O.C. ART REVIEWS / Cathy Curtis : Tapping a Talent Long Unnoticed

On those rare occasions in the 1920s and early ‘30s when August Gay could be persuaded to pick up his paintbrush, he built slabs of color into strong, rhythmic compositions with a forcefulness that belied the small size of his canvases. Nobody else had his knack for remaking the familiar, even banal, sights of Monterey and environs into seductive images.

Little wonder, though, that Gay is not a household word, even in California.

The French-born artist painted few works, sold virtually nothing, won no prizes, kept no records or journals, apparently carried on no correspondence and rarely even bothered to date his paintings.

Living in Oakland and Monterey, he scraped up a meager living in warehouses or fish canneries and seems to have spent the rest of his time hanging out with his artist buddies.

In the ‘teens, they formed a Post Impressionist-inspired group called The Six, which began to exhibit together in 1923. (Other members were Maurice Logan, Louis Siegriest, Bernard von Eichman, William Clapp and Gay’s sometimes friend, supporter and housemate Seldon Connor Gile.)

Now, thanks to patient detective work on the part of Jo Farb Hernandez, former director of the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, Gay is the focus of a beguiling show at the Laguna Art Museum through Oct. 9. Amazingly, this is Gay’s first solo exhibition.

One of the most disarmingly lovely paintings on view is “Untitled (Garden Scene),” an undated image of an idyllic domestic hideaway in which broad, meandering yellow brush strokes surround floating flowerpots and a red wicker chair.

In another memorable image, “Old Marsh’s Studio,” from 1931, the stepped roof of a flat, white building and the repetitive layers of abstracted green and pink vegetation form a tightly knit formal unit.

Something happened to Gay’s style between these two works, and catalogue essayist Nancy M. Boas suggests it was the influence of the “geometrical compositions and darkly evocative colors” he saw in a 1926 exhibition of paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, Alexei Jawlensky, Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger at the tiny Oakland Art Gallery--a forward-looking venue run by Clapp.

Faithful to The Six’s belief in spontaneous-looking compositions of small-scale rural settings and flirtations with European modernism, Gay was unique by virtue of his fascination with juxtapositions of flat swatches of color and his knack for distilling landscapes and seaside views into arresting patterns of solids and voids.

Nature tends to be a benign, supportive presence in Gay’s paintings. In “Untitled (Cabins),” the awkward, uneven shapes of the sides and roofs of what must have been a cluster of derelict buildings offer an angular counterpoint to the enfolding rim of a nearby hillside. In “Corral: Hatton Ranch,” one of Gay’s few images with a broad spatial compass, golden fields embrace a soft hillock with casually sprawling geometric buildings.

To be sure, not every painting in the show is a winner. Some works veer too far toward literalness, while other canvases are too schematic. With the exception of a few strongly stylized paintings (such as “Drying Their Nets, Fisherman, Monterey”), the dockside views tend to be rather dull and predictable.

Gay might have made further breakthroughs had his utterly unambitious “career” not petered out altogether, in favor of stable employment as a furniture carver. During the 1930s, the Depression, Gay’s personal money problems, the breakup of The Six and an infection that required part of his finger to be amputated all provided excuses for him to abandon easel painting.

His work in the mid-’30s on a massive Federal Arts Project mural with a fishing theme for Pacific Grove High School was destroyed by fire a few years later. Another high school mural was consigned to a storage room. By 1948, when he died at 57 (of causes unexplained in the catalogue essay), Gay hadn’t even had a show in nine years.

But the passage of nearly half a century has added luster to Gay’s work. He deserves to be remembered as one of the minority of early 20th-Century California artists who gave a new spin to the local landscape without recourse to academic pieties.

Robust yet delicate, engaging without being cloying, Gay’s paintings are like the sort of delectable minor vintage that you still remember with pleasure even after many a grand cru .

*

Good connections cut both ways in the museum world.

They can weigh down an exhibition schedule with frivolous shows mounted to suit the whims of Mr. High Roller, in the hopes that he will eventually donate big bucks or desirable objects he’s in danger of giving to a rival museum.

But good connections also can genuinely enrich a museum’s offerings with objects that may be difficult to obtain from other sources.

Happily, through May 29, the latter situation prevails at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art. A modest sampling of Japanese paintings and lacquer ware from the collection of Etsuko and Joe Price--Corona del Mar neighbors of museum director Peter Keller--are on display in the Leo Freedman Galleria, the hallway between the admission desk and the galleries.

The Prices are widely known for their major collection of art from Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1868), as well as for the Pavilion for Japanese art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (built with the help of their $5-million donation), which contains 300 pieces from their holdings.

With one exception, the paintings on view are all of the natural world, inscribed with brief poems (translated on the labels) that evoke wistful images of wind, water, growing things and minute shifts in the atmosphere.

The most appealing of the paintings to contemporary Western eyes are the ones executed in the “boneless” technique of the Rimpa school, in which objects appear to be practically breathed onto the paper, with highly controlled concentrations of ink and no outlines. The tension between persuasive evocation of plants and animals and tautly decorative stylization gives these works their refined appeal.

In Sakai Hoitsu’s painting, “Egret and Water Plant,” the long-legged, white-breasted bird is set off by tall, green fronds, tense sprays of tiny flowers and a pale film of pond water. The brown edges of the leaves suggest their short lease on life. This image of decay seems a mild reminder of the cycle of life and death.

Shiba Kokan drew on his studies of natural science for exquisitely detailed images of a beetle, cicada and wasp in his painting “Insects and Plants”--all the more miraculous because of the seemingly effortless way he directs the thinnest rivulets of ink.

“Cricket Basket,” by Shibata Zeshin, is not in the Rimpa style, but this skinny, slot-like painting--which has an effect almost like peeking through a keyhole--has the piquant appeal of chain reactions set off by mischievous activity.

The cricket’s cage has tipped over, unfurling a bright red, fringed cloth that apparently was wrapped around it and setting free the insect, which balances tentatively on top of its former jail. The mature, wistful tone of the accompanying poem about crickets in autumn offers a poignant contrast to the merry disarray of the image.

The lacquer ware--a variety of boxes and other useful objects, made from multiple layers of lacquer tree sap applied to a wood or fabric core--has a showy prettiness. Sprinklings of gold dust and inlays of mother-of-pearl create stylized renderings of running water, insects, leaves and flowers, and an autumn moon or two.

Though a couple of tea caddies in the show actually date from the Meiji period (1868-1912), the only historically jarring note is the group of 10 ivory sculptures of leaves made in 1981 by Okuda Kodo.

Unlike the lacquer ware, these pieces were made to serve no useful function. They are collectors’ trinkets: lacy, painted in modulated hues, ever-so-realistically curled and torn, but lacking (unlike the historical pieces) a sense of their own time and place.

* “Wonderful Colors! The Paintings of August Francois Gay” continues through Oct. 9 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission: $4 adults, $3 students and seniors, children under 12 free. (714) 494-8971. * “A Lyrical Garden: Selections From the Etsuko and Joe Price Collection of Japanese Art” remains through May 29 at the Bowers Museum, 2002 N. Main St. , Santa Ana. Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday (until 9 p.m. Thursdays). Admission: $4.50 adults, $3 students and seniors, $1.50 children 5 to 12, under 5 free. (714) 567-3600.