COLLECTING CALIFORNIANA - The Intriguing Heritage of Southern California
THESE DAYS,in certain sophisticated circles of Southern California, Old World charm is eagerly courted. Mock palaces are rising on swank suburban streets, and residential interiors are choked with European antiques. But re-creating English country houses and French hotels in this part of the world, however tastefully and evocatively, aren’t the only options. Southern California has its own rich past, its own traditions of craftsmanship, its own antiques. On the following pages are some areas of collecting that reflect that surprisingly well-furnished heritage.
( For a guide to galleries handling Californiana, please turn to Page 44. )
MISSION FURNITURE
IGNORED FOR MANY YEARS,Mission furniture is now perceived as having made a giant step in the direction of contemporary design. Also known as Arts and Crafts (or Craftsman) furniture, it flourished in the last decades of the 19th Century and reached the height of its popularity in the years immediately before and after World War I.
In Europe and the United States, the Arts and Crafts Movement was a reaction against the Industrial Revolution. In England, painters such as William Morris and art critics such as John Ruskin encouraged a Gothic revival. They longed for a pre-industrial utopia where artisans could create handmade products--furniture, fabrics, ceramics.
The unfortunate effects of industry on 19th-Century American design were more than obvious in such factory-made pieces as John Henry Belter’s laminated imitations of French Second Empire furniture. Reaction was building against this sort of excess, and many people had been struck by the simplicity of the Shaker furniture exhibited at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia.
Gustav Stickley, an American furniture designer who welcomed the theories of Morris, studied the Shaker exhibit with interest. Stickley, from Syracuse, N.Y., came to the conclusion that European-inspired furniture had no place in America. The honest, no-nonsense furniture he made was constructed by hand with local materials, usually oak.
He edited a magazine, the Craftsman, outlining his views, and in 1901 the first issue came to the attention of two California architects, the brothers Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene. The Greenes’ work showed a number of Oriental characteristics, but they were influenced primarily by Stickley and the Arts and Crafts Movement. Although their furniture was reserved for their clients, the principles were the same: elegant form, exquisite craftsmanship and, above all, simplicity of design. Most of it was made by Peter and John Hall in Pasadena, who were, like Louis B. Easton and Harold Doolittle, among the few furniture makers in the Southern California area at the time. Greene & Greene had created the ultimate in California bungalow design for the rich. However, the concept did filter to the middle class, and a great deal of commercial Mission furniture from the East and Midwest found its way to California.
Prices start at about $400; high end is $100,000.
NATIVE AMERICAN BASKETS
BASKET MAKING,one of the oldest crafts in North America, is a textile art that Native Americans took to the height of sophistication. This was particularly so among the tribes of the Southwest (Apache, Pima, Navajo, Pueblo) and also among California Indians (the Pomo of Northern California; the Chumash, Cahuilla and Mission Indians of the south). It was believed that the women were given basket-making instruction by the gods, and baskets were indispensable in every phase of life.
Nowhere in Native American basketry is there greater diversity and beauty than in the work of the California tribes. Consider the typical Pomo basket with its diagonal twining, quail plumes and white shell beads, or a 4-foot storage container, or miniatures so small that five or six can rest together on the surface of a coin, or a bright red Maidu basket, feathered and beaded and decorated with shells, or a Mission Indian basket with rattlesnake designs.
Rattlesnake baskets are some of the most dramatic and most sought-after baskets in Southern California. They are characteristic of the Mission Indians, who were divided into groups by the Spanish according to the nearest mission--Gabrielino, Luiseno and Diegueno, for example. The Cahuilla (the Western Cahuilla, in Riverside County, the Desert Cahuilla, near Palm Springs, and the Mountain Cahuilla, near the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains) made the finest rattlesnake baskets. (They were not, strictly speaking, Mission Indians, because they managed to maintain a sort of independence from the Spanish priests.) The best Cahuilla baskets were more than utilitarian, rising to the level of money and status possessions.
Native American baskets from California are a challenge to collect--early tribal baskets are difficult to find. Some are rare; it is said that only about 225 Chumash baskets exist.
Prices range from at $800 to $15,000 and up for quality baskets.
PLEIN-AIR PAINTINGS
DURING THE PAST CENTURY,when academic and studio painting ruled the day, a number of artists took their easels into the Laguna countryside and set down a record of what was then rural California. They painted the beaches, hills and sea, and, by the 1920s, Laguna Beach could boast of a large, cosmopolitan art colony. The members, many of whom were former students of the Chicago Art Institute or from the Eastern Seaboard, were turning out excellent work, most of it largely neglected at the time.
