California Watercolor Painters in Context, essay by Donelson Hoopes

California Watercolor Painters in Context

by Donelson Hoopes

One of the first California-based artists to establish an important career as a watercolor painter was Francis John McComas. Born on the island of Tasmania, a dependency of Australia, where he first studied art, McComas emigrated to San Francisco in 1898. There he studied briefly with Arthur Mathews, then one of the most prominent artists of California. In 1899 McComas went to Paris, where he furthered his education at the renowned Academie Julian. Following his return to the United States in 1901, McComas began concentrating on the desert landscape of Arizona, a subject for which he quickly became widely known and praised. His aesthetic sensibility tended toward representations of landscape that favored a more decorative approach, with emphasis on flat patterns and broadly applied washes. In this, his work is related to the tonalists' concern for painting as abstraction from nature, rather than literal transcription. In 1912, the year that he settled permanently in Monterey, McComas began sending his work to major eastern exhibitions. The next year, in recognition of his status among the more progressive artists of his generation, McComas was included in the Armory Show, the exhibition that revolutionized the course of art in America. In what must be one of the earliest examples of a bicoastal career, McComas was also represented in the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, staged in San Francisco in 1915. The official catalog praised McComas for his mastery of the difficulties of watercolor, as well as for the acuity of his "sense of construction and feeling for effect."[11]

During the teens McComas exhibited watercolors en masse at the prestigious annuals of the Philadelphia Water Color Club held at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where, in 1918, he won the Dana Water Color Medal, awarded for work possessing "boldness, simplicity and frankness."[12] In a rare gesture of appreciation, the academy published an illustration in the exhibition catalog showing the entire group of the artist's entries; typically, the subjects were all scenes of Arizona and Monterey. Then, in 1921, at the academy's nineteenth annual, McComas garnered the Philadelphia Water Color Club Prize for "the strongest watercolor in the exhibition" for an Arizona subject, Hopi Adobes. As an indication of the eminence attaching to this award, it had gone to the dean of American impressionist painters, Childe Hassam, two years before. Coincidentally, McComas shared another honor with Hassam, and in exactly the same time frame, when he won the Hudnut Prize at the American Watercolor Society's 1921 annual exhibition in New York for Storm Clouds. As when Hassam won it two years before, the award was given to "the most meritorious watercolor in the exhibition." Clearly, McComas had validated a strong western presence among the eastern establishment, and through his example was a major force in the creation of a vital watercolor movement in California. While McComas was the first Californian to win a prize at the American Watercolor Society's exhibitions, Donna Schuster, a Los Angeles artist, was the first to have a work shown at that venue, preceding McComas by four years.[13]

At the turn of the century, watercolor painting in Southern California could claim only one important practitioner, Paul de Longpre, an immigrant French artist who settled in Hollywood. Noted for his flower still life compositions, de Longpre produced work that adhered to the meticulously descriptive style promoted by Ruskin half a century earlier. But it was nor until 1921, when the medium had attracted sufficient interest among the artist community of Los Angeles, that the California Water Color Society was established.[14] All of the fourteen artists who comprised the founding members of the society were primarily oil painters. The group included Hanson Duvall Puthuff, whose style was solidly rooted in the California plein air tradition. He was a prolific painter as well as an effective sponsor of local art organizations, such as the Art Students League of Los Angeles and the California Art Club, organized in 1909.[15] After exhibiting in the first three annuals of the California Water Color Society, Puthuff discontinued his submissions to these shows. Significantly, the society was beginning to shift away from the traditions that Puthuff's generation represented.

After the mid-1920s, there appeared a number of progressive young artists on the society's roster of members, including Millard Sheets, Phil Dike, Barse Miller, and Hardie Gramatky. Others of a similar persuasion, such as Paul Sample, Phil Paradise, Tom Craig, Lee Blair, Rex Brandt, and Emil J. Kosa, Jr. continued to join the society over the next decade and to transform it. As Nancy Moure has observed, "The style [these men] created was later named the 'California style,' and although it dominated the 1930s, it lasted far beyond that decade. It was characterized by large format size, free, bold brush work, and strong, dark, rich colors."[16] Brandt who in 1937 was the last of these artists to join the society, organized and participated in an important state-wide traveling exhibition that year, The California Group, which through reviews in the Art Digest carried this new and vital approach to watercolor to other parts of the country. Conversely, by 1939 the society had established a pattern for inviting work from artists living in other parts of the United States and abroad. Its annual exhibition for that year included such luminaries from the East as Charles Burchfield, Reginald Marsh, Edward Hopper, and the youthful Andrew Wyeth, just then at the threshold of his career. Strong affinities can be discerned in much of this interaction; as, for example, in the work of Emil Kosa, one is struck by his shared interest with Marsh in forthright depiction of the American industrial scene as a valid concern for art.[17]

