ART / CATHY CURTIS : Filling the Big Lull in Laguna : Works by Beach Artists From the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s Break Up Summer Doldrums for Exhibits

In the weeks before two major exhibitions (“Terry Allen: Youth in Asia” and “Kustom Kulture”) open at the Newport Harbor and Laguna Art museums, respectively, the Big Lull has settled over the Orange County art scene.

What with college and university galleries closed until fall, the pickings for choosy viewers are awfully slim. (I’ll be taking a look at the plethora of juried shows next week, but you’re on your own when it comes to summer exhibitions of California Impressionist paintings at the Irvine Museum and the Brea Cultural Center.)

However, if you happen to be in Laguna Beach before Aug. 22, a pocket-sized display of local art from the late ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s--the third installment in the museum’s anniversary-year exhibition series, “Art in Laguna Beach, 1918-1993”--is worth checking out.

During the Depression and World War II, local artists--like most of their colleagues nationwide--ventured baby steps toward modernism or (more often) retreated to the conservatism of representational paintings. Rather than making grand but unsupportable aesthetic claims for the so-called California School--or simply hanging the works without comment--curator Susan Anderson offers a few wall texts (too bad there aren’t more) that help put the period in context.

She points out, for example, that during World War II, artists no longer were permitted to paint along the seashore, “for security reasons.” So they found their subjects indoors.

The two women dancing together in Barse Miller’s sketchy “Jitterbugs”--and the May-December pair of white-haired guy and platinum bombshell--testify to the man shortage during the war. Not that there weren’t eligible servicemen in Laguna (which then boasted a USO): In Rex Brandt’s “Horsemen at Mission Beach,” two Navy guys horsing around on a carousel turn their attention to a woman in a green dress demurely riding sidesaddle.

Elsie Palmer’s “Thrifty Drug Store,” from 1945, recalls a time when drugstore eateries were hugely popular with just about everyone. Thrifty patrons include an epicine-looking fellow eating pie European-style (with a knife and fork), numerous hatted and turbaned women, and a guy wearing a cap and no jacket (unusual in this formal era) who ruminates over a cigarette.

The painting focuses on a smartly uniformed waitress who absent-mindedly mops the counter while holding, with her other hand, a plate of salad garnished with hard-boiled eggs. The young woman looks out into space in a way that dimly evokes Manet’s bar girl in his famous painting “Bar at the Folies Bergere,” filtered through a William Inge scenario or a B-movie plot.

You can imagine her daydreaming about becoming “discovered” in Hollywood, murdering her lover’s wife, or simply getting off her shift. Anderson suggests that she might be “questioning the circumstances that sent women into blue-collar jobs during the war.”

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During the 1930s--perhaps due in part to women’s new roles outside the home (and less restrictive, more revealing clothing)--national interest in outdoor sports and activities was on an upswing.

It was then that Laguna Beach began to develop an image as America’s quintessential beach paradise, which dovetailed happily with the broad popularity of figurative painting. (In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, however, when Venice Beach became the center of Southern California art activity, the new local aesthetic--which emphasized perception rather than storytelling--no longer neatly coincided with popular taste.)

The image in the exhibition that best captures the vintage Beach Capital, U.S.A., mood is Phil Dike’s “Surfer” (also known as “Surf Riders”), from about 1933. Far above the sun-dazzled ocean, a tanned giant, toting his wooden surfboard on his back, pauses as he ascends the last steps leading from the beach.

Framed by another surfer and a hook-nosed older man in a smartly striped beach robe, the blond surf god is pure icon. A shadow renders his face featureless; one meaty, toe-less (amphibian?) foot is planted on the wood platform; and the late-afternoon sun behind him conveniently outlines the contours of his physique.

Several Laguna Beach artists, including Dike, Miller and Tom Lewis formed the Progressive Painters of Southern California in the mid-’30s. “Progressive,” of course, was a relative term. Lewis’s untitled watercolor of a fish on a platter shows off his technical mastery but the theme and the style were safely conventional.

Similarly, although Anderson writes that an earlier contingent of Laguna Beach artists “experimented with . . . Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism and Symbolism,” such forays into styles that, for the most part, had been developed decades earlier remained tentative and genteel.

