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California Watercolor Painters in Context
by Donelson Hoopes
Any artist of stature, especially one who was so prominent as a teacher as Sheets, naturally attracts disciples. Milford Zornes was influenced by Sheets while studying at Pomona College in Claremont, and his watercolors bear strong resemblances to the manner of his teacher in terms of the use of a broad wash technique and bold simplification of design. Zornes began to exhibit with the California Water Color Society in 1934, the same year that he made his first appearance at the American Watercolor Society in New York. His first one-man exhibition in New York came in 1938 at Maynard Walker Galleries and was greeted with somewhat mixed reviews. One critic noted "... a perilous thinness sometimes, and an effect a trifle showy [recalling] in some ways the work of Millard Sheets . . . although they are not equipped with the [same] emotional sweep."[28]
Of course, this orientation entailed a considerable degree of distance between what these artists were doing and the stance taken by the avant-garde practitioners -- and promoters -- of abstract expressionism, then in its ascendancy. By the early 1940s the California style stood in opposition to the rising tide of artistic fashion, led by a formidable group -- painters mostly -- who would form what came to be known as the "New York School." Indicative of the schism that was manifesting itself on the national scene in the 1940s, one of the most influential critics from that era wrote: "The naturalistic art of our time is unredeemable, as it requires only taste to discover; and the sheer multitude of those who still practice it does not make it any more valid."[29] A few bastions of conservatism in the East, principally the American Watercolor Society and the Philadelphia Water Color Club, continued to offer venues for artists of a traditional bent, however; and the Californians found that these organizations remained hospitable to their work well into the postwar period. But even on home ground, the shift away from the California style toward new trends, especially abstract expressionism, was taking place.[30]
Expression, although not wholly "abstract," became the governing force of the art of Dan Lutz very early in his career. A native of the Chicago area, he moved to the West Coast in 1932 and immediately became associated with the art scene in Los Angeles, notably as a teacher on the faculty of the University of Southern California. He began exhibiting with the California Water Color Society in 1936 and two years later was elected its vice-president. His first offering to a major eastern exhibition came in 1940. It was a painting he had done ten years before, in a style that was representational; the incident suggests that Lutz had gauged his target correctly, for the picture, Central Park, Decatur, took a major prize.[31] That same year, he also sent two watercolors to the Thirty-Eighth Annual Philadelphia Water Color Club Exhibition, without adding to his luster, however. He diligently pursued the recognition that annually eluded him at Philadelphia, until, in 1945, he won the Wheelwright Prize for Bridle-Path. Lutz was at his best when extemporizing, not on the undulating landscape or the sometimes picaresque city scenes of his adopted home in Southern California, but on themes that derived from his interests as a musician. Perhaps the abstract values of music crept into his paintings, for he certainly chose subjects that were as redolent of rhythm as music, and he also frequently included images of musical instruments as part of his compositions. He was, in fact, not a painter of places, but of mood. As one critic put it, commenting on a painting of an ethnic neighborhood church illuminated by a baleful street lamp: "It is not only in his subjects of the spiritual that Lutz distinguishes himself. We must consider his pictorial poems of buildings, of landscape situations, of moods of nature and stark realities of weather."[32]
"The Bay Area," as the greater San Francisco-Oakland-Marin County complex is customarily known, produced a number of artists in this period who received national recognition. One of the more successful of these was Otis Oldfield, a native of Sacramento, who, prior to 1928, lived for about twenty years in France. Returning to San Francisco, he became known for his scenes of that city. His first one-man show in New York took place at the esteemed Montross Gallery in the winter of 1929. On the occasion of his second show at the same venue later that year, his dealer published several notices of praise from the major New York critics. One citation, reproduced in his second Montross exhibition catalog, observed that "... he endows the 'Hillites' of Telegraph Hill [San Francisco] and all other figures of his teeming pictures with an intensity of life so that they seem to flash before you in a remarkably vivid presentment."[33]
The same evaluation could very well have been made of the watercolors of Dong Kingman. Of all the artists that San Francisco produced during the period between the two world wars, Kingman is perhaps the best known. Unlike Oldfield, his major contribution was in the medium of watercolor; and there may be noted a strong ethnic bias for this. Traditionally, Chinese artists have worked with aqueous media; and, although Kingman was born in Oakland, because his family moved to Hong Kong shortly thereafter, he was thoroughly indoctrinated in classical Chinese art traditions at an early age. Back in California by 1929, he soon took up watercolor painting, and in 1935 joined the WPA watercolor project, where he spent the next five years. It was during this period that Kingman's style crystallized into the distinctive manner which has since distinguished his work. At once representational, and yet imbued with a strong proto-cubist orientation, his watercolors most frequently celebrate the often chaotic energy of city life, be it that of San Francisco or New York. In 1942 he submitted a characteristic work, Birds Over City, to the California Water Color Society, and his comments on the picture are revealing: ". . . this painting was based on many cities that I have lived in . . . the mood of the sea and the sky remind me of Hong Kong . . . the bridges I saw and sketched many times in San Francisco . . . the buildings we see every day here in New York."[34] Following his permanent move to the East Coast in 1946, Kingman became a regular exhibitor with the American Watercolor Society and at the Philadelphia Water Color Club annuals, and in 1950 he won the academy's Joseph Pennell Memorial Medal for Triple Decker. Two years before, the academy jury belatedly had conceded the genius of John Marin by giving him an award -- incredibly, the first recognition for him of any kind in these exhibitions -- the Dawson Medal for distinguished watercolor. But it was 1950 that seemed to signal the academy's decisive turn toward acceptance of the modernist aesthetic, with awards going to Charles Burchfield, Karl Zerbe, and William Thon, as well as to Kingman.
In terms of California-based artists, perhaps Erle Loran most perfectly represents the artist who made the transition between the California style and the movement in American art called "Abstract Expressionism." A native of the Midwest, Loran spent several years studying in Europe before settling in the Bay Area in 1936. He first exhibited with the California Water Color Society in 1940, and continued this association with annual submissions for the next decade. From the titles of his pictures, it is possible to infer a steady progression from specific subject matter, handled in conventional California style, toward purely conceptual themes. By the time of his 1952 one-man exhibition in New York at Viviano Gallery, he had completed his transformation into a fully-committed abstract expressionist.
The historic orientation of American watercolor tradition to the values of its British models remained remarkably constant throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, commencing in the East in the 1850s, that which constituted the ideal in composition and technique was passed with only superficial change to the heirs of the American watercolor legacy, the regionalist painters of the early twentieth century. And, in terms of what was commonly practiced among those groups, the venerable concession to the "picturesque" mode of subject matter remained equally constant. In 1923, two years after its founding, the California Water Color Society issued a kind of manifesto, entitled Renaissance of Water Color Painting. Clearly, the artists of the society saw themselves the inheritors of that great tradition, charged with keeping the flame burning brightly. So long as the values of the culture at large coincided with theirs, artists such as those who promoted the California style produced a very vital body of work. But the press of events in the period between the two world wars tended to disrupt what had been the unbroken thread from the past. In the words of a contemporary:
The last reference in this assessment of those times points to a future that at least one of the California style group, Millard Sheets, saw as positive -- the integration of the "so-called fine arts [and] commercial arts." Perhaps he was speaking for all of his California colleagues, when, in 1937, he is reported to have said, "... I'm glad I'm living right now. This is my age and I think it's swell."[36]
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