Nature Nurtures Painters’ Enclaves

No streets, no towns, no homes, no people. Just majestic, sun-drenched landscape. Nature, unspoiled, in all her transcendent glory.

With a few notable exceptions, that’s what distinguished the art that poured forth from Laguna Beach in the early 20th century from the work that came out of three prominent East Coast art colonies, the subject of an ambitious new exhibit at Laguna Art Museum.

“Although Laguna was a tiny, new town at that time, there was more of an interest in nature writ large,” said curator Deborah E. Solon, who seeks to measure Laguna Beach against enclaves nurturing Impressionists at the same time: Cos Cob and Old Lyme, both in Connecticut, and Shinnecock, in New York.

Certain names in the exhibit should resound in Orange County, where museums and galleries perpetually celebrate Laguna’s unparalleled contribution to early California Impressionism: William Wendt, Joseph Kleitsch, Anna Hills, Guy Rose, Edgar Payne, Frank Cuprien and others who began to paint Laguna onto the map when the coastal hamlet’s population numbered in the hundreds and its telephones totaled three.

Yet, said Solon, who chose only three works from the Laguna museum’s holdings for the 68-piece display, “My intention was to show paintings that hadn’t been seen in recent history.”

Drawing from other public and private collections, Solon showcases such East Coast luminaries as William Merritt Chase, Frederick Childe Hassam, John Twachtman, George Brainerd Burr and William Metcalf.

“Colonies of American Impressionism: Cos Cob, Old Lyme, Shinnecock and Laguna Beach,” opening Saturday, caps the Laguna museum’s yearlong 80th anniversary celebration. In 1918, Payne rallied his colleagues to create the Laguna Beach Art Assn., the museum’s predecessor, chasing the bats out of a “ramshackle” old town hall, as Cuprien later put it, to establish an institution where local artists could exhibit and sell their work.

“[Public and scholarly] interest in American painting in general is only about 30 years old,” Solon said during a recent walk through the museum’s storage vault, “and California Impressionism has been a kind of a stepchild of that.”

“There’s a need to look at what was happening on the East Coast and on the West Coast, to look at the similarities and the differences, and to see how they measure up against each other quality-wise,” she said. “I think they measure up pretty well.”

The show also places California Impressionism within a larger context, said Laguna resident Solon, an independent curator who from 1991 to ’96 was research director for Karges Fine Art, a Los Angeles-based gallery of California Impressionism. She also has taught art history at the museum, and though she’s not a trustee, she sits on its exhibition committee, whose members assist with curating shows.

Similar Training, Different Results

Artists on both coasts underwent similar training; many trekked to France to study Impressionism at its source; some lived at such now-legendary colonies as Giverny, Monet’s home.

These Americans took up French Impressionists’ love affair with luminescent light, intense color and, to some extent, diffused detail. But, unwilling to wholly abandon the academic European schooling they’d ached for, Solon said, they forged a hybrid style that tended to adhere more closely to nature as it actually looked.

The main difference between East and West Coast Impressionists, active from the early 1890s to the early 1930s, was subject matter, which was intricately linked with the artists’ lifestyles. Those in Eastern colonies mostly lived in boarding houses, or at least in close quarters, Solon explained.

Old Lyme, near southeastern Connecticut’s picturesque Lieutenant River, is renowned for its Florence Griswold House. The stately mansion was converted into a boarding house and haven for artists in 1899 by “Miss Florence,” the daughter of a sea captain.

Cos Cob, in Greenwich, Conn., had Holley House, first opened to artists in the late 1880s by owners Edward and Josephine Holley. Daughter Constance Holley married artist Elmer MacRae, a key figure in the Greenwich art community.

Meanwhile, at Shinnecock, in Long Island’s exclusive Southampton section, artists inhabited an art village built for the colony’s main attraction, the William Merritt Chase Shinnecock School of Summer Art, established in 1891. Thousands flocked to study with Chase, one of the preeminent teachers in the history of American painting.

Thus clustered, the artists in each colony typically painted what they saw when they gazed or strolled outside their well-tended domiciles, which usually boasted lovely gardens, Solon said.

“Gardening at that point was becoming a very popular area of discourse in literature,” she said, “and a lot of artists painted the gardens or lands where they lived, their neighbors’ gardens or their own gardens. Many American Impressionists cultivated gardens just so they could paint them.”

Examples in this exhibit of such bloom-filled tableaux include Greacen’s “The Old Garden” (1912), depicting the Griswold House garden, and Metcalf’s “May Night” (1906), with its glimpse of Florence Griswold in front of her columned estate. The work, on loan from Washington’s august Corcoran National Gallery, won the Corcoran Gold Medal in 1906.

Other views of “domesticated landscape” include Hassam’s “The Smelt Fishers” (1896), a dockside scene crowded with boats and fishermen, and “The Chase Homestead” (1893), wherein Chase captures his daughter Dorothy, herself filling a canvas with petals and stems.

‘Pack Mules’ and Wide Open Spaces

In contrast, the only blossoms most Laguna artists painted grew wild; they preferred barren seaside cliffs and remote sycamore-dotted canyons, which they often camped out to reach, rather than manicured plots.

Works by Joseph Kleitsch depicting the famous old Hotel Laguna (opened in the late 1890s south of the town-hall-turned art-association headquarters) and the town’s post office are among the most notable exceptions to the landscapes, Solon said.

“One of the things Kleitsch wanted to do was to paint the town of Laguna,” she said, “partially because he moved here in 1920, and by 1930, the town looked considerably different; it had been developed in extraordinary ways.”

Earlier--before phone service arrived in 1923 and Pacific Coast Highway came through in ‘26--only a few hundred souls inhabited the isolated village, which lacked the established East’s large boarding houses and attracted frontier-minded artists “more content with the company of nature than the company of others,” Solon writes in an exhibit essay.

Renting cottages or rooms from residents, these “pack mule” painters often hiked for hours into the surrounding foothills and canyons, Solon said, to capture the grandiose vistas in such works as “Silver and Gold,” Granville Redmond’s homage to the area’s sprawling, poppy-covered hillsides. Similar in spirit, Benjamin Chambers Brown’s “The Jeweled Shore” depicts immense seaside boulders.

“You get this idea of the vastness of nature,” Solon said, “and the works tend to be infused with a kind of religious aspect, a sense that God is in nature, which is a kind of holdover from 19th century Hudson River School painting, wherein nature was deified.”

Longevity of Local Impressionist Period

Laguna Beach remained active as a colony for Impressionist art for at least a decade longer than its Eastern counterparts, Solon added. By the ‘20s, Cos Cob and Old Lyme’s lights had dimmed as Impressionism gave way to Modernism. But then, they had been exposed to the idyllic style years before Laguna was.

Solon also attributes the local colony’s longevity to the passion of its artists, who raised money, donated work and volunteered curatorial expertise to transform their association, with much community support, into Southern California’s first permanent venue for the exhibition of art, today’s Laguna Art Museum.

“This little town generated a very important museum and a very important place in the development of the arts in Southern California,” she said. “There’s no doubt about it.”

* “Colonies of American Impressionism: Cos Cob, Old Lyme, Shinnecock and Laguna Beach” opens Saturday at Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. $4-$5. Through April 11. (949) 494-6531.