PORTRAIT OF PROGRESS : After 75 Years, Modernists at the Laguna Art Museum Have Day in the Sun

In the early days of the Laguna Beach Art Assn.--the forerunner of the Laguna Art Museum, which celebrates its 75th birthday this year--life was sweet. Virtually all Southern California artists in the late ‘teens and ‘20s were painting landscapes in styles more or less derivative of French Impressionism, and both the artist-founders of the association and their public welcomed having a permanent place to view local work.

But by the early ‘30s, the fussin’ and fightin’ had begun. For nearly 60 years--despite perennial flurries of indignation by the modernists (who preferred abstraction and other contemporary styles)--the traditionalists retained the upper hand, relegating the museum to the status of a sleepy, regional outpost.

In a 1938 article, Los Angeles Times art critic Arthur Millier testily described the factional Laguna Beach art scene as a potpourri of:

”. . . older professional artists who helped found the colony before boulevards, realtors and bourgeoisie flocked in . . . a group of amateur or businessman painters whose artless productions are often preferred as souvenirs of the art colony by gas buggy tourists . . . a sprinkling of ‘pinkish’ youth who talk learnedly about modern art but seldom work hard at it, or at anything . . . (and) a precious nugget of a few souls who want to galvanize the sluggish stream of colony art by attracting vital outside work into local exhibits.”

The provincialism of the association was no deterrent to local artists and art lovers, however. In a close-knit small-town environment, the institution was a cultural bulwark, a professional society, a sales gallery and a club house, all rolled into one.

After 1972, when the association became a museum, the main agenda shifted from honoring local artists and selling their work to surveying the broader picture of California art. During the past few years, the exhibition calendar has tilted gradually toward more adventurous contemporary work at odds with the traditional arts-and-crafts colony outlook that typifies Laguna Beach.

Although the new direction of the museum has provoked a good deal of local grumbling, the horizon-broadening benefits to artists and viewers have been immeasurable. Anyhow, after 75 years, the museum’s progressive faction has been long overdue for its day in the sun.

The following timeline traces some of the high points in the colorful and checkered past of the oldest cultural institution in Orange County.

1918: Laguna Beach is a strikingly lovely coastal hamlet with limited amenities: dirt roads, a hotel, a store, a post office and a single telephone.

Under leadership of Edgar Payne, Laguna Beach artists transform the unused former town hall--a small wooden building north of the Hotel Laguna--into a gallery where they can exhibit. The first show opens July 27, with paintings by Granville Redmond, Frank Cuprien, Anna Hills, Jack Wilkinson Smith and George Gardner Symons.

After an avalanche of visitors--2,000 during the first three weeks--the artists decide to make the gallery a permanent institution. On Aug. 22, the Laguna Beach Art Assn. is founded with 150 charter members--half the size of Laguna Beach’s summer population! (Only 35 members were artists, however, more than half of whom lived in Los Angeles.)

The association holds bimonthly exhibitions of members’ art (primarily landscapes, all for sale) and Saturday night receptions with music recitals, dramatic presentations and lectures.

1919: First art auction, with paintings donated by member artists.

1921: Members commission Los Angeles architect Myron Hunt to design a fireproof new building, and president Anna Hills becomes chairman of the fund-raising committee. Hills also initiates the museum’s educational outreach programs--decades before “outreach” was in anyone’s vocabulary--with a junior high school talk.

1922: Obliged to start paying rent, the association levies its first-ever entrance fee (10 cents, the price of a movie ticket).

1923: Developer H.G. Heisler sells a half-acre lot of ocean-view property at the corner of Cliff Drive and Pacific Coast Highway to the association for $2,000, but a coastal survey prevents the deed from changing hands until 1925.

1929: The $20,000 reinforced concrete building with a 60-by-36-foot main gallery (now the Steele Gallery) opens Feb. 16, 1929. Construction funds were raised through private donations and by such quaint-sounding events as a Peace Pipe Pageant and the Laguna Women’s Club Greek Moonlight Festival. There are now 700 association members, but only 45 are artists living in Laguna Beach.

1932: The association and the Laguna Beach Chamber of Commerce are co-founders of the Festival of the Arts, a combination of tableaux vivants (living paintings staged in the “The Pageant of the Masters”) and arts and crafts exhibits that nets the association several hundred dollars each year.

Modernism begins to make inroads in the conservative association under president Louis Danz, a composer and author of books on the psychology of modern art. The plein-air painters--who politely review each other’s work in the local paper--are apoplectic.

