The term California Plein-Air Painting describes the large movement of 20th century California artists who worked out of doors, directly from nature in California, United States. Their work became popular in the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California in the first three decades after the turn of the 20th century. Considered the be a regional variation on American Impressionism, the painters of the California Plein-Air School are also described as California Impressionists, the terms are used interchangeably.
The California Plein-Air artists depicted the California landscape - the foothills, mountains, seashores, and deserts of the interior and coastal regions. California Impressionism reached its peak of popularity in the years before the Great Depression. The California Plein-Air painters [1] generally painted in a bright, chromatic palette with "loose" painterly brush work that showed some influence from French Impressionism. These artists gathered in art colonies in places like Carmel-by-the-Sea and Laguna Beach as well as in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Pasadena.
Organizations like the California Art Club, the Painters and Sculptors Club, San Francisco's Sketch Club, The Carmel Art Association, The Laguna Beach Art Association [2] and the Los Angeles Museum of History, Art and Architecture [3] played a key role in popularizing the work of the Plein-Air Painters of California. While Impressionist-influenced paintings remained popular in California well after it did in Europe or the Eastern United States, as the Depression worsened and newer, more modern styles became accepted, the movement fell into decline. This slumber that would last more than four decades.
Most of the these Plein-Air painters came from the East, the Midwest and Europe and only a few of the early artists such as Guy Rose (1867–1925) were actually born and raised in California. Some of the most prominent names associated with the Plein-Air school are the fore mentioned Rose, William Wendt (1865–1946) [4], Granville Redmond (1871–1935), Edgar Payne, Armin Hansen (1886–1957), Jean Mannheim (1861-1945), John Marshall Gamble (1863–1957), Franz Bischoff (1864–1929), William Ritschel (1864–1949), Alson S. Clark (1876–1949), Hanson Puthuff (1875–1972), Marion Wachtel (1875–1954) and Jack Wilkinson Smith (1873–1949). [5] Most of these artists were already trained in art when they moved to California, arriving between 1900 and the early 1920s.
In the 1890s, painting in Northern California began to progress from the grand vistas of specific locations that had been popular in the 1870s and 1880s, to more intimate views. [6] This second generation of Northern California landscape artists were less concerned about the details of specific locations than they were about recording the color, atmosphere and feelings they experienced when they sketched. William Keith, known as "The Dean of Northern California" painters, completed this transition in his own work. He began his career as a painter of picturesque landscapes, many of them of massive size. Then, after traveling abroad, he began to concentrate on "mood", eliminating what he saw as unnecessary detail from his landscapes. In the cool, misty climes of the north, this aesthetic view that is described as California Tonalism took hold.
Many of the Northern California painters were influenced by the works of the French painters of the Barbizon School who worked in the forest south of Paris in the mid-19th century as well as the American landscape master George Inness (1825–1894)[7] and the American expatriate James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903). Northern California Tonalist landscapes can be recognized by its simplified compositions and an limited palette that gave the paintings close color harmonies. Some of the other major Northern California Tonalists were Arthur and Lucia Matthews, who headed of the Bay Area Arts and Crafts Movement, [8] the morose and melancholy moonlight painter Charles Rollo Peters (1862–1928), the flamboyant Xavier Martinez (1869–1943) and the painter and muralist Giuseppe Cadenasso (1858–1918). While many of the Northern California painters did paint extensively out of doors, most of the works were done in their studio, stylized and poetic visions, a step away from the type of Plein-Air "visual snapshot" or "impression" favored by the French school. [9]
