O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : A Portrait of Long-Ago L.A.

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 museum through Feb. 20), Moure also notes that a whopping 80% of the 450 artists listed in city directories between 1885 and 1900 were watercolor painters and china decorators.

There were few places to show, and buyers were almost nonexistent. Early landowners preferred to sink their money into horses and silver saddles. High rollers who made fortunes in real estate or oil bought their art in Europe, with its belle epoque snob appeal. The fluctuating economy made employment iffy even for portraitists or painters of popular local views (picturesquely dilapidated missions, city panoramas).

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 that overshadow Moure’s modest attempts at cultural analysis.

The show itself 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, stunningly abstract stone image of a pelican made about 18 centuries ago by a Chumash sculptor represents millennia of Native American art. A single engraved map sums up the 18th Century. Mission religious art also 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 U.S.-Mexican 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.

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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--artists’ cheap substitutes for southern Italian ruins, perhaps--have a numbingly similar look.

The landscape painters, who began their ascendance in the 1890s, took their sweet 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 thick, luminous brushwork lavished on a shelf of grubby pots to Paul DeLongpre’s suffocatingly prim watercolor flower compositions. William J. McCloskey was notable for his exquisitely rendered odes to native produce (“Tangerines in Tissues With Grapes”).

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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.

Carvalho’s linear likeness of shrewd-looking rancher Don Manuel Dominguez from 1854 recalls the stiff yet expressive portraits of Early American sign painters. In Walker’s undated “Judge of the Plains,” the setting sun illuminates the linear, anxious faces of breeders awaiting a decision on cattle ownership and the animals’ silvery strings of saliva and underbelly hairs.

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.

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Speaking of crafts, the final show in the museum’s yearlong salute to local art, “Hand and Spirit: Media Exploration in Laguna Beach, 1918-1993” (through Feb. 13), offers a compact overview of the history of handwork in a town that has housed a metalworking firm (Craftsmen Studios) and numerous ceramics enterprises (most notably Brayton Laguna Pottery, 1927-68) and has supported annual craft festivals since the first Festival of the Arts, in 1932.

The inescapable fact of Laguna Beach pottery is its stylistic roughness, which shades off into varying degrees of funk and junk. Brayton dishes--the first California colored pottery lines--were thick, simple wares glazed in pure, clear colors. In 1938, the firm’s figurine production prompted Walt Disney Studios to commission the first ceramic likenesses of Pluto, Donald Duck and the gang.

In 1962, potter Jon Stokesbary moved to town. He introduced the expressionistic innovations of Berkeley ceramist Peter Voulkos, who broke out of the polite pot-making tradition to work on a massive scale, with brute manipulation of clay. The results can be seen in such eccentric pieces as Robert Hardy’s massive stoneware figure from the mid-’60s, encrusted with lumpy, vaguely medieval medallions.

Most of the recent ceramic work on view still seems to operate on the cruder-is-better theory, with varying results. Richard White’s seated armless figure (“Gladhander”), pieced together from fecal lumps of reddish clay, is very much the provincial art object; a relief by Kris Cox with mandala-like concentric troughs gouged around the crude image of a house (“House Chevron”) carries a convincing emotional charge.

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The wood objects, in contrast, tend to be sleekly, self-consciously modern. Louise Nevelson’s sculpture inspired the compartmentalized shapes in the bench embellishment and door designed by Mabel Hutchinson in 1968. Robert (Jocko) Johnson’s curvilinear mahogany chair from about 1970 resembles a Surrealist bird. Michael Graham’s “Broken Weave” from 1981--which looks like a cross between an undulating length of plumbing pipe and a hugely magnified blow up of a woven thread--displays the literal-mindedness that separates craft from more sophisticated contemporary sculpture.

A couple of pieces--Angie Bray’s “It All Depends” and Barbara Berk’s “Up and Down”--are conceptual works that just happen to be made of craft media. It seems equally irrelevant that Eloise Ryan’s fine tongue-in-cheek collage, “Astringent”--a composition whose ingredients include a curling dried leaf, a fragment of newspaper with a drawing of kitschy twinkling stars, and a pattern of minuscule dots on butcher paper--happens to be housed in a ceramic box.

Based on the examples in this show, Laguna Beach crafts seem to have wavered for the past 60-odd years between willful eccentricity and fine workmanship, with relatively few fresh conceptual approaches. Geographically isolated from the mainstream styles, nurtured by flocks of undiscriminating summer tourists, the craft colony seems much like the city’s famous Greeter--a funky local tradition content to charm passersby.

* “Loners, Mavericks & Dreamers: Art in Los Angeles Before 1900” continues through Feb. 20 and “Hand and Spirit: Media Exploration in Laguna Beach, 1918-1993” through Feb. 13 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. $3 general admission, $1.50 for students and seniors, free for children under 12. (714) 494-6531.