1934: Plein-air painter George Brandriff becomes association president--score one for the conservatives.

1937: The mortgage is finally paid off in March, thanks in part to a round-robin series of contract bridge parties (at which each guest agreed to become an association member--with dues starting at $1 a year, up to a $100 “life” membership--and to host a similar party).

Wesley Wall, a landscape architect, becomes association president. He allows non-members into shows, has big-name, out-of-town artists--who tend to prefer modernists--do most of the jurying and (horror of horrors) hangs a Cubist still life by Georges Braque.

1938: Times critic Millier praises Wall for mounting “the first . . . series of exhibits of statewide and sometimes national importance,” including examples of “good contemporary art.” But Millier chides Wall for trying to do too much too soon: “Inertia will be prodded but will not be pushed.”

On Aug. 20, 1938, Millier describes how “a sudden inrush of lay members at the last moment, each paying their $5 membership fee, swelled the ‘conservative’ vote.” The critic writes that the association came up with a “mysterious” fund for bankrolling the fees of new members.

With the installation of new president Mayor Heisler (who is not an artist) the conservatives regain their leadership of the association--which they retain for more than a quarter of a century.

1939: Modernists open the Progressive Art Center--which offers exhibits, studio space and classes--at the Pomona College Marine Laboratory in Laguna Beach. The newly founded Dana Point Art Guild offers another “progressive” alternative.

1942: The Festival of the Arts suspends operations during World War II, and the association loses its subsidy. To recoup, it opens its own Art Carnival, which brings in so much money that an endowment fund is instituted to support the gallery’s operating expenses.

1944: Under president Oswell Jackson, who owns a pottery studio, the “First All-Laguna Ceramic Show” celebrates the work of the town’s numerous potteries. (The exhibition will be an annual feature through 1949.)

1947: An exhibition by winners of a photography contest sponsored by the Laguna Photo Shop and the South Coast News focuses attention on local photographers. Among them are William Mortensen, Paul Outerbridge and George Hurrell.

1949: Association members establish a permanent collection--but it’s limited to work by dead former members.

1950: Asked to jury the Festival of the Arts’ summer exhibit this year, the association limits participation to its members and artists living in south Orange County. The next year, the festival would regain leadership of the event and makes it a national invitational.

Millier writes in August that “if you like your art on the conservative side, the 32nd annual prize exhibition by (association) members . . . should prove rewarding.”

1951: After nine months of construction, a $50,000 addition to the gallery opens July 3. The building size has doubled, and the old wing has been remodeled. Money for the project comes from private donations (notably, a $10,000 bequest from marine painter Frank Cuprien), the annual membership drive, an auction of donated works of art and other events. The collection now contains about 30 works.

1954: After an out-of-town Festival of Arts jury (which included prominent abstract artist Lorser Feitelson) chose work by the dreaded modernists, festival organizers again turn to the association for a conservative-minded exhibit.

1956: Young, progressive-minded David Iredell becomes curator. Three years later, at odds with the membership, he will resign.

1960: Rising property taxes prompt the association to try to qualify for tax-exempt status by beefing up educational offerings. But nonprofit status is denied because the association continues to sell art by members.

1962: In July, the School of Art--run as a nonprofit joint venture by the association and the Festival of Arts--opens on the Festival grounds in Laguna Canyon with 139 students. Three years later, the school will break away and become self-governing, as the festival did 28 years earlier.

At the association’s annual meeting, a motion that the gallery continue to show only “traditional, representational art” is defeated, 18 to 4. But the factionalism between modernists and traditionalists is as fierce as ever.

New commercial galleries are siphoning off tourist dollars, and in a few years, key association members will retire or resign.

Meanwhile, the Pavilion Gallery--later renamed Newport Harbor Art Museum--opens in Newport Beach with a group of figurative paintings by Los Angeles artists. Two years later, the gallery will be showing up-to-the-minute, “hard edge” paintings.

1965: A Karl Benjamin retrospective and “Five Hard Edge Painters” (a Johnny-come-lately version of “Four Abstract Classicists,” shown four years earlier at the Los Angeles County Museum) mark the beginning of a modest increase in the number of modernist exhibitions mounted by the association.

1966: Curator Tom Enman proposes a new round of art acquisitions by offering purchase prizes at the annual exhibit--an early step toward becoming a museum.

1967: Enman resigns, and the board attempts to run the gallery by itself. Meanwhile, Cal State Fullerton exhibition design department founder Dextra Frankel organizes “Media Explored, 1967” a popular show about the relationship between contemporary art and craft, with work by 112 artists.

