No, L.A. Art Isn’t Just a Recent Thing : Exhibition: Laguna Art Museum’s ‘Loners, Mavericks, Dreamers’ shows the origin of images later artists made famous, its curator says.

Nancy Dustin Wall Moure has been mercilessly razzed by colleagues lately.

As she’s gone about curating an exhibition of art in Los Angeles before 1900, they had this one tiny question: Um, Nancy, was there any art in Los Angeles before 1900?

Her reply, of course, has been “Yes,” followed by an invitation to visit “Loners, Mavericks, Dreamers: Art in Los Angeles Before 1900.” The show, billed as the first of its kind, runs Friday through Feb. 20 at the Laguna Art Museum.

California plein-air painters active after 1900 have long claimed the limelight with their “pleasant, fluffy” depictions, Moure said recently. But, she asserted, they were merely revisiting territory charted by their predecessors.

These pioneers “didn’t have set formulas that they fell into; everything was a possibility, and they developed the iconography--the Spanish mission views, the poppy fields, the scenes of the beach from the cliffs--that the later artists used over and over again.”

Survey maps, portraits and still-lifes as well as bucolic land, city and seascapes make up the 68-piece show, which includes work by Paul DeLongpre, William Lees Judson, Guy Rose and Alberta Binford McCloskey. It begins, however, with a woven basket by a Cahuilla Indian, followed by a focus on little-known itinerants passing through Los Angeles in the early and mid-1800s.

Cheap real estate, a restorative climate, jobs or wanderlust lured the burgeoning cow town’s first artists, who rode their hopes and horses to the sun-drenched land, said Moure, an independent art consultant who until 1983 served as Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s assistant American art curator for 15 years.

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Some such frontiersmen only dabbled in art while working as traveling salesmen or in the military. Ferdinand Deppe, a Yankee merchant trading manufactured goods for cowhides, used his spare time to paint the San Gabriel Mission. William H. Meyers, a naval gunner, drew Mexican-American War battles.

“Works from the first years are a little crude,” Moure said during an interview at her Glendale home. “These guys weren’t professional. But they give us our only views” of L.A. as it was then.

Filling a demand for town views from speculators, promoters and civic leaders, others made lucrative “bird’s-eye views” right through the 1890s, Moure said. These peripatetic draftsmen “would visit all the newly developing towns in the West, and if no bird’s-eye view had been done, they’d ask around to see if they could make money selling them.”

French-born Henri Penelon, who made daguerreotype and painted portraits of the area’s leading citizens and rancheros, Moure said, was L.A.’s first resident artist, arriving around 1855.

But a true art community only began to take shape about two decades later with the advent of the transcontinental railroad, which ushered in L.A.’s boom times: By the end of the century, its population had soared roughly tenfold to more than 100,000.

“When you had enough people who could actually afford to buy art,” Moure said, “and all these railroad company promotions telling people to come out for your health and make a million in the real estate boom, then you have more artists than ever before coming out. They were thinking, ‘OK, here’s a new town, it’s a scenic, healthy place, I’ll see if I can make a living there.’ ”

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The early women’s movement gave female artists equality with male ones during this fertile period, she said. Among the standouts were portrait and still-life painter McCloskey and artist-teacher Louisa Garden MacLeod, who founded the long-lasting Los Angeles School of Art and Design and an art association that provided exhibition space.

Other organizing efforts were forged by such prominent male artists as John Gutzon Borglum, who later carved the Mt. Rushmore Memorial.

Because such movers and shakers often left town to study in the East or Europe, growth of the local art community near the end of the 19th Century lurched by fits and starts, and fewer than 30 artists working in various styles earned lasting reputations. Still, Moure said, “a full-fledged community” had evolved.

The artists’ influences ranged from the realism of the Barbizon landscapes to Impressionism. “You had artists painting still-lifes, landscapes, genre paintings and watercolors--plus illustrators working for newspapers, people producing late-period bird’s-eye views, lithographers turning out orange crate labels, and schools in operation.”

All of that was critical to further maturation of the L.A. art scene, Moure said, and it may mean she’ll have the last laugh among her colleagues.

When they go to the show, she says, “They’ll say, ‘Oh, wait a minute, I didn’t know there was some really nice things being produced back then.’ ”