O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Irvine Museum Creates an Impression, Literally

“To collect is to rescue things, valuable things, from neglect, from oblivion, or simply from the ignoble destiny of being in someone else’s collection rather than one’s own.”

So observes Susan Sontag in her recent novel “The Volcano Lover,” whose central character is a fastidious 18th-Century collector.

“But buying a whole collection instead of chasing down one’s quarry piece by piece--it was not an elegant move. Collecting is also a sport, and its difficulty is part of what gives it honor and zest. A true collector prefers not to acquire in bulk . . . (and) is not fulfilled by collecting another’s collection: mere acquiring or accumulating is not collecting.”

But mere acquiring and accumulating is just what real estate heiress Joan Irvine Smith does. She has been doing bulk buying of California Impressionist paintings from dealers and auctions during the past couple of years. Then again, a highly sophisticated art collector is unlikely to covet thousands of paintings of rolling hills, eucalyptus trees, frothy waves and fields of poppies.

The Irvine Museum--the newly opened public showcase of Smith’s holdings--is really about nostalgia for the good old days, the teens and ‘20s, when landscape was unspoiled and mainstream art was about obviously “beautiful” and readily identifiable subjects.

The museum’s opening exhibit of 69 works includes canvases by the most familiar California Impressionists (Alson S. Clark, Franz Bischoff, Edgar Payne, Joseph Kleitsch, Granville Redmond, Guy Rose, William Wendt) as well as numerous unknowns.

While I dutifully tried to attend to matters of brushwork, color and composition, my eyes were glazing over with the monotony of this work. So much of it is utterly bland and conventional, devoid of the visual tensions good landscape paintings achieve by means of unusual viewpoints, idiosyncratic forms and textures and the infusion of human passions.

California Impressionism, of course, actually is a stepchild of French Impressionism, adapted with varying success to a new set of atmospheric conditions and mingled (or mangled) with various other styles.

In the 1860s, the French Impressionists began to imitate the optical effect of light on objects in nature, further refining the Realist painters’ stress on the everyday life of their own times. Quintessential Impressionist paintings--such as Claude Monet’s “Haystack” or “Cathedral” series--consist of forms built from short brush strokes of color recorded moments after the artist’s retina absorbed them. The effect struck many observers of the era as disturbingly unfinished.

The French painters were asserting themselves as triumphantly modern --in the term of poet Charles Baudelaire--by embracing transitory effects in nature. But the Americans used Impressionist techniques--along with a batch of other sanctioned styles, including traditional realism and Post-Impressionism--primarily as handy tools for describing the local landscape.

Without potentially disconcerting technical innovations or social themes unsettling to bourgeois taste, the Southern California artists basked in broad viewer approval. They painted solely to celebrate a golden land, sharing an Arcadian vision with fellow residents as well as with tourists smitten by the vision of sun, surf, golden hills and distant snow-capped mountains.

Think some of the high points of American landscape painting: the apocalyptic power of Frederick Church’s vast views, the ghostly orchards of George Inness, the choppy rhythms of John Marin’s watercolor seascapes, the Luminists’ eerily silent bodies of water, the twittering unrest in the work of Charles Burchfield, Milton Avery’s deceptively simple swaths of color.

Now consider: None of these works would be appropriate for reproduction on the cover of a tourist brochure. They’re too quirky, too grandiose, too somber, too sketchy . Try the same test on California Impressionist paintings, and you get remarkably different results. In Southern California, the landscape was both artists’ inspiration and their undoing. They were too much in thrall to the seductive reality of their surroundings to transform them, radically and definitively, into a personal vision.

The reason these paintings are so popular--because they evoke recognizable chunks of nature without bogging the viewer down in larger themes or emotions, or new ways of seeing--is the same reason they are so poverty-stricken as works of art. (Some of these works, such as Bruce Nelson’s “The Summer Sea” with its schematic “crystal” rocks and Paul Grimm’s “Eucalyptus and Clouds” with its awkwardly striped sky, actually descend a notch lower into technical ineptitude.)

A few works in the current exhibit do stand out. Ritschel’s “No Man’s Land,” from about 1931, achieves some measure of power with its contrast of churning white water and dense rocks built out of glinting layers of color--deep blue, brown, pale blue and white. In Maurice Braun’s undated “Yosemite,” the mountain rises against the evening sky like an ungainly blue animal covered in prickly fur.

In Meta Cressey’s undated “Under the Pepper Tree,” a huge flurry of leaves dangles above a terrace where two languid women seem to be in separate reveries. One rests on a bench; the other sits at a table where teatime cups and saucers still nest on each other. The contrast of the women’s torpor with the riot of leafy activity suggests inner states of suppressed tension.

Some paintings from the ‘30s on view represent the trend toward expressionistic realism among artists working during the Depression. In Rex Brandt’s “Rain After Frost,” a tunnel-shaped cloud bank lies heavily over a rural scene (railroad crossing, windmill generator, dilapidated shacks) illuminated by a sullen light and presided over by a writhing, flamelike tree.

In Millard Sheets’ “Birth of Spring,” rolling, dimpled hills and clusters of airy fluff-ball trees create the effect of a landscape impatient to start blooming. A pair of horses posing symmetrically in a patch of shadow, like Attic Greek statues, adds a contrasting air of quiet expectancy. Painted in 1937, the heyday of Grant Wood and Thomas Benton, the canvas represents a particularly expressive form of regionalism.

Simple silhouettes and flat areas of dark and light give Phil Dike’s “Corona del Mar” and Tom Craig’s “California” a crisp, airy texture. In “California,” the filmy white spray ruffling the otherwise preternatural calm of an isolated farm is actually dust kicked up by a tiny horse-drawn plow.

One good sign that the museum aspires to be more than a shrine to one woman’s buying power is the catalogue (published in conjunction with a traveling exhibit of works from the collection that will open in July). Free of burble and gush, it offers useful essays about French Impressionism (by director Jean Stern), the Southern California painters (by curator Janet Blake Dominik) and the Northern California painters (by Oakland Museum curator Harvey L. Jones) along with biographical information about the artists.

Pending the construction of a museum, the collection is housed on the 12th floor of the garish McDonnell Douglas Building. The quietly elegant, carpeted suite of rooms allows peaceful contemplation of the paintings, despite several office “galleries” that require viewers to step around desks to see the art.

It is amusing, however, to see images of hillsides tenanted only by flowers and shrubs hanging right next to large windows looking out on a vast panorama of office buildings, parking lots and the faintest hint (on a recent post-rainstorm day) of distant hills.

The museum attempts to counter the obvious “Well, who’s responsible for the change in land use, anyway?” question with a one-page handout titled “Development and the Environment.” It lauds the “sensitivity and foresight” of the Irvine Co. in permitting the Nature Conservancy to manage 17,000 acres of wildlife--and handily omits any mention of the fierce battles waged by environmentalists last year before the mighty landowner agreed to the project.

* The Irvine Museum, on the 12th floor of the McDonnell Douglas Building, 18881 Von Karman Ave., Irvine, is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free; one-hour free parking validation is available. (714) 476-0294.