Ruth Peabody’s painting “Cookbook” from the early ‘30s retains a certain appeal, but not because the artist combined realism with “the crisp outline, decorative patterning, tilted planes and flattened color shapes found in the art of Gauguin and Matisse,” to quote Anderson’s remarks. If Peabody owed a debt to those artists, it was so muffled by her conservative approach that crediting them makes about as much sense as finding sources for her work in 19th-Century German and English realist paintings.

“Cookbook” seems more interesting in other ways. For example, the grouping of items on the table doesn’t really make sense, either as a meal or as ingredients for a dish. (What menu or recipe could have called for wine, milk, eggs and tea?)

Curiously, the table at which the woman sits so dreamily--she marks her place in the cookbook with a finger--is covered by a dining room-style white cloth, although the adjoining table seems to have a linoleum top appropriate for a kitchen.

Could there be a hidden agenda in the painting? Is this woman fed up with having to cook for her family or guests when she’d rather paint? (Maybe the odd conglomeration of objects is meant to be a still-life setup.) Is she a secret alcoholic? The little narrative mysteries Peabody engineers remain tantalizing.

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In her wall text, Anderson writes that Laguna Beach artists were included in a 1941 Life magazine cover story about California. Curious, I flipped through the bound copies of Life in the Balboa Peninsula library only to find that the Oct. 27 story (“California Painters: Their Land Lends Grandeur to Their Work”) actually was that issue’s art column. (The cover featured a young woman with a headset, identified as an “Air Raid Spotter.”)

With a clumsy effort at hyperbole, the text trumpets eight painters from Northern and Southern California: “Out of flamboyant California is running a new stream of American art which is making art news throughout the country. . . . (In California) they are less cramped for space and time, and . . . notably it is a land of experiment.”

Dike was represented by “California Holiday,” from 1938, an aerial view of sunbathers and umbrellas in a beach cove overlooking a bay crowded with sailboats. It looks like a sunnier version of his 1948 painting “Fisherman’s Rocks” in the exhibition. The later beach view has a more abstract quality, with the pileup of rocks on the hillside flattening into pure design and the colors muted (as Anderson writes) into camouflage hues.

According to the Life text, the then-35-year-old artist “worked on and off as an instructor and color-coordinator for the Walt Disney Studios.” Perhaps innocently quoting sarcastic notes provided by the artist, the anonymous writer added that Dike enjoys “simplifying color tones and the artless movements of people, mice and ducks.”

Miller, then 37, showed Californians at leisure from a more intimate perspective in “Beach Party.” The painting shows a group of young men and women--the text says they are Miller’s students at the Los Angeles Art Center School--relaxing with cigarettes and beer by firelight on a San Pedro beach.

The artist “has refused several buyers who asked him to paint out the beer bottle,” the text adds. (Gosh, what a bohemian!)

Prices for all of the works are quoted in the Life article. They range from $75 for 27-year-old Brandt’s Corona del Mar fishermen-at-work scene, “Purse Seiner,” to--hold onto your hat--$500 for a Dan Lutz painting.

Other Southern California artists selected for the piece were Tom Craig (whose painting “Rivals” contrasts an old windmill with “modern oil wells”) and Emil Kosa Jr. According to the amusingly terse and deadpan text, Black Mountain in San Diego County, the subject of Kosa’s painting “Mountains Could Talk,” “belongs to William Randolph Hearst.”

The story is surrounded by nostalgic, mildly sexist and medically naive ads--for Listerine (“double precaution against the double O”), Gene Tierney in a war film (“Sundown”), Bond St. pipe tobacco (“a whiff to the wives is sufficient”), Royal Gelatin (“is he a pinch-penny with his praise?”) and Philip Morris (“you can’t help inhaling but you can help your throat!”) .

Apart from war news, the issue offered glimpses of Bob Hope who “runs a gamut of emotions” in a photo essay, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s reelection campaign, Walter Huston as Mr. Scratch in “All that Money Can Buy” and the conjugal visit system in a Mexican prison.

Perhaps someday the museum will take the approach of “Modernism Into Realism” several steps further with a full-out survey of Depression and World War II-era life in the beach towns of Southern California, its relationship to the bigger picture of current events and popular culture in the United States, and its influence on the course of the local art scene.

* “Modernism Into Regionalism: Art in Laguna Beach, 1920-1950” continues through Aug. 22 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays (summer Fridays until 8 p.m.). Admission: $3 general, $1.50 for seniors and students, free for children under 12. (714) 494-6531.