Impressions of Local vs. French Impressionism

Beloved by many for their evocation of a vanished world of idyllic nature, California Impressionist paintings are always on view somewhere in Orange County. At the Irvine Museum, an exhibition of work by Guy Rose, William Wendt, Edgar Payne and others is in the midst of an extended seven-month run.

At Christie’s April 29 auction in Los Angeles, Wendt’s “Arcadian Hills” was No. 4 on the hit parade of top sellers. A smaller version of his 1910 painting of a gently undulating spring landscape punctuated by bands of trees--which the museum owns--it was purchased by an anonymous private collector for $85,000, about twice the pre-sale estimate.

For all the love--and money--lavished on them, however, California Impressionist paintings have always seemed to me a fundamentally different animal than their French forebears.

To be sure, the American works were painted decades after the French ones, and they describe a drier, less domesticated landscape. Even so, they tend to be more minutely descriptive and less coloristically experimental than their French counterparts.

On page 85 of “California Impressionism” (Abbeville Press, 284 pages, $55)--an excellent, copiously illustrated new book with essays by art historians William H. Gerdts and Will South--this nagging difference is discussed in terms that intriguingly reflect the cultural biases of turn-of-the-century Americans.

For the French painters, South writes, “the energy, warmth, brilliance and transience of light took precedence over idealizing the landscape.”

But even when the California painters borrowed Impressionist innovations--such as the emphasis on light, intense color and simplified detail--these artists had a different relationship to landscape.

Their rose-colored view of the world was rooted in unshakable certainties and plain-spoken truths. God was in his heaven; the U.S. was a great country and getting better all the time.

If landscape was a visible sign of God’s bounty, according to this worldview, it followed that landscape painting was a form of spiritual testimony. American artists had a duty to show the unaltered “truth” of nature; their job was to translate a radiant universe into paint.

Wendt, a dapper fellow who in 1911 became president of the California Art Club, the leading support group for home-grown Impressionists, represented the style’s innate conservatism. He was, South writes, “a forceful critic of modern art,” believing that “abstraction or any other distortion of nature was an attack on truth and therefore deeply objectionable.”

In “Arcadian Hills,” Wendt turned an otherwise unremarkable landscape into a version of the pious 19th century “majestic view”--a sweeping vista of a huge land mass, popularized by Thomas Cole--and gave it a title implying “a mythic region of peace.” The Irvine Museum is also showing Wendt’s undated “Sycamores,” a grand view of (snowcapped) purple mountains’ majesty straight out of “America the Beautiful.”

Mountains were not in the repertoire of the French Impressionists, who lived and worked in less striking terrain. More significantly, they had an “interest in the sensual and the contemporary” that “far outweighed any . . . sense of moral obligation.”

While study in Europe was a rite of passage for the Americans, South notes that they were primarily concerned about getting good notices at the annual Salon de la Societe des Artistes Francais, a bastion of the same sort of conservative, realist painting taught at American academies of the day. There was no reason to go off and investigate the radical world of Impressionism.

Rose--who visited the art colony in Giverny in the 1890s and lived there from 1904 to 1912, before heading to Pasadena--knew Claude Monet socially. Although many others flocked to the picturesque French village, no other California painter apparently had anything to do with its most famous resident.

Back home, enthusiasm for painting the sun-kissed landscape of Southern California was tempered by a couple of sobering realities. Los Angeles businessmen were loading up their mansions with art from back East or Europe, and tourists were equipped with their own Kodaks, so (as one observer wrote in 1898) “they do not care to buy anything in art for more than two dollars.”

The 1913 opening of the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art at least ensured that the artists would have a welcoming venue. But, as both Gerdts and South point out, more research needs to be done on the early patrons of California Impressionism.

At least the painters in Los Angeles did have an energetic local booster: Antony Anderson, The Times’ first art critic, hired in 1906. His effulgent prose wrapped California Impressionism in another layer of starry-eyed idealism.

After viewing work by the now-obscure Jack Gage Stark and three other artists, Anderson announced that people in L.A. were beginning to take the style seriously.

“Few of us dare laugh at it, for fear that we may become the butt of our own jokes,” he wrote.

Judging by the Gage landscape from about 1910 reproduced in the book, Anderson was on the money. The painting exhibits a startling coloristic freedom, with an optical drizzle of salmon-colored brush strokes laid over an otherwise conventional meadow scene with a mountain backdrop. Too bad there’s nothing similar at the Irvine Museum.

The lone essay by Gerdts, a heavyweight authority on American Impressionism, is disappointing in its cautiousness. Venturing a qualitative comparison between East and West Coast Impressionism, he stiffly opines that “the finest work by the Californian Rose transcends a routine painting by the more famous [East Coast artist] Childe Hassam.”

Still, the book as a whole adds an important sense of context to a field that too often is awash in names and dates and mindless adoration.

* “California Impressionism” continues through June 13 at the Irvine Museum, 18881 Von Karman Ave. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Free. (714) 476-2565.