Nice and Comfortable in Santa Barbara

“Santa Barbara Collects: Impressions of France” is an exhibition of 50 paintings and 20 works on paper, gathered from 14 local collections in order to celebrate the opening of the newly enlarged Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The show is pleasant if uninspiring, reflecting an essential artistic conservatism in the community and its museum.

Since 1941, the museum has occupied a former post office building on State Street, downtown’s principal thoroughfare. As part of a $6.7-million renovation and expansion, which opened to the public in a free day of festivities Sunday, an expanded shop has been added directly on State Street (the shop is heavy on gifts, scarce on books). Also added are a cafe and children’s education gallery--amenities now obligatory for art museums.

But the real news lies elsewhere. An expansion 15 years ago added 50% more exhibition space and considerably enlarged support areas. Yet, despite the relative smallness of the place, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art always seemed a rather confusing jumble of spaces, many not well suited to looking at art. Now, much of that confusion has been handily erased. The simple construction of a 3,600-square-foot gallery has allowed for a refreshing breath of coherence in the installation of the museum’s permanent collection, whose layout has been considerably revised. Before, it was easy to feel lost in the disjointed warren of rooms; now, clarity prevails.

Next month, the museum will also open a new study center for its drawing collection, which may boast the most sustained level of quality overall in the museum’s modest holdings. The permanent collection roams widely, including Greek and Roman antiquities, Asian art, 18th and 19th century American and European art, photographs and international Modern art; examples of the highest caliber, though, are relatively few and far between.

Not surprisingly for a museum that--like most--must rely on gifts to augment its art collection, the disappointing ratio of mesmerizing-to-mediocre works in the galleries is replicated in the opening exhibition, drawn from private collections in the area. “Santa Barbara Collects: Impressions of France” is a tepid array of Realist, Barbizon, Impressionist, Postimpressionist and early Modern art.

There are two covetable gems. The knockout painting is Georges Braque’s oval Cubist still life from 1912, “Bottles and Glasses.” The thrilling drawing is a double-sided pastel by Paul Gauguin, dated 1894-1895.

Braque’s densely painted still life dates from the six years of intense activity he shared with Pablo Picasso in creating the revolutionary Cubist idiom. Transparent fragments of objects can be discerned in the picture, whose oval shape suggests a cafe tabletop--drinking glasses, the French word for beer (as would be found on a bottle’s label), a playing card (the ace of clubs), a die, bits of sheet music, scroll shapes like those on a violin and more.

The limited palette is the familiar analytical Cubist one of khaki browns, silvery blue-grays, black and off-white. That Braque was just beginning to try to figure out how to bring color into Cubist painting is suggested by the odd patch of magenta at the upper right. Overall, the suppression of vibrant color feels almost literary, directing attention toward readings more cerebral than sensual.

Think of this disparate array of crystalline objects as forming an intellectually ordered repertoire of sociability--signs for drinking, dancing, games of chance. Together they reflect both public cafe life in Paris and the unusually fervent private rapport Braque was experiencing with Picasso, a fellow adventurer in avant-garde practice.

The two studies of female nudes in Gauguin’s large, double-sided pastel installed nearby are related to two important paintings of Tahitian scenes, one made in France and the other in Polynesia. The most haunting is the 2-foot-long horizontal portrait of a sleeping nude, her lithe body embraced by a white pillow and ambiguous clouds of blue and rose. The subject’s Symbolist dreaminess melds the mystical with the erotic.

Both the double-sided sheet by Gauguin and the Braque still life come from a collection formed many years ago by Mercedes Eichholz and her late husband, Robert. (Also from the Eichholz collection are a bold, blunt profile of a Catholic monk by Georges Rouault and a small, charming still life by Juan Gris.) Judging from the remainder of the show, the enthusiasm for French art elsewhere in town is far less rigorous and erudite.

It also seems to be of remarkably recent vintage. At least two-thirds of the show’s 50 paintings were acquired by Santa Barbara residents in the 1990s.

At this late date, needless to say, assembling paintings from what surely ranks among the most popular, pricey and picked-over periods in the history of Western art is a risky business. Alas, it hasn’t paid off especially well. “Santa Barbara Collects” contains some handsome pictures--it’s most consistent in its representation of the so-called Barbizon School, which flourished in a small village of that name at the edge of the Fontainebleau forest in the mid-19th century--but few of them reach museum stature.

The “impressions of France” left by these paintings are pretty much the standard ones. The rise of landscape subjects, which dominate the show, reflects the emergent philosophy of nationalism that characterized a post-revolutionary world. The land is what citizens of the new nation-states of Europe (and America) held in common, and painters began to celebrate its ancient continuity.

Only a handful of urban scenes will be encountered in this landscape-heavy show, while the few, mostly mediocre Impressionist pictures represent the countryside as a blessed refuge from urban tumult. A frankly industrial subject doesn’t turn up until about 1924, in a Paul Signac watercolor of Rouen’s factory-crowded riverfront.

Celebration of native custom was also important to the new nationalist ethos. A lovely example is found in the small, bust-length portrait by Jean-Francois Millet, in which the artist’s sister is shown dressed in the traditional garb of a Normandy peasant.

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Images of labor, particularly farm labor, also effectively united the people with the land, and several paeans to the union are on view here: Rosa Bonheur’s depiction of haymaking, Constant Troyon’s of a young woman riding a mule to market, Charles-Emil Jacques’ assorted shepherds and shepherdesses, Jan Monchablon’s wheat harvesters, Vincent van Gogh’s drawing of a man with a hoe. Peasants toiling in nature served a romantic and idealized function for an era undergoing the consolidation of political authority in rapidly urbanizing Paris.

You could say, I suppose, that French painting does something similar for Santa Barbara today. “Impressions of France” represents a safe and familiar genre for the popular mass audience, which museums increasingly seek to lure. This is art as comfort food, which turns the galleries into an adjunct of that all-important museum cafe.

* “Santa Barbara Collects: Impressions of France,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., (805) 963-4364, through April 19. Closed Mondays.