California Dreamin’

Imagine her disgust when Helen Hunt Jackson, the late 19th century reformer, learned that her efforts to call attention to the mistreatment of native California peoples resulted instead in the creation of a dreamy, romantic myth. Published in 1884, Jackson’s “Ramona” was intended as an equivalent to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” as a novel that would dramatize the tragedy of America’s Indian policy--which Jackson elsewhere denounced as a “century of Dishonor.”

But something unexpected happened after “Ramona’s” publication: What had been intended as a protest novel turned into a civic and patriotic parable; a celebration of a romantic tale about the love between an Indian girl and her sweetheart. “Ramona” led thousands of Americans westward to visit the Southern California localities mentioned in the book. (To this day a “Ramona” pageant is held each summer in Hemet.) Easterners were lured by the promise of finding a lush, Spanish colonial myth as embodied in Jackson’s novel. Such a clash--between Jackson’s activist intentions and a rustic idyllic picture of the place--sets in relief how California has represented different images and different dreams to people, often at the same time.

So what is the California Dream? The answer has a long and complicated history. Forget whether or not California is about Beach Boys or beatniks: Long before the Golden State was Golden, California had an image in the world unlike any other state in the Union. California wasn’t created by pioneers, the Gold Rush or the covered wagon; it had a society and a regional personality dating back to the Spanish influences in the New World.

California culture was the product of Pacific explorations, not an expression of the westward course of American empire. From the time of the first Spanish maritime explorations in the 16th century, California has offered the world both a natural and mental landscape destined to inspire plastic artists. Endowed with dramatic coastlines that frightened early sailors, California offered them, when they ventured inland, a terrain overflowing with greenery and animal life. The exotic beauty of the littoral inspired California’s name, taken from a fictional Black Amazon queen, Calafia, in a popular tale of chivalry widely read throughout Europe from 1400 to 1600, “The Exploits of Esplandian.”

With the establishment of the Spanish colony after 1769, California’s European pioneers found more and even greater natural attractions in the region. They included the impressive Sierra Nevada and other mountain ranges, mighty rivers and the awesome, if occasionally lethal, deserts of the south.

“Pacific Arcadia” was published to accompany a yearlong exhibit that opened earlier this year at the Stanford University Museum of Art. In the book, Claire Perry, a curator of American art at Stanford, describes the intersection of the California environment and the painterly imagination for more than 300 years. Her conception is ideological; it rests entirely on a retrospective view of the selling of the image of California to settlers, investors, outsiders. Hers is a neo-Marxist interpretation: All California culture, over the centuries, has been a commodity sold to the rest of the world.

Perry’s critical narrative covers the succeeding images of California, informed by the utopian expectations of the book’s title, beginning with glimpses of native Californian culture in the age of exploration at the end of the 18th century. The Spanish missionary era fostered two idealized versions of Spain’s putative civilizing mission: The first in the original Spanish period and a second at the end of the 19th century evoked images of kindly padres coming to rescue the naked Indians from their savagery.

In between the efflorescence of these Iberian fantasies, as every Californian knows, the Golden State was defined by the image of the gold-seeker--rustic, enterprising and picturesquely eccentric. And then, in a second epic of enrichment and growth that seemed to recapture the exuberant Gold Rush era, the rise of Los Angeles and the rebirth of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire produced a new Age of Progress, symbolized by the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915, with which the book concludes.

The alternation of the bucolic and the ultramodern, or, in more extreme terms, of the primitive and the sophisticated, defines California consciousness, and as demonstrated by Perry, is visible throughout her iconographic history of the Pacific coast.

Perry begins this survey with European map making: It is part of her emphasis, which is problematic in my view, on the way that images defined California more for outsiders than for Californians. Her failure to document original native Californian decorative motifs is one of several lacunae (one would think that a book on California art would begin with a substantial discussion of the native art that existed before the Europeans showed up). She recalls how, in classic cartography, California appeared for years as an island and even as “the largest island in the world” in a 1622 volume. Until the 17th century, when the Gulf of California was fully explored and Baja was found to be a peninsula, explorers thought the gulf was a strait separating California from mainland North America. Islands, in mythology, had been the abodes of gods and sorcerers: Hence, this early misperception marked California as a special place emanating a unique aura.

When she addresses the Spanish colonial era of the early 19th century, Perry discusses one of the most remarkable and talented personalities to appear on the California shore. This was Louis Choris, a French artist aboard the Russian brig, Rurik, which came to Spanish California in 1816, under the command of Lt.-Capt. Otto von Kotzebue. Choris was an ethnographer as well as a talented painter. He transcribed the music of the natives at Mission Dolores in San Francisco, which he called “trembling and mysterious.”

Choris’ magnificent art includes a watercolor, “Danse des Californiens,” or “Dance of the Californians,” reproduced in this book. Perry writes perceptively that the painting “portrays a mass of dancing Indians who overwhelm the courtyard of Mission Dolores. . . . Like a wave washing from the nearby ocean, the tribes people seem ready to drown out all signs of the Spanish presence.”