After 1915 and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which brought many French and American Impressionist masterworks to San Francisco, more Northern California painters adopted a more chromatic palette and dappled brushwork that was closer to French Impressionism and they adopted high-key midday subjects. Some of the best known Northern California painters who worked in a more impressionistic manner were the marine painter Armin Hansen, the coastal landscape painter Bruce Nelson and E. Charlton Fortune (1885–1969), a talented Monterey woman who gave up easel painting for ecclesiastical decoration. Two of the most prominent California Impressionists who lived in Carmel and were known for their marine subjects were William Ritschel and Paul Dougherty, both of whom developed national reputations long before they moved west. [10]
Los Angeles developed more slowly than the San Francisco, where the California Gold Rush caused the rapid expansion of its wealth and art scene, so there were few artists and even fewer collectors in the years before the turn of the 20th century. As first the Painters Club (1906) and then the California Art Club (1909) [11] were founded and the first commercial galleries opened, Southern California began to draw artists and patrons and a bright, airy Impressionist aesthetic became dominant.[12] This coincided with a tremendous population boom in Southern California. From early in the 20th century, Southern California painters generally worked in a much higher key then their Northern California contemporaries.[13] This seems almost natural, for the Southland was a land of almost perpetual sunshine. The painters didn't need the earth tones that were favored by the Northern California painters and instead adopted a broad, chromatic palette that helped them to capture the brilliant light that bathed the hills and valleys of Southern California. William Wendt, one of the founders and the long serving president of the California Art Club [14]was a bold stylist known for his paintings of California in the springtime. The Austrian Franz Bischoff [15]and the Alsatian-born Jean Mannheim were both converts to California Impressionism. Guy Rose, whose father was a leading rancher was a Los Angeles native who was trained in San Francisco and Paris and while in France he became an enthusiastic proponent of Impressionism. He only came home in 1914, after years of living in the Giverny art colony. [16]
The decline of the California Plein-Air Movement was gradual. While art historians have described California Impressionism's long popularity as "the Indian Summer of American Impressionism," the movement eventually began to give way to more modern movements, both in the press and among collectors. The Great Depression was severe blow to the art market. The economy made life rough for the galleries the lack of sales hastened the decline of the Plein-Air school. As modernism began to supplant the artists of the Southland art organizations in the museums, a long series of artistic battles were fought, with the modernists on one side and the traditionalists on the other and no one seemed to believe that co-existence was possible. When the older Plein-Air painters, most of whom were then entering their later years, were vanquished, they left the scene in bitter defeat. By the late 1940s, most of the artists who had exhibited extensively in the 1920s had died and the remaining painters were often reduced to showing in lesser venues alongside hobby painters and artists of lesser talent and by the 1960s, the strength, breadth and vitality that the California Impressionist movement had at its peak was largely forgotten.
Historically, from the time that interest in the first generation of Plein-Air Painters like Edgar Payne, William Wendt and Marion Wachtel began to wane in the 1930s, there was little interest in Early California paintings for more than thirty years. Even the masterworks of California Impressionism were available for a few thousand dollars or less. When the Southland painters of the 1920s were discussed, they were often derisively called The Eucalyptus School. Led by a number of pioneering art historians like Nancy Moure, then with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Southern California and Harvey Jones of the Oakland Museum of California in Northern California, dealers, collectors art writers began to recognize that a major movement of Impressionist-influenced painters had been active in California between 1910 and 1940. Interest in California's Plein-Air painters was aided by the historic preservation movement and interest in the Arts and Crafts Movement in California.
