Display Shows Paradise Lost--and Found

A big, eye-friendly show like “A Painter’s Paradise: Artists and the California Landscape,” now at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, clearly aims to please, and it does. It’s a perfect holiday art event, with no difficult aesthetic ideology to decipher, no controversy to dodge. All ages and sensibilities are invited to the party.

It’s a party with all the trimmings. Paintings fill much of the main level gallery space, and a companion exhibition of photographs upstairs is a tiny jewel, not to be missed. A handsome color catalog, with intelligent and fact-packed essays, has been published. Everything has been done properly, and with due care, partly thanks to the patronage of Paul and Leslie Ridley-Tree, Santa Barbara’s good-hearted, deep-pocketed philanthropists.

This is not the first time the subject has been tackled, on a large scale and in this space. Former museum President Paul Mills presented an ample show of California landscape art, “Oh California!,” in the ‘80s.

To some degree, there is an inherent appeal for anyone with a wistful fondness for the Golden State of old, before developers, dreamers and opportunists descended on the place. These admiring views of au naturel California, including works by such notable artists as Thomas Moran, William Keith and Albert Bierstadt, seem to gain in power as they age, and as California’s unspoiled landscape becomes ever more precious and endangered.

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Part of the intrigue, for those of us who live here and/or grew up in this state, is a shock of recognition, a before-and-after effect. Ferdinand Deppe’s vision of San Gabriel Mission, from 1832, depicts the mission property as an unimaginably idyllic scene, with Native Americans living blithely amid the padres and snow-capped peaks in the distance. Can this really be the area as we now know it?

We can at least take comfort in knowing that the beauty captured in Albert Bierstadt’s “Mirror Lake, Yosemite” is still relatively intact and viewable in its pure state. Bierstadt and Moran, whose paintings helped further the support for the national parks system, make only sparse appearances in this exhibition. We get a broader idea of the work of William Keith, another icon of California landscape art, from his large painting of Santa Cruz Island in 1874 to moodier twilight scenes.

We also find works by California-based painters such as Emil Kosa Jr., Millard Sheets, whose works have graced many Ventura County art show, and influential Santa Barbara residents Ray Strong and Channing Peake. Francis M. Sedgwick’s long view of the ranchland of Carpinteria, from the hillside perspective of Cate School, shows that region’s still-intact agrarian vista.

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This being a Santa Barbara-based exhibition, there is an emphasis on works from this legendary locale, but Ventura County is also accounted for, in revealing vintage images. De Witt Parshall’s impressionist paintings, dating from 1929, show fog-shrouded scenes of duck hunting in Port Hueneme.

Ojai emerges in a pristine state, as in Frank Morley Fletcher’s “Somewhere Behind Ojai,” depicting the place as an arid and sprawling expanse. John Calvin Brewster’s photograph of a horse and buggy slicing across the Ojai Valley in 1880 views the area as a bucolic refuge.

The upstairs photography show has its own charms. Titled “A Photographer’s Paradise, 1875-1946,” it presents a medium in its youth, as exercised in and around the photogenic environs of Santa Barbara. Of particular interest are the series of images of the Santa Barbara Mission, the so-called “Queen of the Missions.” In photographs by Edwin J. Hayward in the 1870s, by Carlton Watkins circa 1880, in a poetically hazy shot by Taizo Kato from 1920, and in Horace Bristol’s dramatic tilted image from 1933, the landmark appears as a renewable inspiration.

Ojai’s pioneering photojournalist Bristol is also represented by shots of bedraggled farm workers, complemented by Dorothea Lange’s shot of a trailer in the mud, the humble residence of itinerant Sunkist packers. In these few images, a rare dose of human reality enters into the picture.

This may not be the most vanguard or challenging exhibition mounted at the museum since its expansion several years ago, but it’s a fine one, nonetheless. The appeal is broad-based. Californians can admire the passionate paintings and photographs with pride and longing. Visitors from elsewhere can gaze with envy.

The landscape savored by these artists looks suitably paradisiacal, as a wonderful place to live or visit. It was, and, in changing ways, it still is.

DETAILS

* WHAT: “A Painter’s Paradise: Artists and the California Landscape.”

* WHERE: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., Santa Barbara.

* WHEN: Through Feb. 16. Gallery hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursday; noon-5 p.m. Sunday.

* HOW MUCH: Museum admission is $4 adults, $3 seniors, $1.50 students with ID and youths 6-16, free for children under 6.

* CALL: 963-4364.