THE SOCIETY OF SIX by Nancy...

THE SOCIETY OF SIX by Nancy Boas (Bedford Arts: $39.95; 224 pp.)

These six young, bold artists working in Oakland in the 1910s and ‘20s have often been called “landscape painters,” but their work is considerably more sophisticated than that of mid-19th Century realists, for rather than faithfully and “objectively” depicting the environment, their art reflects a more modernist conflict between inner and outer landscapes. At their best, the “Oakland Six” use deep and dreamy hues of red, blue and gold not only to express their love of the land but to portray its pristine beauty as a form of spiritual purity that is often beyond human attaining.

By showing how the society’s paintings presaged modernism, Nancy Boas hopes to bring them out of the basements to which they were relegated after being dismissed as derivative. Isolated from European and New England culture, the Oakland Six didn’t learn French Impressionist techniques until an exposition traversed mountains and deserts to reach the Bay Area in 1915. By then, however, mainstream artists already were moving on to newer forms of expression. Even so, the society innovated substantially beyond Impressionism, Boas argues, pioneering a rapid, raw, coarse and boldly subjective style that became our country’s first distinctly original contribution to visual art.

The work reproduced here in color ranges from intense evocations of the Old West--Seldon Gile’s “A Pueblo, Arizona” for instance, is a composite of bright orange masses that are on the verge, as Boas writes, “of exploding into pure light”--to August Gay’s more introspective studies of troubled psyches in tranquil environments. Gay’s “Stevenson House,” for instance, suggests a world that is outwardly beautiful, but inwardly threatening: a tranquil, pastel building lies in the background, while in the foreground, the spreading branches of a tree seem to shatter the composition like glass.