Kosa's debut in the national arena occurred at the American Watercolor Society's 1936 annual, held, as customary, in the galleries of the American Fine Arts building in New York. This was an auspicious occasion for the Californians; for the first time the contingent was represented in strength, with no fewer than thirteen papers. [18] Two years later, one of Kosa's entries, Handsome Trouble, won the Zabriskie Prize at the society's annual and was duly illustrated in the accompanying catalog.[19] From 1938 through 1947 Kosa also appeared consistently in the annual exhibitions of the Philadelphia Water Color Club, without capturing any prizes, however. That first year was something of an unfulfilled promise for Kosa, since one of his typical truck subjects was chosen to be illustrated in the catalog.[20] The 1938 Philadelphia watercolor show ran the gamut of stylistic mannerisms, from the technically daunting, if slick, work of Eliot O'Hara to Andrew Wyeth's more traditional approach, rooted in the earnest realism of Winslow Homer. But it was another Californian, Barse Miller, who succeeded in carrying off the Philadelphia Water Color Club Prize that year, awarded to his Mainline Tragedy which the jury deemed "the strongest watercolor in the exhibition."

In his late teens, Miller had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy, and perhaps because of this early association, he was a frequent exhibitor there. From 1929 to 1951 Miller submitted some seventy-six watercolors to the academy's shows, as well as a lesser number of oils to the venerable academy annuals devoted to that medium. As such, his academy exhibition record exceeds, quantitatively, that of any other California artist represented there during these years, and even surpasses the number of works he sent to the exhibitions of the California Water Color Society. In the summer of 1939 Miller conducted highly acclaimed studio courses at the University of Vermont, and again the following year when he was joined by another summer transplant from California, Rex Brandt. The state's leading newspaper proclaimed that ". . . the nature of many of [Miller's] watercolor portrayals of the life and customs of Vermont people should be incentive enough for the State to take the initiative and adopt him as a favorite son."[21] Miller moved to New York permanently following his service in the Army's Combat Art Section during the Second World War. There, amid the ferment of the new wave that was to sweep American art, Miller departed from the more representational mode that had formerly aligned his work with the California style. His watercolors now became increasingly more abstract, yet he continued to find his creative impulses in nature. Impressed by the landscape of Maine, he joined the ranks of such eastern aquarellists as William Thon and William Kienbusch, who, like Miller, searched for a resolution between their regard for the natural world and the imperatives of abstraction -- a concept that had been first introduced here in the first decade of the new century by one of the giants of American modernism and watercolor, John Marin.

Like Miller, Paul Sample had strong affinities with the East, particularly New England, where he was perhaps the most generally recognized California artist of his time. Both Miller and Sample had gained a measure of national popular attention as artist correspondents for Life magazine, which published many illustrations of their work depicting scenes of military operations in the Pacific theater during the early years of the Second World War. Sample maintained close ties with the New York art world, as did Miller, exhibiting regularly with Ferargil Galleries, one of the city's prominent art dealers, and at the annual exhibitions of the National Academy of Design. He gained his first major prize for an oil painting, however, at the Pennsylvania Academy's 131st Annual Exhibition in 1936, winning the coveted Temple Gold Meda1.[22] He also participated in the Philadelphia Water Color Club's exhibitions in 1939 and 1340, but did not gain any prizes and thereafter discontinued submitting work to these shows. After he moved permanently to the East Coast in 1938, Sample's watercolors became closely identified with the Vermont landscape, and his style tended to solidify into a carefully defined realism which had been intimated in his earlier work in California. It was a manner which one critic described as that of "... the literal realist, who can photograph a scene . . . with a perfection of crystalline detail only equaled by [Charles] Sheeler."[23]

One of the most traveled California style artists, Hardie Gramatky divided his career equally between Los Angeles and New York. As a youth in Southern California, he acquired his training at Chouinard; and he was a regular exhibitor with the California Water Color Society from 1923 to 1939, a period in his life that included a stay of several years in New York, where he joined Miller and Sample on the roster of artists at Ferargil Galleries. Typical of the reviews he received, one observed that "though color and light and mood are the most evident aspects of Gramatky's pictures, much of their convincing reality is achieved by drawing that is solid, full-bodied . . ."[24] Gramatky had honed his proficiency at creating rapidly-executed works by meeting the demands of a multifaceted career that included work as a Hollywood film animator and a free lance magazine and book illustrator. During this period he continued to send work to the California Water Color Society's exhibitions, while also showing at the Pennsylvania Academy. In 1940 he participated for the first time in the American Watercolor Society's annual exhibition in New York, where he joined such regulars from the California group as Sheets, Kosa, and Blair. Because of his considerable work in other areas, Gramatky was not so prolific in watercolor as some of his colleagues; however, he earned due recognition from the art community through a number of prizes and purchases. In 1938 a watercolor, American in the Park, was acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art.

