ART REVIEW : Pioneer Artists, but Not in the Vanguard

The glory days of Southern California plein air landscape painting have been so mythologized that you might think there was no art in Los Angeles--other than religious paintings in the missions, and baskets and carvings by Native Americans--before easels began sprouting on the beaches around the turn of the century.

Actually, that scenario isn’t terribly far from the truth. Los Angeles had fewer than 30 artists of any significance during the late 19th Century, and they always seemed to be skipping out to study in the East or in Europe, according to Laguna Art Museum adjunct curator Nancy Dustin Wall Moure.

In her catalogue for “Loners, Mavericks & Dreamers: Art in Los Angeles Before 1900” (at the Laguna Art Museum through Feb. 20) she also notes that 80% of the 450 artists listed in city directories between 1885 and 1900 were watercolor painters and china decorators.

Although the fledgling art scene hardly put Los Angeles on the map aesthetically, it did reflect a pioneer culture’s tastes and social pressures. Unfortunately, the exhaustively researched catalogue--the first to investigate the period in a major way--bogs down in a mass of biographical details and repetitious historical facts.

The show might have been more focused if it dealt with a specific era (say, the population boom years of 1885-1900) rather than trying to account for the entire pre-1900 period. If nothing else, the inevitable tokenism seems inappropriate. A tiny (albeit stunningly abstract) stone image of a pelican made about 18 centuries ago by a Chumash sculptor sums up millenniums of Native American art. Mission religious art is treated with sound-bite brevity: one anonymous artist’s sweetly animated interpretation of the fourth station of the Cross.

In fact, the “loners, mavericks and dreamers” turn out to be nearly all white, native-born artists working in the second half of the 19th Century: the period after the Mexican-American War, when government surveyors, tourists in thrall to a Romantic notion of exotic natural sights, and (in later years) tourist brochure illustrators flocked to Southern California.

Based on the evidence at hand, Los Angeles could claim--either as visitors or residents--no artists of the stature of such East Coast painters as Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, George Inness, Winslow Homer, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Martin Johnson Heade or William Harnett.

Genre painting ranged from the cloying theatricality of Gutzon Borglum (author of the Presidents’ heads on Mt. Rushmore) to William Hahn’s idyllic style of frontier reportage. Images of crumbling mission exteriors have a numbingly similar look.

The landscape painters, who began their ascendance in the 1890s, took their time inching toward tentative experiments with the bright colors and broken brushwork of Impressionism. Charles Stetson, who experimented with hazy moonlit effects, was the closest Southern California came to the fin-de-siecle Tonalist moodiness popular back East.

Still-life attracted a broader range of approaches, from John Bond Francisco’s luminous brushwork lavished on a shelf of grubby pots to Paul DeLongpre’s suffocatingly prim watercolors of flowers. William J. McCloskey was notable for his exquisitely rendered odes to native produce (“Tangerines in Tissues With Grapes”).

Whatever vitality the show has it owes to artists like Solomon Nunes Carvalho and James Walker, whose unschooled styles aren’t timid copies of European or East Coast models. They seem to capture a rawer aspect of frontier California in much the same way George Caleb Bingham’s wooden figures evoke mid-century life on the Mississippi.

A stained glass window from the late 1880s made by painter Guy Rose for his parents’ house--vividly colored chunky textured glass pieces surrounding a jarringly academic painting of grapes--suggests that more attention to the beginnings of the arts and crafts movement in California might have illuminated artists’ apparent difficulties in finding new ways to capture the vitality and natural beauty of a new land without falling back on fake airs and graces.

* “Loners, Mavericks & Dreamers: Art in Los Angeles Before 1900,” Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach, (714) 494-6531, to Feb. 20.