Nicholas Brigante; Painted L.A. History

Nicholas P. Brigante, 93, a California artist who used watercolors to paint the history of Los Angeles, died Saturday at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center of natural causes.

Brigante was part of Los Angeles’ founding generation of Modernist artists. His career spanned seven decades, during which he captured on canvas the wildlife of Arroyo Seco and Elysian Park, the natural beauty of the Hollywood Hills and the budding development of a young Los Angeles.

Born in Padula, Italy, in 1895, Brigante came to Los Angeles at the age of 2 and began painting while in his teens.

By the time of his death, his paintings had been exhibited in such institutions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Museum of American Art in Washington.

But his first public exhibition was a bit more humble--a Coca-Cola advertisement on the side of a barn.

It was about 1910 when Brigante teamed up with artist Hanson Puthuff and began to make his living traveling around the West painting advertisements for Coca-Cola and Bull Durham tobacco on the sides of barns and depots.

Two years later, as a member of the Los Angeles Art Students League, the young artist found a mentor in famed Modernist painter Rex Slinkard, and began studying a broad spectrum of art history, particularly Chinese philosophies and art forms.

Wartime Service

After service as a cavalry soldier in Europe in World War I, Brigante continued his artwork in Los Angeles and saw his career take off, beginning with an exhibit of his paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1921 and culminating with showings of his work at the renowned Daniel Gallery in New York.

In 1924, Brigante returned from New York to Los Angeles, where he resumed the work for which he became best known. Using watercolors, he painted the rocks, Sycamore trees and natural wildlife of a city that was still largely untouched by skyscrapers, freeways and air pollution.

In the mid 1930s, Brigante gave up his financial mainstay of commercial painting and confined himself to his studio, where he created perhaps his most famous work, “Implacable Nature and Struggling Imperious Man,” an epic 12-panel, 21-foot-long watercolor that is currently in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Although Brigante experimented with other techniques and themes in the 1940s, he ultimately returned to his exploration of Chinese watercolor methods in an ongoing series of large-scale paintings entitled “Tidepool,” “Space Explorations” and “Burnt Mountain.”

Brigante, who leaves two brothers, a sister, and several nieces and nephews, will be buried Tuesday after services at 1 p.m. in the All Souls Chapel of Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles.