Personality Plus Captured in California Portraits

Film makers let actors portray their idealized selves at tender ages, budding novelists recast their life stories as fiction, the famous spill their guts in juicy autobiographies. But only artists do self-portraits, scrutinizing the contours of their faces and imbuing them with the idiosyncratic psychology of the person inside.

“The Artists of California: A Group Portrait in Mixed Media,” at the Laguna Art Museum to July 24, is a motley assortment of 80 portraits and self-portraits of California artists--the famous and the obscure alike--spanning late-19th Century to the present. Organized by the Oakland Museum, the exhibit includes paintings, watercolors, sculpture, photographs and drawings.

For the most part--since California hasn’t produced any Rembrandts--the arresting, insightful images are those that step beyond the presentational quality of formal portraiture and use stylistic tricks or additional imagery to capture a fleeting, casual image or reveal the artist’s mental state.

Most of the early images in the show are as revelatory as a prepared statement. Artists wear suits and ties and assume stately poses, as if in imitation of their prosperous Gilded Age patrons. Only in an off-duty sketch do quirks of personality intrude: In a little scribble, landscape painter Albert Bierstadt portrays himself as a pair of legs emerging from behind an easel and grandly adds his autograph.

Slightly later portraits are spinoffs of the Romantic view of the artist as a dreamy, poetic creature.

Xavier Martinez, a California Tonalist painter, saw himself as a moody fellow with a jutting forelock, drooping mustache and sulky chin. In a sculpture by Leo Lentelli, the painter cuts a raffish figure, with his forward-sloping walk and untended shock of hair. Genre painter William Hahn chose to portray his friend, marine artist William Coulter, soulfully serenading a lady in white on a flower-trellised porch.

While the men tend to preen, pout or present themselves as wise elder statesmen, lone female figures from this period project determination and lack of pretense.

Lucia K. Mathews portrayed herself as a serious worker, her eyebrows arched in concentration as she attacked her canvas. Photographer Annie Brigman, whose work celebrates the nude body in nature, is seen bending solicitously over a terrarium in a photo-portrait by Francis Bruguiere.

In the 1920s, a group of Oakland-based landscape painters known as the Society of Six worked in a bright, impressionistic style that carried over to their portraits and self-portraits.

August Gay’s stubby brush strokes captured an al fresco scene of fellow Society member Seldon Gile inclining his bulky body over a tiny barbecue grill. Bernard von Eichman bravely sacrificed the real contours of his face to a patchwork of arbitrary swipes of color.

During the Depression, a serene gaze and a worker’s cap identified social realist Eugene Neuhaus as a hearty member of the proletariat; John Langely Howard painted himself in a blue-eyed daydream over the body of his infant son in a cherubic, baby Jesus pose. Young Helen Lundeberg announced her calm classicist’s vision with a cool profile of herself against a charcoal-and-dusty-pink mountain background.

The era also yielded Paul Taylor’s shot of his wife, documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, perched on the roof of a car with her camera, and master caricaturist Antonio Sotomayer’s leering, bulbous image of muralist Diego Rivera’s face. Sotomayer is also right on the mark with his amusing view of Ralph Stackpole--sculptor of immense and high-minded stone pieces--furrowing his brow as he balances on a wall to sandblast a huge head whose Aztec features weep monumental tears.

In our time, the art of portraiture has become much wilder and woollier.

Mel Ramos’ “David’s Duo” impudently presents himself and his wife nude, with big wings, on an Empire period chaise--a remake of Jacques Louis David’s painting, “Cupid and Psyche.”

A Sam Francis self-portrait is a huge head speckled with multicolored paint that evokes the artist’s well-known style rather than details of his physiognomy. Wayne Thiebaud’s brush gave his head the appearance of an immovable, deeply lined object with unevenly sized ears inserted into a stiff shirt under unseen harsh lights.

William Wiley depicts himself in his familiar dunce-hatted “Mr. Unnatural” guise in “Opening, Closing.” The drawing includes a rambling handwritten monologue about the frustrations an artist experiences while attending his own gallery opening (“One woman said, ‘I don’t know about the art but where can I get some of those socks?’ ”).

Photographer Judy Dater snapped Imogen Cunningham, California’s gnomish grande dame of “straight” photography, looking like an elderly Little Red Ridinghood as she sights a bashful young nude model in the woods.

One of the most striking images is Robert Bechtle’s painting, “French Doors” from 1966, a view through a pair of French doors that stand slightly ajar, letting in the evening air.

One large pane of glass reveals the tall, bearded figure of painter Robert Bechtle, then in his 30s. His arm bends in mid-gesture, fingers clenched, as if he’s making a point to a seated woman in yellow. Behind the other door stands a shorter, older version of the artist, his arm positioned in the same way under a blurred light.

Combining the voyeuristic tease of a view into the artist’s dining room with a personal meditation on age and the persistence of a characteristic gesture, this painting suggests how much the art of self-portraiture has gained by pushing past the polite remnants of tradition into newly irreverent and probing avenues.