The modernists gain some ground when the rules for juried membership exhibits are changed. From now on, there will be different juries for traditional and modern art. But the association still lacks museum-level professionalism: Exhibits are hung salon-style (with several rows of works on the same wall) and most programming decisions are made by the board rather than by the staff.

1971: Newly appointed board member Jack Glenn, a well-regarded contemporary art dealer in Corona del Mar, loans Pop art from his and his wife’s collection to an association exhibit.

Shortly thereafter he begins a four-year stint as board president, during which another exhibit highlights contemporary art from the Thomas Inch collection in Los Angeles.

1972: In July, the association officially changes its name--and its status--to the Laguna Beach Museum of Art. It may no longer sell members’ art, but its nonprofit status permits it to apply for local, state and federal grants. The exhibition schedule remains unfocused, however.

1976: Board president Barbara Steele Williams wangles two $150,000 matching grants from the Harry G. Steele Foundation and adds 35 paintings from the ‘40s and ‘50s from the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation.

1977: Exhibits of work by member artists have dwindled to only one a year.

1979: “Southern California Artists 1890-1940” opens; it is the first of a trilogy of regional art history shows developed by the museum.

1980: The museum hires its first curator of education, Suzanne Paulson, and Enman resigns, becoming director emeritus.

1981: In January, William Otton, former associate professor of art and director of the Weil Gallery at Corpus Christi State University in Texas, becomes director. He announces that the galleries will be divided among exhibitions of local realists, nationally prominent artists working in all styles, and the permanent collection.

The new California Contemporary Artists series includes both little- and well-known artists working in all styles and media. Two other new series--California Historical Artists, and Forum, for emerging artists--will peter out soon after they are initiated.

The 28 exhibits mounted in Otton’s first year include 17 of contemporary art and eight of earlier art (the remainder are juried and student art shows). But representational art remains the dominant aesthetic.

“Paul Outerbridge: A Singular Aesthetic”--curated by Cal State Long Beach graduate student Elaine Dines, and based on the museum’s holdings of his photographs--helps re-establish his reputation. This is the first of the museum’s exhibits to travel to other institutions.

1984: The museum’s satellite exhibition space in South Coast Plaza opens while the museum closes for two years for extensive remodeling. Carl Dentzel, founding director of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, donates 300 paintings and drawings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

1986: With a catchier new name--Laguna Art Museum--the institution reopens on Sept. 23. The $1.6-million renovation has increased the size of the building nearly twofold to 20,000 square feet, added or refurbished nine galleries, reconfigured the entrance area, embedded several pieces of art into the structure of the building and spruced up the landscaping.

1987: Otton resigns in November to become president of the Art Institute of Southern California, the new name of the School of Art, which has moved to a different location on Laguna Canyon Road. He has increased the annual budget (to nearly $800,000), added eight staff members to the original two-person team and overseen the building renovation. But turnover among staff during these years--including the chief curator, a public relations officer, two registrars and two development directors--has been disturbingly high.

1988: Charles Desmarais--former director of the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside--becomes the museum’s new director. Major new donations come from George Kennedy’s Brandriff’s widow (41 of his paintings) and the estate of Pauline Hirsch (contemporary art).

1990: The fiscal year ends in the black for the first time since the remodeled building opened. In October, the museum receives a $150,000 Special Artist Initiatives grant--the largest National Endowment for the Arts grant awarded in Orange County--for exhibits, publications, education and collecting that will concentrate on 20th-Century California art.

Museum practices are aligned with guidelines issued by the American Assn. of Museums, and museum publications begin to demonstrate a new emphasis on research and writing. A new “mission statement” defines the museum’s collecting focus as the art of California.

With “Ilene Segalove: Why I Got into TV and Other Stories,” curated by Desmarais, and a series of artists’ installations at the South Coast Plaza satellite, the museum wins critical praise for addressing up-to-the-minute art. “Morphosis: Making Architecture,” also curated by Desmarais, is the museum’s first architecture show.

1993: “Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph,” a critically well-received exhibit curated by Desmarais, investigates the link between skeptical attitudes of the ‘60s and a new kind of photographic vision.

Sources: Draft copy of “A History of the Laguna Art Museum, 1918-1993,” by Nancy Moure and Joanne Ratner (Laguna Art Museum, 1993); Los Angeles Times archives; Laguna Art Museum press and membership materials.