large black woman seated in a bus.

The artist is Belle Baranceanu, now being honored with a major exhibition at the Mandeville Gallery at UC San Diego. The scholarly catalogue that accompanies “Belle Baranceanu--A Retrospective” is a major contribution by the campus, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, to the neglected documentation of the art history of San Diego.

Baranceanu was born in Chicago in 1902 to Romanian-Jewish immigrant parents. She studied art at the Minneapolis School of Art and the Chicago Art Institute. After beginning a promising career in Chicago, she moved with her parents to San Diego in 1933 because, as she later commented, “In California, it’s easier to be poor.”

Here she painted several murals under federal patronage, including “Scenic View of the Village” in the La Jolla Post Office, and taught art classes from 1946 to 1969. A major tragedy was the destruction of her “The Seven Arts Mural” when old La Jolla High School was demolished in 1975 after being determined seismically unsafe.

The artist, who years ago ceased to paint, complained, “I haven’t been able to do my art anymore. People will only destroy it.” Now disabled, she resides in a convalescent home in La Jolla.

Interest in Baranceanu was revived five years ago by San Diego attorney John Howard, a former student of the artist, and his wife, Kathi, who is Mayor Roger Hedgecock’s chief of protocol. In February, 1980, there was an exhibition of the artist’s works at the County Administration Center. At the same time, San Diego Historical Society Curator Bruce Kamerling began efforts to preserve Baranceanu’s works and papers.

The Mandeville Gallery exhibition, spanning nearly a quarter of a century of productivity, includes newly conserved paintings, drawings, lithographs, woodblock and linoleum block prints, a hammered copper relief and a mammoth mural panel of “Portola’s Departure” (1938) rescued from the destruction of Roosevelt Junior High School by the Historical Society because it had been painted on canvas.

Such an exhibition is possible in the 1980s because prejudice by abstractionists has been superseded by a revived interest in landscape and figuration, as well as a growing respect for the representational work of earlier decades.

Californians are becoming conscious of their visual arts culture as never before, and they aren’t the only ones. At the College Art Assn.’s annual meeting in Los Angeles earlier this year, a session devoted to California art was jammed. Connoisseurs of California art are gratified at this interest in their passion, but it is also a matter of concern as works move to markets outside the state, especially to New York. Efforts need to be made to preserve California’s art heritage.

It is essential first to define what is historically and aesthetically significant, to preserve it and study it. “Belle Baranceanu--A Retrospective” is an important element in that effort.

As UCSD professor of literature Bram Dijkstra has written in his exemplary catalogue essay, “Virtually everything Baranceanu painted has the stamp of her concern for strongly expressed humanist content, for distinctive outline and rhythmic linear counterpoint, or, as one might call it, ‘Linear Expressionism.’ ”

Baranceanu was never a pure formalist. There is always a sense of a human presence in her work, as viewer if not subject. She relies on contour rather than color to define her shapes in space. Her paintings are not overly intellectualized but palpably physical, at times even passional. She had affinities with early American modernists like Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth and Georgia O’Keeffe, and beyond them to Europeans Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Georges Braque. She was not, however, a mere copier or derivative artist.

Baranceanu’s “Reclining Nude(s)” (circa 1925 and 1928) recall Matisse’s famous “Blue Nude” in their sculptural modeling, but are more realistic and voluptuous. Her early landscapes and cityscapes in earth tones similarly have a sculptural quality. An outstanding exception is the brilliant “Los Angeles Hills” (circa 1927-29) in which natural landscape features, especially a great yellow area in the center, are delineated by changes in brush stroke rather than by modulations of color.

In “Road Near Mt. Wilson” (circa 1927-29), she created a vertiginous sense equal to that of Wayne Thiebaud in his San Francisco paintings. Her portraits, which include “Virginia” (1926), “Grandmother” (circa 1926), “The Johnson Girl” (circa 1930) and “Hilda Preibisius” (circa 1935), are remarkable for their sense of human presence.

The murals in their formality and stylization lack the emotional content and the sense of engagement of the earlier easel works. They possess instead a quality of public grandeur.

For a time, Baranceanu made works of great distinction. But fully half of the works in the Mandeville Gallery exhibition date from the period before the artist moved to San Diego, and they are the stronger works. It is appropriate, then, to refer to her as having been a “Chicago artist.” After the murals, Baranceanu’s painting career receded as the artist became an inspiring teacher who permanently affected the lives of her students in San Diego, an influence which it would be useful to document for the area’s art history.

This exhibition reminds us of her important presence. It will help to establish her position in the nation’s art history.