‘Impressions’ of California’s Landscape

Paul Bockhorst knew his television program about California Impressionism would need more than slow pans past rows of plein-air paintings. Luckily, he found vintage film clips of smock-clad artists, which he hoped would help bring the past alive.

Flickering black-and-white images of Edgar A. Payne, the early 20th-century landscape painter, are among those featured in the two-hour program premiering Sunday night at 9 on KOCE-TV Channel 50, Orange County’s public television station.

“We were able to get some 16mm, live-action footage of Payne from his daughter, Evelyn [Hatcher]” said Bockhorst, who wrote, produced and directed the show. “It includes scenes of him setting up his easel in the Sierra and actually painting there and leading a pack train” of donkeys into the soaring mountains the artist so loved. The footage was shot by Payne’s nephew Ralph Payne around 1946.

“You’re dealing with historical material,” Bockhorst added, “and you want to give contemporary viewers as much of a connection with that period as possible.”

“Impressions of California: Early Currents in Art 1850-1930” examines the social and geographical conditions stimulating the movement known for shimmering landscapes made by artists who were drawn by the state’s pristine natural beauty and dazzling sunlight.

The program, which showcases about 300 paintings by 70 artists, starts with the movement’s roots and ends with a look at the progressive artists who advanced from the pack toward modernism. Its four half-hour segments explore the influences of French Impressionism and the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as Northern California Tonalism and other regional developments.

(Two of the show’s experts have curated related exhibits: “Impressions of California,” organized by Jean Stern, executive director of the Irvine Museum, opened there Friday; “The California Progressives: 1910 to 1930,” curated by Susan M. Anderson, former senior curator of the Laguna Art Museum, opens at the Orange County Museum of Art’s Laguna Beach branch on Oct. 26. OCMA also begins displaying “First Impressions” today at its South Coast Plaza Gallery.)

The brief footage of Payne, founding president of the forward-looking association that became Laguna Art Museum, illuminates Laguna’s critical contribution to American Impressionism at large. The Chicago-born artist settled there in 1917 to paint the craggy coast, as well as surrounding mountains such as the Sierra.

During a recent phone conversation from her Minneapolis home (see story, F2), Hatcher, who also makes an appearance in the program, reminisced about the city she knew as a child.

“It was a little, tiny fishing town,” said Hatcher, 82. “We lived at first in a beach cottage with a studio which we worked on. My mother wove rugs and stippled walls and made it into what I have learned since is a regular Craftsman-style cottage that was typical of--though much better than--art colonies of the period.”

Anderson, the program’s associate producer, said recently that Laguna’s contribution to California Impressionism involves Payne’s and other artists’ devotion to landscape.

“For the most part, these artists really were painting an untouched nature,” she said. “Their output, consciously or not, seems to express a timelessness, a feeling that life would just go on untouched by modern necessities or modern ills.”

Indeed, William Wendt, the dean of Southern California landscapists, describes the spirituality he felt the area inspired.

“The earth is young here,” Wendt wrote in a letter that’s read on the program. He is shown painting on a sunny bluff beneath a breeze-blown eucalyptus tree. “The peace, the harmony which pervades all gives a Sabbath-like air to the environment. One feels that he is on holy ground, in nature’s temple. Here away from the soul-destroying hurly-burly of life it feels that the world is beautiful, that God is good.”

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A sense of freedom drew artists such as Anna Hills, Joseph Kleitsch, Guy Rose, Frank Cuprien and George Gardner Symons from around the country too, Anderson said. “There were no art structures or schools or traditions that said you had to paint in a certain way, so artists were free to experiment, free to live the life they wanted to live or to start over and be somebody they hadn’t been before. That’s still the attraction of Southern California for many artists.”

“Impressions of California” is the second installment of what is planned as a three-part series on California art. “Visions of California,” another Bockhorst production that aired in 1994, looked at the California Regionalists who depicted scenes of everyday life during the Great Depression and World War II. Funds for the third part, “California Modern,” have yet to be raised, but Bockhorst is optimistic.

The project began with the idea to profile just one famous artist of the 1930s. But, Bockhorst said, “I thought, let’s do something that’s never been done before. . . .

“The tendency in art, particularly today, is to divide into camps, to approach art in a very partisan and ideological manner. I think there’s a need for productions that pull back and look at art more broadly, and the historical frame permits that.”

* “Impressions of California: Early Currents in Art 1850-1930” premieres Sunday on KOCE-TV Channel 50, 9-11 p.m. The program will then air in four separate half-hour installments on consecutive Mondays at 8 p.m. beginning Sept. 16, and Thursdays at 9 p.m. beginning Sept. 19.