Leaving His Mark on the Landscape

One way to account for the art of Conrad Buff is to say that he left the Swiss Alps for the even more dramatic landscape of the American Southwest and poured his soul into the natural wonders of his adopted homeland. One could also say that Buff fled the constraints of European tradition for the freedom of Southern California. Both statements are true, but there’s much more to be said about the painter of hard-edge, high-contrast Western landscapes who lived in Los Angeles from 1907 until his death in 1975.

A 50-year survey of Buff’s work--at George Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood through June 3--and a gallery-commissioned book by art historian Will South fill in many blanks of the painter’s little-known story. The artist who emerges is a shy but determined individualist who bridged the abyss between California’s conservative Impressionists and progressive Modernists in the early 20th century. Too unconventional to ally himself with the popular painters of sun-dappled eucalyptus trees, but too devoted to nature to abandon himself to pure abstraction, Buff was “an architect who painted,” as South puts it.

“His interest was in flat planes of color and the way he could construct them, like an architect putting together a building,” South said. “You look at his canvases and see massive, would-be monuments in two dimensions. They are like Egyptian pyramids and Roman coliseums, brought down to a scale that you can fit into your living room. He loved architectural space, but he also loved brilliant color and he just kept finding ways to marry those interests.”

A scholar of American art who specializes in California Modernism but is also an authority on California Impressionism, South recently became director of the University of North Carolina’s Weatherspoon Art Gallery in Greensboro. Having written his PhD dissertation on Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973), a pioneer of abstract color painting who was a major presence on Los Angeles’ art scene from the 1920s through the 1950s, South also has organized an exhibition of Macdonald-Wright’s work, which will appear at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art next year.

South said he was well aware that Buff was “in the Modernist orbit in Los Angeles in the teens, ‘20s and ‘30s in a very big way,” but didn’t delve into the artist’s background until gallery owner George Stern asked him to write the exhibition catalog. “I knew the context very well, but I only knew Conrad Buff as most people know him, through a few paintings,” he said. “I had no idea he was so prolific, that his commitment to Modernism was so strong and began so early, or that he was so fiercely independent.”

Buff was born in 1886 in the Swiss village of Speicher, near St. Gallen. His father, also named Conrad Buff, was an embroiderer who left his trade to buy a general store and, when that business failed, became a farmer. The boy’s parents were divorced, apparently because of financial woes, when he was about 15. He studied art, initially planning to design embroidery like his father, but his mother threw him out of her house when he decided to become an artist. She relented in 1905, but only to the point of scratching together enough money to send him to America.

Buff arrived at Ellis Island at age 19 and spent the next two years working his way across the country by milking cows, washing dishes, peeling potatoes, baking cakes and working on a railroad. Frequently quitting jobs over perceived abuses, he became increasingly resentful of having to work for others to eke out a living. Buff sought out other Swiss immigrants at first, but then avoided them because they seemed to embody all the shortcomings of his mothers and others at home, whom he regarded as hopelessly conservative and unimaginative.

Los Angeles turned out to be the promised land for Buff, but only after a great deal of effort. He made a living as a creative house painter and decorator, purchased a plot of land in Eagle Rock and eventually built a house there. Still hoping to be an artist, he briefly attended the Art Students League of Los Angeles, but left in a huff when he felt his artistic freedom was threatened, then took evening classes at Los Angeles High School.

His breakthrough came in 1917, when California Impressionist Edgar Payne agreed to provide murals for all 11 floors of the new Congress Hotel in Chicago and enlisted the help of other artists. Buff spent four months on the project, which introduced him to artists who would become his friends and laid the groundwork for his own career as a muralist.

Within the next few years, Buff’s personal life and artwork flowered as he met painters Franz Bischoff, Elmer Wachtel, Mabel Alvarez, Henrietta Shore, photographer Edward Weston and architects Richard Neutra and Rudolf Schindler. Among his new acquaintances was Mary Marsh, a curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Science, History and Art, whom he married in 1922.

Buff exhibited his work at the museum in Exposition Park and joined both the Impressionist-dominated California Art Club and the Modern Art Workers, led by Macdonald-Wright. He also began traveling to mountainous areas and fell in love with Utah’s spectacular rock formations. Collecting ideas on his travels, he translated them into easel paintings and murals commissioned for private homes, public buildings and corporate offices.

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By the end of the 1920s, the young man who had come to Los Angeles “with no money, no friends and no plan,” as South wrote in the catalog, was one of the city’s leading painters. His work adorned the Guaranty Building and Loan in Pasadena and Southern California Edison Co. in downtown Los Angeles, among many other buildings.

The Depression effectively ended Buff’s private commissions, but in the 1930s he painted a mural at Santa Monica High School and documented the construction of Hoover Dam for the federally funded Public Works of Art Project. Looking for new ways to make a living from his art, Buff also became an accomplished lithographer and illustrator for children’s books written by his wife. The couple also produced an artistic legacy. Their son Conrad Buff III, who died in 1988, was a prominent Southern California architect, and their grandson Conrad Buff IV is a film editor who won an Oscar for his work on “Titanic.”

As the years passed, Conrad Buff II refined his beloved Western landscapes into simpler, stronger compositions. Meticulous crosshatching gave way to bold, flat planes of color. But the trajectory of his work isn’t entirely clear, because he didn’t always date his paintings and he didn’t keep a journal.

Nonetheless, he left a large body of distinctive paintings. His work bears some similarity to that of his close friend Maynard Dixon. It also resembles the work of their East Coast contemporary Rockwell Kent, whom Buff apparently never met. But Buff’s work retains its own flavor.

“His passion for mountains speaks to his interest in architectural possibilities,” South said, noting that Buff rarely painted the Pacific Ocean, a favorite subject of the Impressionists. “In the ocean, there’s a simple bifurcation of earth and sky. There isn’t enough to build on; he couldn’t make pillars and pyramids and ziggurats. He always wanted to build something tangible and solid,” he said.

“Eventually Buff got to the point, late in his career, when he thought there should be no narrative at all in terms of murals and interior decoration, and I’m sure his architect friends fueled that kind of thinking. He believed there should be only space and color. Simplify, simplify, simplify. His last works are about simplification of masses and strips of color. There is nothing Impressionistic about them. He is much closer to the Color Field painters. And yet he still wanted to hang on to nature, which is kind of amazing. You ask yourself why he needed it, but he wanted that intense color based on nature to inform his paintings.”

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“CONRAD BUFF: A MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE,” George Stern Fine Arts, 8920 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. Dates: now through June 3. Phone: (310) 276-2600.