ART REVIEW : ‘Twilight and Reverie’: Troubled Mood of the Tonalists

Endings of centuries seem to be hard on people. Up in Northern California during the 1890s, the gloaming of that hundred-year period produced a brooding, reminiscent way of painting that its practitioners called “Luminism.” Today it’s termed “Tonalist,” and this part of the state gets its first good look at the work in an exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum.

“Twilight and Reverie: California Tonalist Painting 1890-1930” originated at the Oakland Museum by its chief curator Harvey L. Jones. The exhibition consists of about 65 pictures by some 17 artists and marks an important step in an ongoing revival of pre-modernist California art.

Actually, in their early days the Tonalists dipped into advanced trends on both sides of the Atlantic, so many of them that the melange produced an unmistakable mood of its own. The work, at once bucolic and sophisticated, represents an authentic, if odd, response to its time and place.

A cosmopolitan group of artists inhabited San Francisco and the Bay Area. What was on their minds, however, was regret at the way rapid industrialization was slowly eroding the innocent grandeur of the land. This is paradoxical, rather like L.A. people today who move in droves to the state of Washington to get away from it all and then complain that the place is getting too crowded.

These pictures do not depict a crowded world. So few people are shown that one might suspect the real problem was isolation. There’s something self-contradictory and a little neurotic about this art, as if the artists enjoy feeling morose.

There’s a sense that these artists had trouble deciding whether they wanted their art to be inspired by their environment or by European ideas. Granville Redmond was a virtuoso who studied in Paris. When he moved to California, he shuttled between the north and south. At one point the artist--who was deaf--worked as a pantomimist with Charlie Chaplin.

Redmond’s paintings are uniformly fine. But when you compare a morning river-view in France with one of a moon rising over Tiburon, they are too similar to seem from different places, yet too different to be convincing of a consistent aesthetic. The distinction is subtle, but it’s almost as if these artists were trying to hold together the idea of a world with a certain wholeness at a time when it was--rather like our own--fragmenting.

American art was grounded in no-nonsense realism as one can still see in works by William Keith and George Inness, East Coast artists who greatly influenced the Tonalists. But the Californians were also being infused with European styles historically based in theory. No wonder there is an odd edge to two small portraits, one by Arthur Mathews, the other by his wife, Lucia. Both works look like a combination of American Ashcan School and Dutch 17th-Century Realism. Common sense says the styles should harmonize, but something curdles in the combination of American empiricism and European conceptualism.

Charles Rollo Peters--a native San Franciscan--was such an assured and gifted painter he could get away with almost anything. Yet even he appears uneasy. Like the rest of these painters he looked at nature but often produced final versions in the studio as admittedly intimate personal distillations of the scene observed.

The Tonalists combined a number of potentially combustible contradictions in art that intended to attain calm. That sometimes resulted in internal tensions that turned to mysticism for relief, as seen in works by Peters, Gottardo Piazzoni and others.

Another result of muffling expressive vectors that want out is a sense of frustration. Xavier Martinez’s “Afternoon in Piedmont” clearly intends to be a relaxed interior showing a pretty young woman turning from her book to muse on a beautiful landscape outdoors. Instead she looks wistful, cooped up on a nice day.

The Tonalists made a lot of good but troubled art. Maybe it was their times that did it, a sense of slipping away into the past. Maybe it was just the weather around the Bay. After all, in the Abstract Expressionist 1950s, Richard Diebenkorn made himself famous there with a conservative move back to the depiction of the figure. Come to think of it, all those girls on terraces he painted look moody.

* Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach, through Oct. 8, closed Mondays (714) 494-8971.