Perry notes, correctly, that in Choris’ depiction, “Spanish authority, symbolized by the mission church and the large cross that looms in the background, seems unable to restrain the primal energy generated by the dance. Like a force of nature, the Indians are uncontainable and unmoldable, sweeping aside everything in their path and threatening to absorb even the viewer in their swelling numbers.” Unfortunately, Perry ignores the biography of Choris, which is also Californian in its adventurousness; he was murdered by bandits in Mexico not long after completing his irreplaceable record of Indian customs.

Of course, the “swelling numbers” of Gold Rush emigrants were destined to “sweep aside” both Indians and Spanish missionaries. Perry has assembled an extensive and useful anthology of representations from that epoch, many familiar to Californians and ranging from serious art to newspaper caricatures to outright kitsch.

Here one encounters the sole principle that seems permanent in California history: the utter replacement, or better, the obliteration, of each phase by another. The cult of the gold-seeker--first the “lone prospector,” then the “industrious miner,” in Perry’s view--leaves virtually no space in the Gold Rush tradition for the Indian, the Spaniard, whether military or missionary, or its Mexican predecessor.

Perry develops a useful profile of Charles Christian Nahl (1818-1878), a painter who in the decade after statehood in 1850 emerged as the outstanding artist in California. Nahl was prodigiously talented, and while his works are mainly known to specialist scholars today, his art deserves a wider appreciation.

In his early period, Nahl was devoted to the symbolism of the hard-working miner, and his works include fascinating explorations of the interiors of miners’ cabins, illuminated by moonlight, candles or cooking fires. The pictures seem to offer an allegory of the emergence of California from the primordial darkness of the Spanish colony into the illumination of Yankee civilization.

With the coming of stability to the state, California’s agricultural wealth supplanted its mineral resources, making it “the cornucopia of the world.” Eventually, this pastoral conception, lyricizing the fields and hills of the state, melded into a nostalgia for the Spanish period. But the Spanish theme employed much of the same vocabulary of motifs that appeared in the art of agricultural prosperity, including the commercial literature of the railroads and other interests seeking to attract a new generation of emigrants.

Perry is particularly insightful in her commentary on the “Spanish Arcadia” in California art, which emerged in the 1870s, decades after the disappearance of the old colonial society. “The emphasis on leisure and the past in images of Spanish California,” she declares, presented “a startling departure from the traditional American preoccupation with hard work and progress,” so recently developed in the cult of the industrious miner. But in this genre, Nahl again played a significant role, now memorializing the Spanish cowboy, or vaquero, as he had once made the miner a hero.

The sentimentalized view of Spanish colonial life, according to Perry, “was calculated to appeal to a growing segment of the population disillusioned by the changes brought about by industrialization and the emergence of large-scale corporations.” Thus, Perry connects the cult of Spanish colonial life with the late 19th century rise of travel by Americans. As she writes, “California’s Old World heritage suddenly represented, rather than a burden and an embarrassment, a potentially lucrative tourist attraction.” Perry shows how the Spanish California myth was complemented by a similar legendary rhetoric centered on the Indians, as demonstrated by Jackson’s “Ramona.”

The author also brilliantly analyzes the way in which the essence of the Spanish Californian metaphor was transformed. “Through the 1870s,” she states, “representations tended to focus on the passionate energies of the inhabitants . . . wild-eyed vaqueros chasing errant cows into the sunset, handsome bandidos, and scantily clad senoritas.” But in the 1880s, “such imagery began to lose its naughtiness, and more sedate subjects, particularly portrayals of mission life and Spanish religious rituals, predominated.”

Strangely, Perry fails to notice that the 19th century Mission Revival’s later romance with an older, more relaxed and genteel mode of existence, a specifically Spanish incarnation of Hispanic California, supplanted its Mexican aspect. Although she understands that Mexicans, unlike Spaniards, were viewed by most Anglo Californians as a nonwhite underclass (whereas Spaniards were viewed as a white aristocracy), she ignores a compelling explanation for the conversion of an exotic, erotic rural idyll into an almost Puritanical, official or “Establishment” ideological Spanish. That was the need of the state’s ambitious Anglo ruling class to match the historical traditions of the Atlantic states, embodied in the Pilgrims, Capt. John Smith and other such icons, with a strictly European and noble origin of our own.

This limitation in her analysis is unfortunately typical of Perry’s study. Near the end of “Pacific Arcadia,” she describes the “urban visions” that emerged in the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake. Yet she unaccountably overlooks that quintessentially cosmopolitan phenomenon, the Bohemian aesthetic rebellion represented by “les Jeunes” in San Francisco in the 1890s. Such trends fostered the rise of the school associated with the outstanding California painter Maynard Dixon (represented here by a Sunset magazine cover), who combined modernist experimentation with Spanish and other traditionalist elements. Nevertheless, “Pacific Arcadia” is a valuable book on the Golden State’s evolving artistic image.