California Art History / Articles contained in Resource Library without named authors: P-Z

California Art History

with an emphasis on representational art

(above: William Wendt (1865-1946), The Bay, The Bar, The Sea, The Sea, 1925. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Resource Library articles honoring the American experience through its art

P-Z

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

Go to Painted Light: California Impressionist Paintings from the Gardena High School Los Angeles Unified School District Collection, hosted by CSU Dominguez Hills in 1999, featuring works by Franz A. Bischoff, Jessie Arms Botke (1883-1971), Maurice Braun (1877-1941), Benjamin Chambers Brown, Alson Skinner Clark, Leland S. Curtis, Maynard Dixon, Victor Clyde Forsythe, John (Jack) Frost, Joe Duncan Gleason, Armin Carl Hansen, Sam Hyde Harris, Clarence Kaiser Hinkle, Frank Tenney Johnson, Emil Jean Kosa, Jr., Jean Mannheim, Peter Nielsen, Edgar Alwin Payne, Hanson Duvall Puthuff, John Hubbard Rich, Carl Clemens Moritz Rungius, Walter Elmer Schofield, Clyde Eugene Scott, Jack Wilkinson Smith, James Guifford Swinnerton, Marion Kavanagh Wachtel, William Wendt (1865-1946) and Orrin Augustine White.

Go to Painted Light: California Impressionist Paintings: The Gardena High School/Los Angeles Unified School District Collection which toured to The Irvine Museum in 1999.

Go to Painting Partners, a 1998 exhibit at The Irvine Museum, displaying an interesting selection of California paintings that examines the close relationships that exist among artists. These relationships may be direct, as in husband and wife teams such as Edgar Payne (1883-1947) and Elsie Palmer Payne (1884-1971), Elmer Wachtel (1864-1929) and Marion Kavanagh Wachtel (1876-1954), or Edouard Vysekal (1890-1939) and Luvena Buchanan Vysekal (1873-1954). Other relationships reflect parent and child, such as Elanor Colburn(1866-1939) and her daughter Ruth Peabody (1898-1966). The greatest relationships, however, are those between close friends. Among the many pairings of painting partners are Hanson Puthuff (1875-1972) and Sam Hyde Harris (1889-1977), who were lifelong friends and frequently accompanied each other on painting trips. Likewise, the bond between Guy Rose (1867-1925) and John Frost (1890-1937) has often been compared to that of uncle and nephew.

Go to Painting World War II: The California Style Watercolor Artists on display in 2010 at The Oceanside Museum of Art, an historic first examination of paintings by California Style watercolor artists on the subject of WWII. Over 60 paintings depicting scenes of California mobilizing for the war as well as images of the war overseas will be on view. Featured artists include Arthur Beaumont, Rex Brandt, Hardie Gramatky, Dong Kingman, Barse Miller, Phil Paradise, Charles Payzant, Ed Reep, Millard Sheets, and Milford Zornes.

Go to Peaceful Awakening: Spring in California, an Irvine Museum 2007 exhibition, adorning the walls of the galleries with gentle rolling hills, secluded meadows and valleys covered with brilliant wildflowers as far as the eye can see.

Go to Pop! From San Francisco Collections, a 2004 exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Drawn from local private and museum collections, as well as SFMOMA's own, Pop! features some one hundred paintings, sculptures and works on paper. Included are pieces by such luminary New York artists as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein alongside works by California artists Ed Ruscha, Wayne Thiebaud, and Robert Arneson, among others, underscoring the role of the West Coast in this pivotal movement and demonstrating the wealth of quintessential Pop art holdings in the Bay Area,

Go to Preserving California's Gold. a1999 article by Sarah Bessera. In 1986, the Oak Group was born out of conversations between veteran landscape painter and muralist Ray Strong of Santa Barbara and landscape painter Arturo Tello. In the more than 12 years since its founding, these 30 Santa Barbara area painters have become eloquent and dedicated political activists in defense of endangered lands. They have become the role models for other painting groups who want to protect open spaces in other regions of the State.

Go to Representing LA, Pictorial Currents in Contemporary Southern California Art, featured at the Frye Museum in 2000, the first group exhibition to explore the rich and varied representational painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture produced by Southern California artists from 1990 to 2000, filling a gap in West Coast and Southern California art history by surveying and interpreting about 80 works by 70 artists working in representational or realist styles and approaches.

