Gardena School Alumni Reclaim Neglected Paintings

It’s been nearly half a century since Rosemary Best graduated from the old Gardena High School, but her memories of studying in its elegant library are vivid. She recalls the high, open-beam ceilings, the big windows, the sturdy oak tables and, most of all, the paintings.

Surrounded by a treasure trove of original California Impressionist oil paintings--the gifts of decades of graduating classes--Best used to gaze up at the artworks whenever she was stumped by a history question or stuck for words in a writing assignment.

“I’d look up and see the paintings, and the answer came,” Best said, near tears recently upon viewing the paintings again after they had passed long years in storage and neglect.

Painstakingly cleaned and restored, 31 of the paintings are on display in the art gallery at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson, forming a unique exhibit that will open to the public today.

How they got there--and that many of them survived at all--is something of a minor miracle, a combination of serendipity and persistence. The result is the resurrection of a collection that California Impressionist expert Jean Stern said represents “the very best examples of the individual painters” of the genre.

It was common practice for many years for graduating classes in Los Angeles and across the nation to bestow artworks on their high schools, leading to impressive holdings at some campuses.

But Stern, a writer and lecturer and executive director of the Irvine Museum in Orange County, said the Gardena High collection is unique in its size and quality.

Visitors to the “Painted Light: California Impressionist Paintings” exhibit, which runs through April 23, will see some of the best works in the plein-air genre that flourished in California between 1890 and 1930. The artists used color to capture the intense light in landscapes and rural settings, preserving on canvas a vanished beauty--the hills of Montrose, a snowy mountain above Pasadena, a stormy desert.

They will see Maynard Dixon’s “Men of the Red Earth,” a gift of Gardena High’s Class of Summer 1944; Franz A. Bischoff’s “A Cool Fog Drifting,” from the Class of Winter 1925, and John Frost’s “Desert Twilight,” from the Class of Winter 1928. Anchoring the exhibit is the mammoth “The Betatakin Ruins,” by James Guifford Swinnerton, presented by the Class of Summer 1927.

The collection says almost as much about the life and times of the paintings’ buyers as it does about the works themselves.

It was begun in 1919, when then-Principal John Whitely suggested that each graduating class purchase a painting as its parting gift to the school. Each year, until the mid-1950s, students visited art galleries, interviewed artists--many of whom lived in Southern California--and made their purchases after student art committee recommendations were voted on by the entire class. Artists often gave the students price breaks or even donated a work, and the entire community joined in the yearlong fund-raising drives to add to the collection.

“Gardena was really very much a working-class community, but the high school was the center of the community’s cultural life, and it was held in high esteem. Everybody came to our programs,” said Mary Grove Warshaw, a member of the art selection committee in 1942 and now an artist based in Watsonville, Calif.

“We didn’t have art appreciation classes, but we had these paintings surrounding us all the years we were at the school. They were in the library, the auditorium, the hallways,” said Warshaw, who is planning to see the exhibit this week.

“And then we had our whole senior year of learning about the paintings and choosing one. Going to Los Angeles, going to the galleries, it all seemed like very hallowed ground.”

Everything changed in the mid-1950s. The tradition ended in 1956, about the time a new high school was built. The old campus became what is now Robert Peary Middle School, and the paintings came down. Most of the 90 pieces (about 60 of them Impressionist) were relegated to a basement storeroom. They sat there for nearly four decades, inexorably dirtying and decaying while alumni and art experts alike worried about their fate.

Among those who was concerned was Robert C. Detweiler, the recently retired president of Cal State Dominguez Hills, who about three years ago spoke with university art gallery director Kathy Zimmerer about finding a way to rescue the paintings and put them on public view. They got a $300,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to restore and exhibit about half the collection and worked with Gardena alumni, the Los Angeles Unified School District and others to ready the exhibit.

Stern, the California Impressionist expert, volunteered his services as guest curator and arranged for the paintings to be exhibited at the Irvine Museum later this year.

Help came none too soon, Stern said. At least two of the larger paintings were already beyond repair. Others had badly cracked paint and decaying canvases; all needed a thorough cleaning and revarnishing.

The grant included funds to develop an exhibit-related curriculum with the Torrance and Los Angeles school districts, and money for about 8,000 fourth-, fifth- and eighth-graders from the two districts to make field trips to the exhibit.

“Every schoolkid knows about Van Gogh and Monet, but they don’t know we had our own great painters here,” Stern said.

Indeed, local arts officials are hoping the enthusiasm surrounding the Van Gogh exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will fan interest in the works of his California counterparts.

Unlike some of the styles that succeeded it, Impressionism “is very viewer-friendly . . . these paintings are very easy to live with, very easy to look at,” Stern said.

What will happen with the paintings once the Cal State Dominguez Hills and Irvine exhibits are over has not yet been determined. Los Angeles school officials are inventorying the vast collection of artworks at campuses throughout the sprawling district. State law prohibits their sale, and district officials are working on ways to preserve and perhaps display them in a museum.

For now, Rosemary Best, Class of 1952, and her husband, Bill, Class of 1950, are focusing on the paintings’ resurrection. “It’s like seeing old friends,” Bill Best said at a recent exhibit preview.

Although it is less than 15 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, Gardena in her youth “was considered the boonies,” Rosemary Best said. “We were farm kids. Most of us were not encouraged to go to college.

“But we had this art collection that we lived with every day.”

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California Impressions

California Impressionist paintings collected over several decades by Gardena High School graduating classes have been restored and are on exhibit at the Cal State Dominguez Hills Art Gallery.

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Exhibit Details

April 23

University Art Gallery, 1000 E. Victoria St. Carson

(310) 243-3334

Exhibit is open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Admission is free; campus parking permit is $1.50.

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Related Events

“Painted Light” lecture by California Impressionist authority Jean Stern

7 p.m. Feb. 25 at the gallery; free admission

“American Scene Painting” lecture by independent curator Janet Blake

7 p.m. March 11 at the gallery; free admission

“The Spirit of the Land” lecture by independent curator Susan Anderson

7 p.m. April 15 at the gallery; free admission

From May 8 through Sept. 25, the paintings will be on display at The Irvine Museum in Orange County. Information: (949) 476-2565.