O.C. ART REVIEW : Guy Rose was Monet’s friend, but his own works fail to impress in Irvine. : French Connection

A cynical viewer unconvinced of the worth of so-called California Impressionism may view California’s claim on painter Guy Rose as something of a desperation move, since he was active in this state for only seven years, at the end of his life.

Rose’s big claim to fame was his friendship with French Impressionist Claude Monet during a prolonged sojourn in the village of Giverny, near Paris. No other California painter of the day could claim such a direct link with the big art guys across the pond.

Cynics and true believers alike can judge Rose’s worth for themselves through Feb. 24 at the Irvine Museum, where 64 of his paintings are gathered in an exhibition jointly organized with the Oakland Museum.

Rose, born in San Gabriel in 1867, studied at the California School of Design in San Francisco, where he was particularly influenced by still-life painter Emil Carlsen. Early works, like “Spring Harvest (Still Life With Asparagus),” from 1887, reflect the Old World-style atmospheric warmth of his teacher.

At 21, Rose sailed to Paris to study at the Academie Julian, a school founded specifically for the influx of foreign students hungry for art instruction. It had been 14 years since Monet, Renoir and other French Impressionists held their first, widely deplored, unofficial exhibition, but the school remained true to conservative tastes.

Rose’s “Les ramasseuses de pommes de terre (The Potato Gatherers),” from 1891, reflects the enormous popularity of Jean Francois Millet’s peasant scenes as well as more contemporary works by Leon Lhermitte and Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Nonetheless, Rose was intrigued by Impressionism, and in 1891, he became one of numerous Americans making the pilgrimage to Giverny.

Beginning in the late 1860s, Monet developed a way of painting that emphasized atmospheric effects and de-emphasized solid forms. Working outdoors, he and the other Impressionists used clear, bright colors on a canvas primed with white instead of the traditional brown, applying color with short, clearly visible strokes.

A year before Rose’s visit, Monet--by now well known and comfortably situated in his own house with a large plot of land--had begun his now-famous series paintings, based on the observation of a single object (a haystack, poplar trees, a cathedral) under different light conditions.

“When you go out to paint,” Monet once told an American student, “try to forget what object you have in front of you--a tree, a house, a field, whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you. . . .”

The outdoorsy aspect of Impressionism appealed to Rose, who was a fisherman and hunter back home. After several trips to France, interspersed with visits to Los Angeles, a battle with lead poisoning (an occupational hazard) and a teaching gig in New York, he finally bought a house in Giverny in 1904.

In “The Old Bridge, France,” from about 1910, Rose seems to revel in the task of painting a sturdy bridge and then “deconstructing” it into fragments in the river below, which is filled with green flecks of reflected foliage.

In “Untitled (River Epte, Giverny),” from the same period, daubs of green and yellow indicate leaves falling from the trees, a common stylistic tick of Rose’s.

He obviously had trouble shaking his academic training to produce an entire canvas of atmospheric effects. The closest he seems to have come to this ideal are the pastel-hued quasi-Tonalist works, like “Printemps (Spring)” and “Tamarisk Trees in Early Sunlight.”

Yet even in the latter painting, the focus is a decorative motif--the slim, elaborately twisted tree trunks--rather than an optical effect.

*

Rose found a handy outlet for his talents in paintings of upper-middle-class women looking wistful outdoors or in parlors rife with exotic knickknacks, a theme that supplanted peasant scenes in the American popular taste early in the 20th Century.

Such images as “In the Studio” (a pensive woman in a brilliant yellow duster standing on a polished wood floor under a luminous Chinese lantern) and “The Blue Kimono” (a prettily robed woman with Katherine Hepburn cheekbones pausing beside a tree, with a burst of pink flowers behind her head) gave Rose free rein to indulge his strong sense of color without having to abandon the world of solid objects.

Actually, the most freely painted work in the show is probably “Dunes, 17 Mile Drive,” from about 1918, several years after Rose returned to Southern California. Casual, almost unfinished-looking, the spare canvas with undulating brush work evokes the lazy, flat expanse of portions of the Pacific Coast.

Until suffering a stroke in 1921, four years before his death, Rose roamed up and down the state, painting the landscapes of Point Lobos, Carmel, Monterey, Pasadena, Laguna Beach and other scenic spots in a style that really is only tangentially related to French Impressionism.

A reproduction of “Laguna Eucalyptus” from 1917--a tightly composed, sharply focused image of trees with picturesquely gnarled trunks--appears on the cover of the exhibition catalogue. No doubt intended to underline Rose’s California connection, the photograph reinforces for this viewer the pleasant but unexceptional nature of his output.

The elaborately produced catalogue thoroughly treats Rose’s life and work, with essays by Harvey Jones, senior curator of the Oakland Museum; Jean Stern, director of the Irvine Museum, and Will South, a curator at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The book also includes excellent and copious reproductions of Rose’s oeuvre .

Looking at some of the paintings not in the show--such as “Late Afternoon Giverny,” from about 1910, with its intriguing contrasts between heavily impastoed trees in the foreground and the watery distant view--a viewer may fleetingly wonder whether a different selection of works might have shown Rose in a more flattering light.

He emerges from the exhibition as a coloristically skilled, compositionally able recorder of pleasant chunks of nature, an admired figure in the provincial world of Southern California art of the early 20th Century.

Yet he seems to have entirely lacked the distinctive vision one expects from a modern artist of stature.

* “Guy Rose, American Impressionist” through Feb. 24 at the Irvine Museum, 18881 Von Karman (12th floor), Irvine. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Admission free. (714) 476-2565.