Go to Romance of the Bells: The California Missions in Art, a 2004 travelling exhibition organized by The Irvine Museum. When people think of California, the visual image that often comes up is that of a gentle land, with rolling hills of oak trees and wildflowers, dotted with buildings of weathered adobe walls and red-tiled roofs. These and other idyllic images of old California are rooted in the romantic period of California's past that is associated with the missions. Twenty-one California missions and a number of branch missions (asistencias) were founded between 1769 and 1823, yet that brief period of barely 54 years had a lasting effect on the artistic and social fabric of our Golden State.

Go to Scene in Oakland, 1852-2002: Artworks Celebrating the City's 150th Anniversary, on view in 2002 at the Oakland Museum of California, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, watercolors and photographs dating from 1852 to 2002, featuring views of Oakland by 48 prominent California artists. The scenes depicted include a wide variety of the city's landmarks, districts, architecture and activities

Go to Sierra Grandeur is on exhibit in 2001 at the Wildling Art Museum. It presents a selection of oil paintings from the Schaeffer Foundation Collection, comprises paintings of the Sierra Nevada by California artists active between 1880 and 1950, and includes paintings by Orrin White, Edgar Payne Carl Henrik Jonnevold, Paul Lauritz, Jones Messiman, and Leland Curtis.

Go to The Sixteenth National Biennial Exhibition of the Los Angeles Printmaking Society, a 2001 exhibit at the Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University. Since its inception in the early 1970s, the National Biennial Exhibition of the Los Angeles Printmaking Society has been the only regular survey of the evolving field of printmaking presented in California.

Go to Society of Six: American Masters of Color, a 2003 Wiegand Gallery show of Society of Six paintings with works from numerous private collections and the Oakland Museum of California. They were once deemed "too rough and audacious for the refined Bay Area art establishment." Now the works of 'The Six' are regarded as the most advanced painting of the early 20th century in Northern California. The Society of Six -- Selden Conner Gile, August F. Gay, Maurice Logan, Louis Siegriest, Bernard von Eichman and William H. Clapp -- were plein air painters who worked closely together in Northern California from about 1915 to 1930, and who came to be celebrated for their fresh and direct approach.

Go to Spacious Skies: California Impressionist Cloud Studies and Seascapes, a 1998 exhibit at The Irvine Museum. Along with paintings of cloud-filled skies, the museum will portray the natural cycle of California's water. We will follow water from the rains of winter to the snow pack of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the streams and rivers that drain into valleys, and the lakes and beaches that are the ultimate destination of the water, before it returns to the sky as evaporation.

Go to Spring in California, a 2003 Irvine Museum exhibit of landscape and flower paintings. The familiar nostalgic ideal of California as an unsullied Eden is evident in numerous paintings executed nearly a century ago. Bygone vistas of gentle rolling hills, covered with brilliant wildflowers as far as the eye could see, adorn the walls of the museum. Many of these works were painted in meadows and plateaus deep in the hills but a surprising number of them are located in or near what are now bustling cities.

Go to Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing, a 2003 exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art surveying the connection between the visual arts and surfing. It has been featured in The New York Times as well as numerous other national publications throughout its tour with stops in Hawaii and Virginia Beach, VA.

Go to This Side of Eden: Images of Steinbeck's California, a 1998 exhibit at the Laguna Art Museum, which covers a tumultuous period in California's and the country's history, two world wars and the Great Depression, and features over fifty works of art from forty different artists reflecting California in the 1920's, 30's and 40's. Many of the works in the exhibition reflect Steinbeck's literature and influence.

The exhibition represents an intrinsic view of an inspiring and trying time that generated both art and literature of great historic and artistic value. Works include rural scenes in the Salinas Valley and early Monterey as well as local customs and life during those years. Several important watercolors by Millard Sheets discovered in 1988 showing the lives of 1930's migrant fieldworkers are part of the exhibit Other artists include Leon Amyx, Bruce Ariss, Albert Barrows, Jane Berlandina,·Peggy Worthington Best, Lee Blair, Lester Boronda, Burton Boundey, Frances Brooks, Lois Green Cohen, Sam Colburn, George Corbit, James Peter·Cost, George DeMaine, Albert Thomas DeRome, Marguerite Dorgeloh, James Fitzgerald, Oscar Gaigiani, Frank J. Gavencky, August Gay, Jay Hannah, Armin Hansen, Doug Kingman, Emil Kosa Jr., Art Landy, Jeannette Maxfield Lewis, Xavier Martinez, Frank Harmon Myers, Smith O'Brien, Gottardo Piazzoni, Julius Pommer, Granville Redmond, Henrietta Shore, Ray Strong, Herman Struck, Alexander Warshawsky and Willaim Harvey Wiliiamson. (left: Art Landy, Field Workers (untitled), c. 1935)

