California Art History / Articles contained in Resource Library without named authors: Cal-Can

California Art History

with an emphasis on representational art

(above: Thomas Hill, Palo Alto Spring, 1879, oil on canvas, 86 5/8 x 138 3/8 in., Cantor Art Center. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Resource Library articles honoring the American experience through its art

Cal

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

Go to The California Art Club, established in 1909, the Western United States' largest professional art organization. Starting in 1913, and continuing for many years, the club held annual exhibitions in the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art in Exposition Park, which evolved into the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, with the art component moving to Wilshire Boulevard and named the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In the fall of 1927 the club moved into its first "permanent" clubhouse, the elegant Hollyhock House designed inside and out by Frank Lloyd Wright. Exhibitions, lectures and gala social functions were held at Hollyhock for fifteen years. In 1999, the club opened the California Art Club Gallery in the Old Mill building in San Marino, CA. The Old Mill was built in 1816 as a grist mill to Mission San Gabriel and is believed to be the oldest commercial building in Southern California. Also see California Art Club 90th Annual Gold Medal Exhibition, Old California, In the Tradition: Paintings of San Diego County by the San Diego Chapter of the California Art Club and California Art Club Forms First Regional Chapter in San Diego County.

Go to California Dreamin': Contemporary Art from the Bank of America Collection, a 1999 exhibit at the Bank of America Gallery, located within Charlotte's Mint Museum of Craft + Design. While many think of the Statue of Liberty as symbolizing the American melting pot, it is in fact the state of California which truly showcases the diversity in American culture. And in no arena is this more emphatically stated than in the visual arts. The artists working in the state over the last thirty years represent the range of aesthetic styles, ethnic backgrounds and approaches to subject matter found throughout the country

Go to California, The Golden Years: Selections from the Bowers Permanent Collection, a 2002 exhibit at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art featuring landscapes and figure paintings. Visitors will find familiar scenes of Laguna Beach and Orange County, as well as views of southern and northern California, painted by such noted artist as William Wendt and Joseph Kleitsch. Figure paintings in the Impressionist style include Guy Rose's beautiful portrait of Marguerite (c. 1900-1910) and Fannie Duvall's Confirmation Class, San Juan Capistrano (1897), one of the earliest works included in the exhibition.

Go to California Impressionists at Laguna , a 2000 exhibit at the Florence Griswold Museum organized by Florence Griswold Museum curator Jack Becker, consists of twenty-six paintings by over a dozen California artists and selected works by members of the Lyme Art Colony, providing opportunity to compare and contrast the styles and subjects of the Lyme and Laguna Impressionists. The exhibition examines how the colonies contributed to the very identity of their regions; in the case of Laguna as a new Eden of perpetual sunshine, and for Lyme as a place rooted in traditional New England values. (left: William Wendt (1865-1946), South Coast Highway, Laguna Beach, 1918, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 inches, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas B. Stiles II)

Go to California Impressionists, a 1997 Crocker Art Museum exhibit originated by the Georgia Museum of Art and the Irvine Museum. It brings together canvassed by major artists who adopted the techniques of painting directly from nature using short brush strokes from French Impressionism. They likewise sought to capture ephemeral effects of light and atmosphere of California landscape motifs. Works by artists working in both Northern and Southern California are featured, allowing comparisons between their approaches. Of special importance are the paintings created by William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam during their visits to the state in 1914. These compliment views created by artists such as Bischoff, Rose and Wendt, who spent significant portions of their life working on the West Coast.

Go to California Impressions Featuring Landscapes from the Wendy Willrich Collection, a 2006 exhibit at the de Young Museum. The exhibition shows 33, turn-of-the century paintings and watercolors from the collection of Bay Area art patron Wendy Willrich and selections from the permanent collection of the Fine Arts Museums.

Go to California Landscape into Abstraction: Works from the Orange County Museum of Art, on exhibit in 2014 at the Orange County Museum of Art, includes fine examples of 19th and early 20th century landscape painters such as Frank Cuprien, Elmer Wachtel, and James Milford Zornes. By the 1940s, the stylistic tension between the two schools seems to be fully in place with the Modernists -- including Oskar Fischinger, Helen Lundeberg, Agnes Pelton, Frederick Wight, and Stanton McDonald Wright -- approaching the landscape as a vehicle for expressionist, surrealist, or hard-edge influences.

Go to "California Mission Hosting Art Exhibitions", an introduction to exhibits held in the Spring of 2004 at Mission San Juan Capistrano.

Go to California Paintings 1910-1940: Selections from Mills College Art Museum on exhibit in 2000 at the Orange County Museum of Art, organized by Adjunct Curator Ann Harlow from the collection of Mills College Art Museum in Oakland. The exhibition includes many paintings that have been shown rarely, if at all, in recent decades. Among them are canvases by many acclaimed California Impressionists, including Maurice Braun (1877-1941), Anne Millay Bremer (1868-1923), Clark Hobart (1868-1948), Jules Eugene Pages (1867-1946), Joseph Raphael (1869-1950), Granville Redmond (1871-1935), Matteo Sandona (1881-1964) and William Wendt (1865-1946). (left: Anne Bremer, Ravenlocks, c. 1920, oil on canvas, 30 1/2 x 25 inches, Mills College Art Museum, Estate of Albert M. Bender)

Go to California Pottery: From Missions to Modernism, a 2003 exhibition at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage of the art of the everyday, presenting an unprecedented survey of aesthetically inventive and historically significant commercially produced tiles, tableware, gardenware and accessories that were made between 1900 and 1955 by more than forty-five of the hundreds of commercial potteries that once flourished in California. The designs range from color-splashed interpretations of traditional forms to radical innovations that changed the way we live. Bill Stern, executive director of the Museum of California Design, curated the exhibition, which was drawn from forty-four California collections.

