EXHIBIT MINES ‘GOLDEN LAND’

An experienced curator is at work in “The Golden Land,” at the San Diego Art Museum, and it’s a presence to be noted.

Paul Chadbourne Mills, retired director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and former chief curator of art at the Oakland Museum, has selected 117 works that trace California landscape from Gold Rush days to the present.

With Mills in charge, I didn’t anticipate another boring old landscape show, but I didn’t expect “The Golden Land” (through Jan. 18) to be such a honey, either. It’s difficult to trek through such familiar territory and find anything new in it. Mills’ success is not so much in making discoveries as in his follow-through.

From the moment you pass from paintings by awe-struck adventurers into a more domesticated landscape, you see that the show tracks attitudes and not just styles of representation. Upon leaving the final gallery, you know that a thread of idealism survives among contemporary landscape artists, but that it has become dangerously frayed by the intrusion of civilization with its relentless development and parking lots.

The settlement of the American West coincided with the rise of landscape painting. While settlers who struck it rich bought original interpretations of Western landscape from artists, a revolution in photography, illustration and printing led to wide distribution of similar images. The result was an important legacy of images that record not only the exotic look of “The Golden Land” but how people felt about it.

Though early depictions of the sublime often seem overblown or overheated, they convey an understandable sense of wonder. Labels repeatedly call attention to the artists’ immigrant status: Albert Bierstadt came from Germany, Maurice Braun from Hungary, Marius Dahlgren from Denmark, James Hamilton from Ireland, Thomas Hill from England, William Keith from Scotland.

One dominant theme links the 19th-Century works in the exhibition: the bigness of nature and the smallness of humankind. Nearly every picture has a tiny person or two tucked away somewhere, though you may have to search to discover them among the crashing waves, towering redwoods and snow-capped mountains. Even the deer seem astonished by the enormity of it all in Bierstadt’s “Lake in Yosemite Valley.”

As the chronology of the show proceeds, nature becomes less awesome and forbidding--and ever smaller. While the 19th-Century artists stand back and survey stunning vistas, their early 20th-Century followers walk right into warm meadows and cuddle up to soft bushes, umbrella trees and rolling hills that might be pillows.

Arthur Frank Mathews, Hanson Duvall Puthuff, Marion Wachtel and William Wendt are among the artists whose work lends a soft, warm, pastoral tranquility to the exhibition’s midsection. When people appear in these later pictures, they are cozily enveloped by nature. Former wildness is cultivated though not yet despoiled, and the artists are busily interpreting familiar surroundings while edging toward abstraction.

Arthur Bowen Davies’ 1905 “View of San Francisco,” which reduces a bayside scene to a few areas of solid color, marks an abrupt change from the romanticism prevalent in the first galleries. Instead of portraying panoramic vistas, the later artists were more inclined to focus on a single grove, modest harbor or building nestled in a valley. In Mathews’ 1930 painting, “Monterey Cypress,” for example, spreading trees flatten out into a muted landscape of ruffled shapes and textures.

As time marches forward in the show, colors brighten, abstraction takes hold and--predictably--nature is nearly obscured by buildings. The definition of landscape expands to include almost any picture that has an outdoor setting.

Richard Diebenkorn’s 1961 “Cane Chair Outside” and Paul Wonner’s 1960 “Chair” paintings seem to merge interiors with landscape as they blend representation and abstraction. In Roland Petersen’s 1966 “Flag Festival,” landscape is crowded into a few slim triangles behind tightly packed picnic tables.

“Farm Pond,” a 1979 oil by Wayne Thiebaud, seems to walk a thin line between twinkling entertainment and dire warning. There’s a sparkle in the trees and reflections along the painting’s high horizon, but the pond that balloons out from a winding stream to the center of the canvas seems vaguely ominous and the brown earth surrounding it a sharp contrast to the juicy background.

“The Golden Land” is, in part, a paean to nature. We should “love this land” and “be careful about man’s role upon it,” Mills counsels in text printed on a gallery wall. If he had wanted to drive home the point more vigorously, he might have concluded the show with a comparison between Ansel Adams’ majestic views of Yosemite and Ron Partridge’s photograph, “Parkinglot,” which shows Half Dome all but strangled by cars.

Instead, these opposing views are assimilated in a minisurvey of contemporary attitudes about California landscape. Among a good group of photographers, Laurie Brown extracts poetic serenity from the furrowed hills of a construction site, while Robbert Flick merges the kaleidoscopic with the panoramic in a gridded composition of images taken in a bleak area near Lancaster. Richard Ross glories in luxurious verdure as he photographs an elegant old couple of chairs surveying the landscape.

The contemporary paintings and drawings vary from Carlos Almaraz’s steamy pastel of Echo Park to Vija Celmins’ contemplative expanse of ocean portrayed in a lithograph. For sheer explosive flamboyance, there’s nothing to match Peter Alexander’s “Punta Bando” sunset in acrylic on canvas.

It’s difficult to draw a meaningful conclusion from such diversity: To walk slowly through the show is to journey from the land of naive wonder through the terrain of self-satisfied comfort to a thorn patch of uncertainty.