Go to Treasures of the Sierra Nevada, a 1998 exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. It feature 45 on location paintings by historic and contemporary artists of the California Art Club. Historic paintings are on loan by Joan Irvine Smith Fine Arts, Inc. The following California Art Club artists are featured: Meredith Brooks Abbott, Peter Adams, Ken Auster, Paula V. Bacinski, Suzanne Baker, Lisa Bloomingdale Bell, John Bohnenberger, John Budicin, Carole Cooke, Richard Coons, Michael Dancer, David Damm, Karl Dempwolf, Dennis Doheny, Don Durborow, Esther Engelman, Ted Goerschner, Donald Hildreth, Tom Hoon, Rick Humphrey, David Jonas, S. Burkett Kaiser, Jean LeGassick, Kevin Macpherson, Stephen Mirich, Ralph Oberg, Daniel Pinkham, Ray Roberts, Amy Sidrane, Marilyn Simandle, Tim Solliday, Alexey Steele, Leonid Steele, George Strickland, and Sarah Vedder.

Go to Un/Familiar Territory, a 2003 exhibition of work by ten artists that addresses the interface of cultural place and personal identity at the San Jose Museum of Art. Co-curated by Senior Curator JoAnne Northrup and Director of Education Val DeLang, the exhibition includes a wide range of viewpoints and media by the following artists: Ruth Boerefijn, Enrique Chagoya, Albert Chong, Allan deSouza, Cia Foreman, Arnold J. Kemp, Bari Kumar, Dinh Q. Lê, Juan Carlos Quintana, and Consuelo Jiménez Underwood.

Go to USC Collects California on display in 2000 at the USC Fisher Gallery, spanning a hundred years and reflecting a wide range of media and styles The exhibition is articulated around three main groupings: "Representing California," "Making Art in California" and Maynard Dixon's "Jinks Room" murals. It ranges from the landscapes of Charles L. A. Smith, Aaron Edward Kilpatrick (1872-1953), Emil Jean Kosa, Jr. and Frances Hammell Gearhart (1869-1958), to Julius Shulman's photographs of urban Los Angeles and Reverend Ethan Acres' exuberant "Miracle at La Brea."

Go to The Vanishing Landscape, a 2002 exhibit at The Irvine Museum which comprises a selection of paintings by leading California Impressionists that show various familiar parts of California as they appeared prior to development. It is a unique look at our communities in vistas that no longer exist, truly a show of vanishing landscapes.

Go to Views and Visions: Celebrating California, a 2006 exhibit at the Reynolds Gallery. It is a celebration of California's beauty through a special invitational show featuring some of the region's finest landscape painters. The exhibit features the oil paintings of well-known Santa Barbara artist Meredith Brooks Abbott and her daughter, Whitney Abbott. Other participating artists associated with the Westmont Art Council and Art Department are Sandy Leue Rogers, wife of Westmont Physics Professor Warren Rogers, Barry Berkus, Patricia Chidlaw, Tom Cummings, Jim Dow, Priscilla Fossek, Karen Gruszka, Jeremy Harper, Ruth Ellen Hoag, David Holt, Joan Landis, Wayne McCall, Leonardo Nunez, Karin Shelton, Erling Sjovold, Garrett Speirs, Cory Steffen, Nicole Strasburg, Arturo Tello, Karin Young.

Go to Well of Gold and Other Paintings of Summer in California, a 2003 exhibit at The Irvine Museum which portrays California as experienced by our Plein-Air, or outdoors, artists of the past century. The name of this exhibition is also the title of a painting by Phil Dike (1906-1990) from 1928. Painted in broad strokes of thick oil paint, it shows a small family farm and the hard working people who struggle to make their future in this land of great potential. Another painting of bygone California is Rain After the Frost, 1937, by Dike's friend and painting companion Rex Brandt (1914-2000). Set on a railroad crossing, Brandt painted the feeling of the cold, windy and dreary day with the sentimentality of a simpler time and place.