These artists have been roughly grouped together as the California plein-air school, a portmanteau term that describes a devotion to outdoor painting. It includes American impressionists and Postimpressionists and particular groups such as the famous Eucalyptus School, which takes its name from the Australian trees transplanted here in the late 19th Century. From the 1850s to the 1950s, some of the most important and best-known of the plein-air painters were Orrin White, Edgar Alwin Payne, Joseph Kleitsch and Anna Althea Hills. William Wendt (1865-1946), called in his day the “dean of Southern California artists,” was one of the finest California artists of the early 20th Century. When he built a studio in Laguna Beach in 1912, it attracted art students from every part of Southern California. In later years, while his wife, Julia Bracken, sculpted in Los Angeles, he roamed the countryside around Laguna and elsewhere, seeking undiscovered natural settings.
The work of the plein-air artists has generated interest at New York and California auctions, and prices are rising.
Prices average $2,000 and can be as high as $70,000.
FIRST EDITIONS
SOME OF THE BEST 20th-Century American writers have had love affairs with the difficult and fascinating city of Los Angeles. The hard-boiled writers of the 1930s and ‘40s created a harsh kind of poetry by setting their fictions within the context of a very real city. Locales were vividly particularized: the ocean piers, the downtown hotels, the Malibu beach houses, the Beverly Hills mansions, the bars, nightclubs and restaurants of Hollywood.
A sense of this colorful past can be found in the recently popular area of collecting modern first editions. A preliminary list might include “Fast One” (1932), by Paul Cain; “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1934), “Double Indemnity” (1936) and “Serenade” (1937), by James M. Cain; “You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up” (1938), by Eric Knight; “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1935), by Horace McCoy; “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939), by John Steinbeck and “The Day of the Locust” (1939), by Nathanael West. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels have created the rich mythology of that far-from-make-believe Los Angeles vividly seen in his four finest books: “The Big Sleep” (1939), “Farewell, My Lovely” (1940), “The High Window” (1942) and “The Lady in the Lake” (1943). Less well known, and only recently rediscovered, are books by John Fante. He produced many short stories for magazines in the 1930s. His books brilliantly portray certain aspects of Los Angeles in the late 1930s: Angel’s Flight and the seedy hotels and the dusty palm trees and the mean streets that have fascinated so many other writers. He published several critically acclaimed novels in small editions: “Wait Until Spring, Bandini” (1938) and “Ask the Dust” (1939) among them. Today, first editions of his novels are not too expensive, though they are not necessarily easy to find.
Hard-cover first edition prices range from $20 to more than $1,000.
ART POTTERY
ART POTTERY IS a term indicating that special area of American ceramics made during a specific period and placing great emphasis on individual craftsmanship. Beauty was more admired than utility, though a piece might incidentally serve a practical purpose as a vase, pitcher, fruit or candy dish, even a dinner plate. The era flourished roughly from 1870 to 1920--perhaps 10 years longer in California.
The development was largely undertaken by talented amateurs, many of whom were women. These artists experimented boldly, using both coarse earthenware and fine porcelain clay with glaze coatings of all kinds and colors--shiny, opaque and translucent. They applied decoration with brushes, squeezed it through tubes, sprayed it on with atomizers. They shaped the wet clay with their hands; they carved the surface; sometimes they hammered it, when cool and almost hard, like metal. The typical art pottery piece followed the designs set at the Rookwood Pottery, founded in 1880 in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was often a vase, decorated with leaves and flowers in the art nouveau manner, very much like Tiffany glass of the same period.
During the high noon of American art pottery, there were more than 100 producers in 23 states. Many stayed near the rich clay deposits of Ohio, and others lived in the arts-and-crafts colonies of Colorado and California. In this state, for example, at least 15 creative ceramic companies made art pottery between 1890 and 1930, including California Faience in Berkeley, Rhead Pottery in Santa Barbara, Robertson Pottery and Grand Feu Art Pottery in Los Angeles and Valentien Pottery in San Diego.
A surprising amount of this California work has survived, although vases and bowls are difficult to find in any great quantity. Many ceramic tiles survive from the Ernest Batchelder Tile Co. in Los Angeles and from Malibu Tile and Catalina Tile, all famous in their day. In the 1930s, the J. A. Bauer Pottery Co. in Los Angeles produced commercial ceramics in a variety of bright colors.
