California Watercolor Painters in Context, essay by Donelson Hoopes

California Watercolor Painters in Context

by Donelson Hoopes

Notes:

1. This discussion concentrates primarily on the period between the two World Wars, with New York and Philadelphia as the main reference points. It should be remembered, however, that many of the artists cited in this essay also worked and exhibited in other cities across the country during the period under review. The number of artists cited in this essay is limited by space, and any omissions should not be construed as negative.

2. Shaw's work was commissioned and engraved by the English aquatinter John Hill and published in Philadelphia in 1820 as Picturesque Views of American Scenery. Between 1820 and 1825 Hill also commissioned Wall to provide the watercolor views which served as the basis for a suite of aquatint engravings which Hill published in various editions in New York as The Hudson River Portfolio. Bartlett's watercolors were engraved and published in London between 1839 and 1842, with an accompanying text by Nathaniel Parker Willis, one of the major American literary figures of the period.

3. The Society for the Promotion of Painting in Watercolor. For a concise history of the development of this organization and its successor, the American Watercolor Society, see Donelson Hoopes, American Watercolor Painting (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1977), 59-60.

4. For the most complete discussion of the effect of Ruskin on American art, see Linda S. Ferber and William H. Gerdts, The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites (Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Museum, 1985).

5. For the most comprehensive study of this development in American art, see Kathleen Adair Foster, "Makers of the American Watercolor Movement, 1860-1890" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1982, Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1985).

6. The San Diego exposition, which was held the same year as its larger rival in San Francisco, differed from the latter in that it was not international in scope and was strongly local in character. See Kenneth W. Luckhurst, The Story of Exhibitions (London and New York: The Studio Publications, 1951), 171.

7. See Ruth Lilly Westphal, Plein Air Painters of California: The Southland, rev. ed. (Irvine, California: Westphal Publishing, 1988), 186ff.

8. Martin's work in watercolor is somewhat peripheral to his achievements in other media, although, in terms of subject matter, it is consistent with his commitment to social realism. In 1937 he became chairman of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Artists' Congress, one of the important national organizations working during the Depression for the improvement of conditions under which art was supported and exhibited in the United States. The organization's credo was "For Peace, For Democracy, For Cultural Progress."

9. Macdonald-Wright was a powerful determinant in the careers of many distinguished Southern California modernists, such as Lorser Feitelson (1898-1978), and Helen Lundeberg (b. 1908). For a comprehensive discussion of the impact of early modernism on the art of Southern California, see Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich, Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists, 1920-1956, exhibition catalog (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1990).

10. Headed by a National Academician, the landscape painter F. Ballard Williams, the league was headquartered in New York and invited leading regional artists to assist with its ambitious program to foster "a better appreciation of contemporary American art" and "to encourage the American people to acquire American art." New York Public Library Collection, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, roll N121, frame 240.

11. Eugen Neuhaus, The Galleries of the Exposition: A Critical Review of the Paintings, Statuary and the Graphic Arts in the Palace of Fine Arts (San Francisco: Paul Elder and Company, 1915), 72. The Panama-Pacific was as international in character as the Armory Show had been, albeit organized along much more conservative lines than the latter. The art of twelve foreign nations was represented in conjunction with that of the United States, a group that included such celebrities as Hassam, Whistler, William Merritt Chase, and John Singer Sargent.

12. Sixteenth Annual Philadelphia Water Color Exhibition, exhibition catalog (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1918). From the published statement of the criteria upon which the award was made. The award was made for the entire group of eight papers McComas submitted, rather than for a single work. The following quotations relating to prizes are also derived from catalog definitions of the terms under which respective honors were given by the sponsoring institutions.

13. My Garden Steps. Fiftieth Annual Exhibition, American Watercolor Society, New York, 1917. A watercolor of the same title was submitted by this artist to the 1924 exhibition of the California Water Color Society, where Schuster exhibited nearly annually between 1921 and 1942. Schuster was a student of William Merritt Chase and is considered one of the earliest exponents of impressionism in California. She received her first important notice in the catalog of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco. See Eugen Neuhaus, The Galleries of the Exposition, 90.

14. See Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, The California Water Color Society: Prize Winners 1931-1954, Index to Exhibitions, 1921-1954 (Los Angeles: Privately Printed, 1973).

15. T. J. Anderson, E. M. Moore, and R. W. Winter, eds., California Design 1910 (Pasadena: California Design Center, 1974), 45.