As interest in the American Arts and Crafts Movement increased and historic preservation became popular, young curators, art historians and art dealers began to mount exhibits and write books and articles on California Plein-Air Painting. [17]By the 1980s, there was a broad interest in California Impressionism. Now, there are dozens of commercial galleries specializing in this group of artists, a broad base of collectors, a number of museums with extensive collections and hundreds of scholarly and "coffee table" books on the movement. By the late 1970s, galleries and antique "pickers" were beginning to recognize that the Plein-Air School was good business as there were thousands of paintings in the homes of aging residents and available in flea markets and second-hand stores. The second generation dealer Jean Stern, who was then at the helm of the Peterson Gallery in Beverly Hills hosted retrospective exhibitions for Franz Bischoff and other artists of the Plein-Air school with small color catalogs, signaling that the early painters of Los Angeles were worthy of both scholarly and commercial attention. Jean Stern's younger brother George Stern, an attorney, opened the George Stern Gallery in Encino and Ray Redfern, another second generation dealer, took over the family firm from his mother and began to specialize in the works of the Laguna Beach painters. Marian Bowater opened the Bowater Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard's "Gallery Row"and began to specialize in Plein-Air Painters. In 1977 the Laguna Art Museum hosted a retrospective for William Wendt, the most important figure in early Los Angeles painting,which was curated by Nancy Moure. The following year Moure released her landmark Dictionary of Art and Artists in Southern California Before 1930, which, for the first time allowed collectors to know whose work it was they were looking at. Moure also curated a retrospective exhibition for the Laguna Beach Museum with illustrations of works by dozens of painters who had been active there. [18]
In 1981 in conjunction with the Los Angeles Bicentennial, an exhibition of early California painting was held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and commercial venues like Peterson Galleries and Morseburg Galleries also hosted exhibitions that were part of the city's official activities. In 1982 the well-crafted book Plein-Air Painters of California: The Southland was published by Ruth Lilly Westphal. Written by Westphal, with introductory essays by Terry DeLapp, Thomas Kenneth Enman, Nancy Moure, Martin Peterson and Jean Stern, the book, which had short essays on dozens of painters, had the effect of separating the values of the painters whose works were included in book from those who were not, perhaps a mixed blessing, but it also gave new collectors a group of names to shoot for. Westphal followed the first book with Plein-Air Painters of California: The North, in 1986.[19] Magazines like the California history magazine the Californians, Antiques and Fine Art, Art and Antiques and Tom Kellaway's reorganized American Art Review also played an important role in publishing articles on the California Plein-Air painters and carrying advertisements from the galleries that spread awareness of the movement.
By the late 1980s, because of the tremendous interest in the early California Plein-Air Painters, collectors gradually became interested in younger painters who were working in the same tradition. In the case of Peter Seitz Adams (b. 1950), Arny Karl (1940–2000) and Tim Solliday (b. 1952) the artists were students of one of the original Plein-Air painters, the portrait artist and plein-air pastelist Theodore Lukits (1897–1992)[20] and these three artists had been sketching together since the 1970s. In the case of Dan Pinkham, Joseph Mendez and Sunny Apinchapong Yang,[21] they had studied under the Russian Impressionist Sergei Bongart (1918–1985) [22] while the Ojai painter Richard Rackus (b. 1922) had studied in the late 1930s and early 1940s when many of the original California Impressionists were still teaching. This loose group of plein-air painters were exhibiting their work at a number of commercial galleries including Poulsen Galleries in Pasadena and Morseburg Galleries in Los Angeles. At the same time, a number of other out-door painters formed a new organization, the Plein-Air of America ("PAPA"). Their first exhibition, the 1st Annual Plein-Air Painters Festival, was organized in 1986 by the artist Denise Burns and Roy Rose, the grand-nephew of the Impressionist Roy Rose. This annual painting festival and sale was held on Santa Catalina Island until 2003 as the organization expanded well beyond the boundaries of California. In Santa Barbara, a group of younger painters was also coming together, grouped around the elderly regionalist Ray Strong (1905–2006). [23] This group of artists was formalized as the Oak Group in 1985 and it spread interest in plein-air painting promoted environmental awareness on the Central California Coast. [24] Perhaps the major turning point in the California Plein-Air Revival was the reorganization and revitalization of the historic California Art Club in 1993 under the leadership of Peter and Elaine Adams. Adams recruited most of the recognized contemporary California landscape painters for the revived CAC and it soon began to sponsor exhibitions that helped to expand what had been a number of loosely affiliated artists into a broad and well-organized movement.[25]