California art pottery prices range generally from $100 to $500 but can reach the tens of thousands of dollars.
SADDLES AND SPURS
DURING THE FIRST HALF of the 19th Century, the needs of frontiersmen began to alter the traditional design of both civilian and military saddles. The riding equipment of the Mexican vaquero, for example, which had slowly evolved from the days of the conquistadors, was used more often in herding cattle on the open range of the Great Plains. The vaquero saddle (or Spanish saddle, as it was called in Texas, California and eventually St. Louis) owed its popularity to its practical construction and durability. It consisted of two wooden sideboards, laterally arranged and firmly connected by a horizontally placed wooden cantle and pommel. The pommel projected upward, forming a horn that was ideal for roping or for retaining one’s seat on a bucking horse.
This comfortable saddle, with its deep, secure seat, was Americanized in St. Louis, the Mississippi River city that was the gateway to the West. Here, in the 1820s, a young saddle maker named Thornton Grimsley manufactured a horned saddle based on Spanish models. After the Texas war of independence from Mexico and the American victory in the Mexican War, the saddle took on regional names: Texas, California and Missouri saddles. In California, the saddles were often characterized by a mochila , a tanned leather covering, decorated with tooled designs, that was placed over the pommel and cantle. In California and in Texas, stirrups were usually wooden and wider, reflecting the Mexican influence; the lariat, made from plaited strands of rawhide, was also borrowed from the vaquero, as were leather chaps. The tradition of the vaqueros and caballeros of Old Mexico became a part of both the romance and the reality of old--and new--California.
Prices for spurs start at about $200. Saddles range from about $750 to $2,000, depending on silverwork and tooling.
MISSION FURNITURE: In West Los Angeles: Couturier Gallery. In Pasadena: James / Randell (reproductions); Jack Moore Arts and Crafts. In Laguna Beach: Sun Stone Gallery. For an introduction to the Arts and Crafts Movement as it appeared in California, visit the Greene & Greene-designed Gamble House in Pasadena, open to the public.
NATIVE AMERICAN BASKETS: In Los Angeles: Southwest Museum Gift Shop. In Santa Monica: Federico. In Venice: Native American Art Gallery. In Burbank: Cowboys and Indians. In Laguna Beach: Sun Stone Gallery, Len Wood’s Indian Territory. In San Juan Capistrano: Galeria Capistrano. And Don Bennett & Kim Martindale, P.O. Box 283, Agoura 91301.
PLEIN-AIR PAINTINGS: In Los Angeles: Turner Dailey Gallery; Ulrike Kantor Gallery; Michael Kizhner Fine Arts. In Beverly Hills: Petersen Galleries. In Pasadena: Poulsen Galleries(an exhibit of early Southern California plein-airists’ work is up through the end of December). In Encino: George Stern Fine Arts (specializing in plein-air). In Santa Barbara: Studio Two (Gary Breitweiser). In Laguna Beach: Redfern Gallery; Sun Stone Gallery; William A. Karges Fine Art. In San Diego: Orr’s Gallery.
FIRST EDITIONS: In West Los Angeles: Vagabond Books; Heritage Book Shop. In Santa Monica: Morrison & Kline Books; Kenneth Karmiole, Bookseller, Inc. In Orange: Book Carnival. In Pasadena: Mitchell Books; Dirk Cable, Bookseller. In Santa Barbara: Maurice F. Neville Rare Books. In San Diego: Wahrenbrock’s Book House.
ART POTTERY: In West Los Angeles: Couturier Gallery. On Melrose: Buddy’s. In Venice: Main St. U.S.A. In Pasadena: Jack Moore. In Santa Ana: Wild Goose Chase. In Laguna Beach: Roberta Gauthey Antiques.
SADDLES AND SPURS: In Santa Monica: Nonesuch Gallery; Hemisphere. In Burbank: Cowboys and Indians; Edward H. Bohlin Saddle Co. In Descanso: McClintock Saddle Works. In Ventura: Old California Store. In Santa Barbara: G. J. Jedlicka’s Saddlery. Visit the Will Rogers Ranch House in Pacific Palisades and the Santa Barbara Historical Society Museum.
There are two annual vaquero shows in California--in October at Rancho El Roblar in Los Alamos and in July at the Mill in Santa Paula--where purchases can be made.