Go to California Scene Paintings from 1930 to 1960, a 2013 exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, curated by Gordon McClleland, featuring close to 75 artworks, including oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints created in the decades when this was California's most celebrated type of art. Some of the works in this exhibition were included in 1930s and 1940s exhibitions of Regionalist, American Scene, and WPA art in major museums across America. Works by key artists are featured in the exhibition, including Phil Dike, Emil Kosa Jr., Phil Paradise, Millard Sheets, Paul Sample, Ben Messick, Rex Brandt, and Dong Kingman.

Go to The California State Capitol Museum in Sacramento, California which holds an impressive collection of fine art. Visitors can see historic and modern-day paintings and sculptures dated from the mid-1850s forward. The collection includes portraits of thirty five governors as well as portraits of icons of American history including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. While some scholars attribute the Lincoln portrait to Jane Stuart, daughter of Gilbert Charles Stuart, others favor William Wynstanley, an English artist known for his copies of Gilbert Stuart's Washington portraits.

Go to California Style: 1930s and 1940s, a 1998 exhibit at the Ventura Museum of History and Art featuring sixty watercolor paintings, depicting scenes from the Depression and War years, by the most prominent artists of the time, including Millard Sheets, Phil Dike, Rex Brandt and many others, the exhibit provides a vivid portrait of Southern California during this dynamic period.

Go to California Style: 1930s and 40s, a 1977 exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art with approximately sixty watercolor works by more than twenty California artists, including Rex Brandt, Phil Dike, and Millard Sheets.

Go to California Style: Art and Fashion of the California Historical Society , a 2007 exhibit at the Autry National Center - Museum of the American West in which visitors step back over 100 years to experience California's remarkable Victorian-era opulence. Classic California and Western American paintings are exhibited alongside sumptuous ball gowns and magnificent 19th century wedding dresses, offering an invaluable glimpse of life, land, work, and fashion during this unique period.

Go to California's Native Grandeur: Preserving Vanishing Landscapes, a 2004 exhibit at The Irvine Museum in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy of California. It employs historical landscape paintings to illustrate the natural beauty of the seven ecological regions of California: the South Coast, the Central Coast, the Desert, the Great Valley, the Sierra Nevada, the Shasta-Cascades, and the North Coast. This unique exhibition is intended to raise public awareness to the delicate balance under which California's wealth of diverse plant and animal species exists.

Go to California Paintings, 1910 - 1940 from the Mills College Art Museum, a 2000 exhibit at the Laband Art Gallery, which casts light on a period that saw the simultaneous flowering of art in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. It was in the years around the 1915 Panama-Pacific Expositions in San Francisco and San Diego that California artists developed a style of landscape painting that fused an academic "naturalist" philosophy with the techniques of Impressionism, and that eventually led to other modes of artistic expression and experimentation. At the same time public interest in the visual arts was stimulated and a number of public and private arts institutions were established in the new urban centers up and down the coast. (left: Anne Bremer (1868-1923), Carmel, c. 1920, oil on canvas, 28 3/4 x 23 3/4 inches, Gift of Albert M.Bender, 1925.14)

Go to California: The Art of Water, a 2016 exhibit at the Cantor Arts Center devoted to artistic portrayals of California's most precious resource. Featuring more than 50 works made by eminent artists and photographers including Albert Bierstadt, David Hockney, William Keith, Richard Misrach and Carleton Watkins, California: The Art of Water explores objects made over the last two centuries that helped to shape ideas about water in California.

Go to California, This Golden Land of Promise: The History of California Through Art, a 2001 exhibition organized by The Irvine Museum that tells the fascinating history of California through a selection of important and rare paintings. Starting with the earliest entry of human beings in the Western Hemisphere, some 20,000 years ago, to the Gold Rush of 1849, the story of California is shown in historical paintings, engravings and photographs of artifacts.

Go to Canyons and Deserts: Picturing the Western Landscape, which explores artists' continuing fascination with the monumental grandeur of the American West. From the local canyons of Laguna and the Arroyo Seco to the vast panoramas of the Grand Canyon and painted desert, California artists have captured the power, beauty, and mystery of the Western landscape. The 1999 exhibition, on view at the Orange County Museum of Art South Coast Plaza Gallery, presents a selection of paintings, prints, and photographs by prominent California artists drawn primarily from the permanent collection. From the early twentieth-century painters William Wendt, Carl Oscar Borg, Fernand Lungren, and Conrad Buff to photographers Edward Weston, Philip Makanna, and Richard Misrach, each artist's work records a personal approach to the unique qualities of the West as subject.

(above: William Wendt, Lupine Patch, 1921, Bonhams. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*)

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.

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