History and Illusion Tangled Up in ‘Arcadia’

Just as the United States is a nation of immigrants, California is a land of prospectors. Prospectors, by nature, quest for something rare and elusive. The gold miners of 1848 spring to mind immediately as the quintessential California prospectors, but centuries of explorers and settlers were lured here by a romanticized sense of promise. The paintings, prints, photographs, books and maps gathered in “Pacific Arcadia: Images of California 1600-1915,” now at the San Diego Museum of Art, are what helped bring them here.

Because the show, which originated at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, curated by Claire Perry, has such a pronounced focus on images of Northern California, the SDMA organized a supplementary show, “Picturing Paradise: San Diego in the Eye of the Artist 1875-1940,” to compensate for being left out. (An L.A. institution would have a similar job to do if the show stopped here.)

Unlike the larger show, “Picturing Paradise” doesn’t attempt to encompass the history of its subject. It’s a skin-deep representation of a city preternaturally proud of the beauty of that skin. La Jolla’s exquisite coastline, the marvelous pseudo-Spanish structures of Balboa Park and the area’s gentle hills graced with eucalyptus are all rendered in mellow tones and picturesque Impressionist-derived styles by a variety of artists who worked in the region. (A companion show to this companion show appears at the nearby San Diego Historical Society, and focuses on how San Diego marketed its climatic and topographic virtues during the same years.)

*

The expansionist creed of Manifest Destiny found its ultimate end, geographically and ideologically, in California. “West of the West,” as Theodore Roosevelt once described it, California epitomized the American Dream. Its abundant natural resources and economic opportunities read as an open invitation to outsiders to stake a claim here. “Pacific Arcadia” concentrates heavily on the attractions of the state, at the expense of the internal pressures and cultural confrontations that played themselves out as a result of California’s sporadic settlement. The show ends up having a perforated feel to it, its holes as evident as the continuous fabric they’re cut from.

The exhibition is broken up into five sections by chronological theme, beginning with 17th century maps and records of California as a “terrestrial paradise,” and ending with a section on developing urbanism, which focuses exclusively on San Francisco, its growth as a cosmopolitan center, heavy damage in the 1906 earthquake and fire, and resuscitation capped by the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Though fascinating images punctuate the flow, too often works seem to have been selected to illustrate their theme more than for any inherent visual impact, making the show a bit drier than it needs to be.

Many of the show’s most captivating images play off of California’s mythical stature, its evolution as a state of mind, not just another state in the union. The Gold Rush did more than its share to establish California’s reputation as a treasure chest waiting to be unlocked, but such notions had entered the popular imagination more than 300 years earlier. Explorers who reached the peninsula of what is now called Baja California in 1533 assumed the strip of land was an island, and equated it with the island paradise named California in a Spanish novel of the time. The old maps on view here join evidence and fantasy with an intriguing sense of confidence.

The hardships prospectors would endure to reach California matched their determination to get here, as satirized in a lively Gold Rush era Currier and Ives lithograph picturing not just overfilled boats but a dirigible, a one-man rocket and a dock full of desperate men eager to hitch a ride on anything that moved westward.

The complexity of power relations between ethnic groups in the state is touched upon in different sections of the show, but not addressed in the substantive way it deserves. Chinese immigrants and Native Americans play minor roles in the show that belie their integral role in the history of the state.

*

The dynamics of subjugation and “civilization” come rushing forward in a particularly unsettling portrait from 1867, “Sacramento Indian With Dogs,” by Charles Christian Nahl. The formally dressed man seated in an outdoor clearing among pedigreed pets appears to be a landed gentleman, but is actually a domestic servant, an Indian whose model appearance is meant to telegraph the success of his white employer, but which, implicitly, documents the demotion of the land’s original residents to second-class citizens.

California seized the imagination of those inspired by greed as well as those motivated by pure awe at the splendor of the land, painters like Albert Bierstadt (represented here by several glorious landscapes) and photographers like Carleton Watkins. Comprising the rough edge of our country, California has always embodied extremity. It makes grand claims for itself, and others--including the artists represented here--have made grand claims on its behalf. Their visions are often exactly that: fabrications, illusions, illustrations of the myth, rather than documentation of the reality. Curator Perry fleshes out the history to some extent in her catalog text, but “Pacific Arcadia” is, ultimately, more about what California promised than about what it delivered.

* “Pacific Arcadia: Images of California 1600-1915,” San Diego Museum of Art, “Picturing Paradise: San Diego in the Eye of the Artist 1875-1940,” 1450 El Prado in Balboa Park, (619) 232-7931. Through Jan. 9. Closed Mondays.