California Art History / Articles contained in Resource Library without named authors: A-B

California Art History

with an emphasis on representational art

(above: Joseph Kleitsch (1882-1931), The Oriental Shop, 1922, oil on canvas, 32 x 40 in., Crocker Art Museum. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Resource Library articles honoring the American experience through its art

A-B

also see: Cal Car-CSU E-I L-O P-Z

Go to Abundance of Color: California Flowers in Art, an Irvine Museum' 2008 show that highlights the outstanding display of wildflowers that once characterized Spring in California. Bygone vistas of gentle rolling hills, covered with brilliant wildflowers, adorn the walls of the museum along with magnificent gardens and charming still life's of beautiful bouquets.

Go to All Things Bright and Beautiful: California Impressionist Paintings from the Irvine Museum, a 1998 touring exhibit organized by the Irvine Museum. A distinct artistic style combining aspects of European and American Impressionism developed in California at the beginning of the twentieth century. Responding to the abundant light of that Western state, this style is called California Impressionism or California Plein Air painting, from the French for "in the open air." All Things Bright and Beautiful features masterworks by such leading artists in the field as Franz Bischoff; Alson Clark; Colin Campbell Cooper, NA; Armin Carl Hansen, NA; Granville Redmond, Guy Rose; William Wendt, ANA and Theodore Wores.

Go to Art in the Garden: Springtime at La Mirada, a 1998 exhibit at the Monterey Museum of Art in which guests observe a number of well-known Central Coast Plein Air artists creating new work at their chosen locations throughout La Mirada's house and gardens.

Go to Artists at Continent's End: The Monterey Peninsula Art Colony, 1875-1907, a 2006 exhibit organized by the Crocker Art Museum, including some 70 paintings, photographs and works on paper drawn from museums and private collections throughout California and beyond. It features work by eight artists of major importance to California's, and America's, art history -- Jules Tavernier, William Keith, Charles Rollo Peters, Arthur Mathews, Evelyn McCormick, Francis McComas, Gottardo Piazzoni and photographer Arnold Genthe. The exhibition also includes the work of more than 25 other artists, both well- and little-known, who each contributed to the reputation of what is now widely recognized as one of America's most important art colonies.

Go to The Art Of Mount Shasta, a 2010 Turtle Bay Museum at the Turtle Bay Exploration Park exhibit for which William Miesse and Robyn G. Peterson, Ph.D, co-curators, say; "Most of the works in this exhibition, lent by museums, institutions, and private collections from around the country, stem from that San Francisco Art Boom. And these paintings are only the tip of the iceberg relative to the large number of Mount Shasta paintings in museums and private collections around the country. The current exhibition is representative of the extensive art history of the Mount Shasta region."

Go to Art Therapists As Artists, a 2003 exhibit at the Laband Art Gallery in which more than 50 works of art by practicing art therapists are on display. Juried by art critic Shirle Gottlieb of the Long Beach Press-Telegram, Art Therapists as Artists features work by 25 artists who seek to integrate psychological expertise with artistic process in a variety of ways to illuminate the human unconscious through the use of image, symbol and metaphor.

(above: Julian Walbridge Rix, Landscape, late 19th century, oil on canvas, 2 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 37 inches. Birmingham Museum of Art. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Joel E. Berenson. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*)

Go to At Home and Abroad: California Paintings from the Emmons Collection, a 2003 exhibit organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, highlights a century of significant California artists' paintings at home in California and abroad in Europe. Drawn from a local collection, the exhibition features landscape paintings, cityscapes, and figural paintings from 1905 to the present.

Go to At The Millennium: Contemporary Paintings From Northern California, a 1999 exhibit at the Monterey Museum of Art The second of two exhibitions guest curated by local collector William Hyland, the exhibit looks at the current trend in contemporary two-dimensional artwork toward elegant surfaces and simplicity of style.

Go to At the West of Things: California Artists at Home and Abroad, a 1999 exhibit organized by the Monterey Museum of Art. For the most part, the artists in this exhibition were directly exposed to prevailing art styles through study in Europe and less directly through the works of artists who had studied there. What makes California artists of this period unique is not stylistic innovation, but the growth that occurred when the aesthetics and techniques they encountered were combined with the Californian landscape, both physical and imagined. As Robinson Jeffers expresses it in his 1912 poem Epilogue, California was seen as a land apart, a place "pregnant with dreams." Many artists were drawn here by the beauty and the climate-artistic as well as geographic.

Go to The Big G Stands for Goodness Corita Kent's 1960s Pop, a 2000 exhibit at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, features 50 works surveying the disarmingly engaging, formally inventive silkscreen prints from the 1960s by Sister Mary Corita (1918-1986). Juxtaposed with these works will be works by 15 contemporary Los Angeles artists who use a similar approach to popular culture and formal experimentation with the visual display of texts; including those by Mike Kelley, Alien Ruppersberg, Karen Carson, Robert Heinecken, Alexis Smith, Michael Gonzalez, Raymond Pettibon, Larry Johnson, Steve Hurd, Lari Pittman, and Ed Ruscha.

Go to Bold Strokes: California Watercolors, organized in 2004 by the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, showcases fifteen paintings from the California Watercolor Movement, also known as California Scene Painting. This exhibition is drawn from the Museum's superb, but little known watercolor collection, and highlights those artists who embraced and depicted the regional uniqueness of agriculture, industrialization, and recreation within the California landscape from the 1930's to the 1970's. Included are works by Millard Sheets, Frederic Whitaker, Dong Kingman, and Mario Cooper.

(above: Lew E. Davis, Early Spanish Caballeros, Los Banos, CA Post Office, 1940, tempera. Treasury Department Section of Painting and Sculpture. Image courtesy of USPS)

Articles contained in Resource Library without named authors listed by article name in alphabetical order:A-B Cal Car-CSU E-I L-O P-Z

Also see: Pacific Coast Painting: Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington: 19th-21st Century

Resource Library articles and essays devoted to individual artists and institutions may not be listed in California Art History.

TFAO's Distinguished Artists catalogue provides online access to biographical information for artists associated with California. Also, Search Resource Library for online articles and essays concerning both individual artists associated with this state's history and the history of art centers and museums in California.

(above: Thomas Hill, Mount Tallac from Lake Tahoe, 1880, oil on canvas, 35.6 x 55.8 inches, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*)

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