A native of Southern California, Phil Dike augmented his 1924-27 experience at Chouinard with a year at the Art Students League in New York in 1928. There he also had private instruction in painting from George Luks, one of the Ashcan School members. While Luks is best known for his dark and heavily painted portrayals of New York street life, he was also an able watercolorist, although this aspect of his work remains barely acknowledged today. Luks' watercolors are bright, transparent creations, charged with an almost postimpressionist drawing and color. One may discern his impact on Dike's work, which partakes of the same witty nonchalance and chromatic brilliance. This characteristic sets Dike apart from mainstream California style painters with their more weighty manner, which is sometimes seen to be touched with aspects of social realism, as in the work of Lee Blair, and to a lesser degree, that of Rex Brandt and Tom Craig. Dike began to exhibit with the California Water Color Society in 1927 and at the Pennsylvania Academy the next year. Following a year of study in Europe, where he expanded his grasp on other techniques such as mural painting and lithography, Dike returned to California in 1931. That year he showed two of his Italian watercolors at the society, one of which, Sicilian Houses, won the society's purchase award. A long time exhibitor at both oil and watercolor annuals of the Pennsylvania Academy, where he was well represented almost yearly from 1928 to 1952, Dike nevertheless claimed no prizes from these efforts. Indeed, during this period his career flourished best at home, where in 1938 he became president of the California Water Color Society and enjoyed one-man shows at Chouinard, the Los Angeles County Museum, and in commercial galleries.

Equally as active as Dike at the Pennsylvania Academy watercolor exhibitions, Phil Paradise was considerably more successful in terms of gaining recognition there. He began sending multiple entries there in 1932 and seven years later won the coveted Dana Water Color Medal for a genre subject, Suburban Supper. The academy's 1933 show was an especially distinguished one, with entries from such established masters of the medium as John Whorf, Edward Hopper, Reginald Marsh, and Andrew Wyeth. Other Californians were represented there also, including Barse Miller and Paradise's old friend, Millard Sheets, who took the Philadelphia Water Color Club Prize for Hilltop Farm. That two Californians seized top honors that year speaks profoundly of the strength of their work in competition with such august company, who were passed over in favor of these relative newcomers from the West.

Of all the group who established the California style in watercolor during the 1930s, perhaps the most prolific exemplar was Millard Sheets. Born in Pomona, not only was he a native Californian, but his earliest influences were implanted by his teachers at the Chouinard School of Art in Los Angeles, one of the strongest centers for art training then to be found on the West Coast. His mentors were Frank Tolles Chamberlin and Clarence Hinkle, both native Californians who had extensive training in the major schools in the East and in Europe. Although they were of the generation of the California plein air painters, Chamberlin and Hinkle were considered modern artists by their contemporaries, and Sheets gained his artistic orientation from them. Sheets was already adept at watercolor at nineteen. In 1926 he began his long association with the California Water Color Society and exhibited regularly there over the next two decades. Early in his career Sheets began to demonstrate his well-known propensity for energetic activity, engaging his considerable talents not only as a watercolorist, but also as an oil painter and muralist. In 1927 he sent his first submissions to the Pennsylvania Academy's Twenty-Fifth Annual Water Color Exhibition. Three years later he redoubled his efforts to gain recognition there with a group of seven papers, and although he did not win a prize, one of his Los Angeles subjects, Arcadia Street, was illustrated in the show's catalog.[25] In 1939 Sheets finally earned recognition at the academy with the previously mentioned autumnal landscape view of Chino that won the Philadelphia Water Color Club Prize. Throughout the war years he exhibited consistently at Philadelphia, and finally, in 1943 he took the academy's coveted Dana Water Color Medal for Brassy Day. In New York, Sheets was not especially conspicuous in the exhibitions of the American Watercolor Society until 1937, the year after Craig, Blair, Kosa, and Miller had made their strong showing there.[26]

Stylistically, Sheets may be said to have bridged the points between naturalism and abstraction. His work took liberties with the one and eschewed the other, presenting his subjects boldly stylized, strongly patterned, and dramatically characterized in much the same vein as the work of the celebrated Rockwell [Kent] who was enjoying great vogue in the 1930s. For Sheets, the imperative to communicate readily understandable ideas and to avoid obscure symbolism dictated the terms of his art. He was adamant that the artist should not stand apart from the larger context of society and that ". . . breaking the term 'art' into so-called fine arts, commercial arts, applied arts, and now industrial arts [ignores] the meaning of art . . . the artist must consider [his] audience regardless of his field of art. Therein lies the greatest failing of contemporary art."[27] This point of view was fueled by his practical experience in most of the areas he mentioned. This was equally true for other artists of the California style, many of whom led active parallel careers involved with that most unique of American contributions to the visual arts of the twentieth century, the animated film.

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