William Alexander Griffith (1866-1940): Plein Air Painter, a 1999 exhibit at the Oceanside Museum of Art. Griffith came in 1918 to San Diego for what was to be only a sabbatical year. He became so enamored of the painting possibilities of this beautiful state that he left his twenty-one year position as head of the Art Department at the University of Kansas and brought his wife and five children to California in order to become a full-time painter. He settled in Laguna Beach and became a charter member of the Laguna Beach Art Association along with fellow painters and neighbors, Edgar and Elsie Payne, William Wendt, Anna Althea Hills and Frank Cuprien. The historical importance of these painters has inspired many exhibitions throughout the country.

Go to Winds of Change: Progressive Artists, 1915-1935, a 2004 exhibit at The Irvine Museum. When compared to the plein-air style, the work of Modernist artists tends to favor overall flatter surface designs instead of portraying realistic three-dimensional effects of natural depth. The forms they create usually follow rhythmic lines that echo or complement each other. Moreover, they tend to intensify colors in larger, simpler brushstrokes and simplify forms such as houses, hills, and trees by using stylized sets of patterns. Among the artists represented are Frank Myers (1899-1956), Elanor Colburn (1899-1939), Emil Kosa, Jr. (1903-1968), Francis Todhunter (1884-1963), Phil Paradise (1905-1997) and Mischa Askenazy (1881-1961).

Go to A Woman's Touch: Selected Women Artists in California, a 2004 exhibit at The Irvine Museum. Far from being limited to a dilettante role, women artists in California were important figures in the early part of the twentieth century and excelled in landscape painting, as well as portrait, figural, and still-life. Moreover, they set the standard in such diverse media as oil painting, watercolor, and sculpture. Not all California painters were inspired by the French Impressionists. Starting in about 1914, a group of progressive artists, usually women, began to show works of strong modernist principles. Among these were Mabel Alvarez (1891-1985), Elanor Colburn (1866-1939), Meta Cressey (1882-1964), Helen Forbes (1891-1945), Donna Schuster (1883-1953) and Elsie Palmer Payne (1884-1971). Their bold use of color and line is in stark contrast to the realistic appearance of the Plein-Air paintings usually associated with this period.

Go to Yosemite: Art of an American Icon, a 2007 exhibit at the Autry National Center - Museum of the American West. From an ideal of wilderness to the complex and often congested experience of the park today, this exhibition explores Yosemite's changing visual identity and cultural role as a national destination. By giving us a broader look at Yosemite as a complex, multifaceted landscape rich in aesthetic and human diversity, it aims to reveal this course and more.

Go to Yosemite: Art of an American Icon, a 2008 exhibit at the Nevada Museum of Art. The power of art-to shape the way we see, use and protect Western lands-is the focus of this exhibit. From romantic depictions of wilderness to images of the complex and often congested experience of the park today, it explores Yosemite's changing visual identity and cultural role as a national destination. Yosemite spans three centuries and includes works by Albert Bierstadt, Ansel Adams, Eadweard Muybridge, Chiura Obata and Anne Brigman.

Go to You See: The Early Years of the UC Davis Art Faculty, a 2008 exhibition at the Hearst Art Gallery at Saint Mary's College, the largest public exhibition ever of work by University of California, Davis faculty members Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Manuel Neri, Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley. The exhibition includes 36 works from the Nelson's permanent collection. "The Palace at 9 a.m.," Arneson's enormous ceramic ode to his '50s-era Davis tract home, anchors the show, together with three Thiebaud masterworks and three of Neri's most admired figurative sculptures. "Crash," Arneson's bronze homage to Jackson Pollock, is also included, together with rarely seen paintings, drawings and prints by De Forest and Wiley. The five Davis artists are sometimes identified with "California funk," characterized by bawdy irreverence, iconoclasm and self-deprecating humor.

(above: William Hahn, Market Scene, Sansome Street, San Francisco, oil on canvas, 60 x 96? inches, Crocker Art Museum. 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.

(above: Albertus Del Orient Browere, The Lone Prospector, 1853, oil on canvas, Oakland Museum of California. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*)

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