Impressions of Depression

A wave of homespun anecdotes spread across the artistic terrain during the Great Depression. For some painters, the story to be told was a grim one of urban unemployment, loneliness and despair. For others, the tale was about the natural bounty and human backbone of rural America.

In conservative Southern California, bolstered by flourishing movies, oil and agricultural industries and a steady drumbeat of tract development, the narrative was mostly a paean to natural beauty and the easygoing pace of daily life.

Even when artists sought to emulate subjects of New York’s urban-centered Ashcan School, the results were more about picturesque settings than human existence. While most artists also worked in oil, watercolor became the medium of choice for catching Paradise on the fly.

Watercolors by 20 artists in “California Style: 1930s and ‘40s,” at the Orange County Museum of Art are notable mostly for their unassuming styles and, for the most part, smooth handling of a medium that requires quick work and a light touch.

While none of the artists--even Millard Sheets, the leading Southern California regionalist--rose to the psychological and visually inventive level of an Edward Hopper or a Charles Burchfield, the show offers modest pleasures. At the very least, it recalls moments from a vanished era.

But the quality of the art varies markedly, even within the work of one painter. Airy and atmospheric pieces glowing with transparent washes and vibrant color share wall space with stiff and cloyingly detailed compositions.

The catalog by David Stary-Sheets, the art dealer who curated the show for the Sebastopol [Calif.] Center for the Arts, offers a brisk, upbeat overview with no critical analysis and no information on the individual painters.

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In that respect, the show compares poorly with the massive Santa Barbara Museum of Art exhibition “Regionalism: The California View,” organized in 1988 by chief curator Robert Henning Jr. and free-lancer Susan M. Anderson, who later became chief curator of the Laguna Art Museum.

Sheets, father of curator Stary-Sheets, and such other prominent watercolorists of the era as Phil Dike, Barse Miller and Rex Brandt were at their best when they weeded out visual clutter--the literalism that was probably the American Scene painters’ biggest impediment, aside from resistance to the expressive possibilities of abstraction.

Sheets and Dike both had a fine sense of visual rhythm, not unlike a good cartoonist’s. In Sheets’ painting “Camp Near Brawley,” from 1938, the irregular outlines of a row of cars and jury-rigged campers, parked in a row facing the blue mist of the unseen ocean, suggest the jaunty self-reliance of their owners.

Dike, as did several of his peers, worked on Disney animations, whose perky busyness sometimes seeped annoyingly into his work (“Evening on the Home Front”).

Still, he also could effortlessly summarize the look and feel of a moment in nature. “The Pink Beach House” from 1947 is alive with stylized wave patterns, silhouetted objects, late-afternoon shadows and an abstracted, ambiguous sky swept with veils of deep blue.

Miller’s style was soft and enveloping, conveying an overwhelming sense of calm. Brandt was at his best evoking the feminine contours of coastal hills.

Other artists have their moments too. Joseph O’Malley’s “Tubes Under Moore Hill” is very “L.A. Confidential,” with its evocation of a rainy night near an urban underpass. Tom Craig was a dab hand at atmospheric effects.

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One of several Bay Area artists who imbue the show with a more Modernist aesthetic, George Post has a dry, sketchy style that conveys the psychological empty space of urban life in “Speedway Alley.”

Distrusting the emotional possibilities of distortion or abstraction, the Southern California artists tended to deliver even downbeat wartime themes by studiously concentrating on visual details with perhaps a “daring” dose of moody shadow.

Despite, or perhaps because of, their literal-minded, small-scale vision, the American Scene painters’ cheerful ditties never became a national anthem. As a case in point, “Beer for Prosperity,” Sheets’ nocturnal evocation of post-Prohibition good spirits on a street outside a brightly lit bar--painted more than a decade before Hopper’s famous “Night Hawks”--lacks the moody vision that made the latter a classic.

* “California Style: 1930s and ‘40s,” Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Ends March 22. 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday. Admission: $5 general, $4 seniors and students, children under 16 free. (714) 759-1122.