California Plein-Air Painting: Too Plain

Faced with yet another exhibition of early-20th century California painting--one of at least half a dozen this year--I feel like cursing the well-meaning people who brought this once obscure work back into the public eye a couple of decades ago.

If Orange County had as many shows of the world’s great art as it has of these bland, Johnny-come-lately Impressionist landscapes, it would be a real art center.

But these landscapes are the obsession of certain collectors, none better known locally than Joan Irvine Smith, whose Irvine Museum hosts the latest installment: “Impressions of California: Early Currents in Art 1850-1930.”

This particular show is drawn from several California collections and boasts a copiously illustrated catalog with essays on art colonies in various parts of the state. But despite the obvious effort that went into this project, it doesn’t break historical ground or propose a new way to look at the work.

The catalog does include paintings you won’t see in the exhibition, such as George Inness’ magnificent golden-hued nocturne, “California,” from 1894, owned by the Oakland Museum.

Inness, an Easterner who visited but did not settle in California, developed a late style that put him in the pantheon of American landscape painters. His genius was to graft onto the realism of the Hudson River School a mystical and atmospheric vision that seemed the visual equivalent of Transcendentalism.

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California’s version of Inness was William Keith, who admired the slightly older artist but whose own late-career subjective style (not represented in the show) lacked the originality of his mentor.

For early 20th century landscape painters, subjective interpretations primarily took the form of twilight scenes, which allowed for virtuosic light effects combined with a decorative, naturally induced moodiness that just happened to dovetail with the spirit of prewar romanticism.

Granville Redmond’s “Evening Glow,” from 1909--a rural scene in which a creek reflects a small patch of orange-tinted sky--exhibits the artist’s conservative approach, echoing the style of the Barbizon School half a century earlier.

Frank Cuprien, who began painting seascapes in Laguna Beach in 1914, mustered a bit more painterly bravado in “Poem du Soir,” a sea suffused with yellow light that hurls up an ice-blue ridge of foam.

In “Moonrise Over San Diego Bay,” from 1915, Maurice Braun allowed the atmosphere and waning light to abstract the land slightly into a zigzag of blue wedges under a pinkish sky. A follower of the Theosophical Society, whose tenets included transcendentalism, Braun used coloristic techniques to suffuse the landscape with a spiritual cast.

Still, this was 1915! Braun’s vision was timid compared with the groundbreaking work being done by the European avant-garde or even by such iconoclastic American artists as visionary landscape painter Arthur Davies, proto-Expressionist Alfred Maurer, Cubist sculptor and painter Max Weber, and Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright (who co-developed Synchromism, a style of painting emphasizing pure color).

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Coupled with a paucity of innovation, an innately conservative impulse seems to have checked the brush hands of the Californians, even when they proved themselves able--in sketches meant for their eyes alone--to loosen up. In the show, this dilemma is demonstrated by the side-by-side display of E. (for Euphemia) Charlton Fortune’s study and finished version of the same view of Monterey Bay.

In the oil sketch, choppy clouds interrupt the blue sky, quick horizontal brush strokes abstract the mountains, and the houses are mere swipes of color.

In the finished painting, “Above the Town,” not only are these elements smoothed out and more painstakingly detailed, but Fortune couldn’t stop herself from adding a few rustic villagers in the foreground, a hoary academic technique meant to lead the eye gently back through space.

The museum could have done without the fatuous statement--in a wall text, repeated from the catalog--that Fortune’s study represents a “reflex, from the eye to the hand, bypassing the brain.” This is, of course, an impossibility.

Perhaps Fortune’s brain was also out to lunch when she painted “The Secret,” a much more individualistic Arcadian scene in misty tones of green, with three ghostly women?

It’s a truism that styles from the past appeal to present-day taste to the degree that they show us what we want to see.

Today, while some people apparently find a refuge from the rougher side of contemporary life in serene California landscapes of 70 and 80 years ago, others more in tune with the ‘90s are looking for work that reveals--and revels in--odd corners, awkward situations and weird (or weirdly beautiful) expressions of spiritualism.

Looking at a show like this one, we grasp at straws--like the pattern of angular bare branches that energizes Gardner Symons’ “Last Light,” or the mythologizing spirit that infuses the work of Arthur Matthews, with its mature goddesses serenely adrift in Nature.

After decades of “rediscovering” early California painting, surely it is time to focus more specifically on the intellectual and social currents that shaped them. An exhibition that focused, for example, on Matthews’ mythic female figures and situated them within the context of spiritualism in early 20th century America would be a welcome relief from the seemingly constant barrage of mediocre landscapes for nostalgia’s sake.

* “Impressions of California: Early Currents in Art 1850-1930,” Irvine Museum, 18881 Von Karman Ave. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Admission free. (714) 476-2565.