16. Moure, California Water Color Society, not paginated.

17. Kosa's exhibition record with the California Water Color Society indicates that his submissions were predominantly landscape subjects; the same is true for the watercolors he sent to the Pennsylvania Academy and to the American Watercolor Society exhibitions. Only a few artists, such as Edward Hopper and Reginald Marsh, were addressing themselves to industrial themes, and review notices of his work tended to focus on this aspect of Kosa's work. Henry McBride, reviewing the American Watercolor Society's 1943 exhibition, noted, ". . . a black, dramatic glimpse of oil tanks by Emil J. Kosa. It will be noticed that rather hard, insistent, but clever studies on mechanical lines (gas tanks, bridges, eta.) are more prevalent [this year]." Henry McBride, "The Watercolor Society National Academy Building Completely Filled with Our Specialty," New York Sun, 29 March 1943.

18. Lee Blair, Lullaby, Eucalyptus School; Tom Craig, Wind at Santa Paula, Bumper Crops, Soledad Storm, San Fernando; Emil Kosa, At Rest, Hour of Leisure; Barse Miller, Cash Register, Attic Treasure. James Couper Wright, a now-obscure artist then residing in Santa Barbara, submitted three additional works whose subjects were based on scenes in Virginia City, Nevada.

19. Seventy-First Annual Exhibition of the American Watercolor Society (New York: American Watercolor Society, 1938), not paginated. A typical Kosa subject of a battered truck parked in the glare of a broad California sun. Significantly, contemporary photo-realist art, which was later to evolve in California, can trace its lineage to such pictures.

20. Potential Blowouts. Thirty-Sixth Annual Watercolor Exhibition (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1938), not paginated.

21. Burlington Free Press, 15 August 1940.

22. Miners Resting. The same year, at the Pennsylvania Academy's Thirty-fourth Annual Watercolor Exhibition, Tom Craig was represented by Evening, Santa Ynez, and Barse Miller won the Dana Water Color Medal for Victorian Doll House.

23. Alfred Frankenstein, "Paul Sample," American Magazine of Art 31 (July 1938), 391.

24. "Gramatky's New York and Bahama [sie] Watercolors," Art Digest (December 1938), 42.

25. Twenty-eighth Annual Water Color Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1930; The Green House, Laigueglia, Italy, Arcadia Street, Oldtown Waterfront, Tioga Pass, Early Spring in the Sierras and Hill Street.

26. Seventieth Annual Exhibition of the American Watercolor Society, New York. Sheets contributed four works, California Fall, White Mare of Carmel, Four Little Pigs, and Balboa Evening.

27. Millard Sheets, "The Education of an Artist," Art lnstruction 3 (October 1939), 14.

28. Carlyle Burrows in the New York Herald Tribune, quoted in a signed review in Art Digest (May 1938). Unpaginated clipping, archives of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Although Burrows went on to comment on Zornes's apparent "professionalism" the reader is left with the distinct notion that the artist's facility was greater than his substance, and perhaps that at least this disciple of Sheets and the "California style" was lapsing into mannerism.

29. Clement Greenberg, "New York Painters," American Magazine of Art (October 1949), 92. Greenberg's assertion, based on the fallacy of "correct" taste, was destined to be discredited, of course. Significantly, this was to be accomplished by a new generation of artists, many of whom were based in California, such as Robert Bechtle and Ralph Goings, who fostered the rise of Photo-Realism. This became one of the dominant modes in
American art in the 1970s and continues to play a strong role on the national art scene.

30. "A . . . major change [in the character of the California Water Color Society] was made in the late 1940s when the influences of abstract expressionism and the use of pigments like tempera, acrylic and casein influenced many of the Society's members to work in a two-dimensional, flat, abstract manner." Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, Artists' Clubs and Exhibitions in Los Angeles before 1930 (Los Angeles: Privately Printed, 1974), not paginated.

31. Central Park, Decatur, 1930. Exhibited at the National Academy of Design, New York, 1940 and awarded the Thomas B. Clarke Prize, for "the best figure composition painted in the United States by an American citizen." The painting is now in the collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

32. Donald Bear, "Recent Pictures by Dan Lutz," American Magazine of Art (December 1943), 78.

33. Second Exhibition of Pictures by Otis Oldfield, exhibition catalog (New York: Montross Gallery, 1929).

34. "Dong Kingman," American Artist (September 1947), 42. The statement reveals Kingman's instinctive allegiance to one of the cardinal tenets of synthetic cubism, that a subject is most truly observed when seen from several points of view simultaneously.

35. Homer Saint-Gaudens, introduction to Survey of American Painting, exhibition catalog (Pittsburgh: Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute, 1940), not paginated.

36. Quoted in Arthur Millier, "The Fabulous Mr. Sheets," American Artist 15 (May 1951), 74.

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