By the early 1990s, Peter Seitz Adams and a number of other Contemporary Traditional Artists saw the need for an organization that could help to bring order to what they saw as the reemerging traditional art movement in California. Adams and his wife Elaine and Jeffrey Morseburg had been discussing the need for an organization that could mount exhibitions and promote the artists who were reviving California Plein-Air Painting. [26] In 1993, when Verna Guenther, who was a member of the historic California Art Club, came to Morseburg to see if he knew anyone younger who would be capable of taking over the venerable organization that then consisted of an aging cohort of painters, Morseburg suggested Peter and Elaine Adams. The Adams saw the value in taking over an existing organization to promote traditional fine arts rather than forming a new one. Peter Adams soon accepted the Presidency of the California Art Club and has served in that capacity since that time. In order to reorganize the California Art Club, Adams recruited most of the active professional landscape and figurative painters that he knew. The core group of artists who became members of the reorganized California Art Club primarily consisted of students of Theodore Lukits or Sergei Bongart. Among the first group of painters to join the CAC included Tim Solliday, Bill Stout, Stephen Mirich, Steve Houston, Dan Goozee, Dan Pinkham, Sunny Apinchapong, Richard Rackus (b.1922) and the Russian painters, Alexander Orlov and Alexey Steele. Because of the tremendous influx of academically trained Chinese painters in California, Adams and the CAC added painters like Mian Situ, Michael Situ, and Jove Wang to its roster. Some of the artists who had been vital members of the California Art Club prior to the Adams administration, such as Don and Wanda Duborow and Rolf and Evelyn Zilmner, who was Chairman of the Gold Medal Exhibition, played important roles in the revitalization. The re-organized California Art Club soon began organizing museum shows devoted to both its historic and contemporary members [27] and soon the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History, the Frederick R. Weissman Museum at Pepperdine and other institutions were hosting exhibitions. A newsletter with articles by recognized scholars and exhibition catalogs contributed to making the works of the CAC's plein-Air painters and other artists more widely known. [28] The organization also held frequent "paint outs" where artists met and worked on location as a group. As the reorganized California Art Club matured, the emphasis on plein-air painting, the focus of many of the artists began to shift somewhat as more experienced figurative artists joined the organization. [29].
The contemporary California Plein-Air movement consisted of organizations like the California Art Club and its affiliated chapters, the Oak Group [30] in Santa Barbara and a number of commercial galleries in Los Angeles, San Diego, Laguna Beach, Carmel and San Francisco. Within the California Art Club there is a core group of painters that are in virtually every annual Gold Medal Exhibition and many of its thematic shows. This group includes David Gallup, Dan Pinkham, Stephen Mirich, Peter Adams, John Budicin, Alexey Steele, Tim Solliday, Rodolfo Rivadamar, Karl Dempwolf and John Cosby.[31] There is also a community of artists from mainland China in the California Art Club that includes Mian Situ, [32] Calvin Liang, Michael Situ, Simon Lok and Ruo Li. In the last ten years, a group of leading younger artists, now in their thirties, has also emerged which includes Glenn Dean, Eric Merrell, Jeremy Lipking and Ernesto Nemesio. Santa Barbara's Oak Group exhibits in and around that city and raises funds for the protection of open spaces. The painters who have been most active on the Santa Barbara plein-air scene have been Meredith Brooks Abbott, Marcia Burtt, Bjorn Rye, Richard Schloss, Arthur Tello, Jon Comer and the late Glenna Hartman (1948–2008). The Laguna Plein-Air Painters Association is a newer organization that hosts an annual exhibition each fall. [33] Its membership consists mainly of Orange County artists including Ken Auster, David Damm, Marcil Burtt, Michael Obermeyer, Ray Roberts, Michael Situ, Jeffrey Watts and Richard Keyes. Plein-Air painters of America, which began as a California organization, is now national in scope, but it still has a strong California membership, which includes Lynn Gertenbach, John Budicin, Gil Dellinger, Michael Siu, Calvin Liang, Louise DeMore and Joseph Mendez.[34]