California Grandeur and Genre: From the Collection of James L. Coran and Walter A. Nelson-Rees

The forty-seven examples of historical California art featured in California Grandeur and Genre are no longer extant. They were destroyed in the fire that swept through the Oakland Hills on Sunday, October 20, 1991. James L Coran and Walter A. Nelson-Rees, avid collectors of California paintings dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lost their entire collection of over seven hundred works. California Grandeur and Genre had been scheduled as an exhibition to highlight selections from their collection.Originally planned as the exhibition catalog, this book concentrates on two recurring themes in California painting: landscape and lifestyle. While some artists captured the grandeur of California's countryside, others focused on genre scenes, images of everyday life. The selected works trace the development of California art over a period of seventy-five years. The earliest paintings are by William Hahn, Herman Herzog and Thomas Hill, artists who rose to prominence in the 1870s. Their landscapes focus on the drama of the land, contrasting deep valleys with towering mountains. Late nineteenth-century harbor scenes by Albert Bierstadt and William Coulter record the importance of the Pacific Ocean in the growth of the state. At the turn of the century the California Decorative Style developed, as seen in lyrical compositions by Arthur Matthews and Francis McComas. Influenced by Impressionism, plein air painting became the dominant style in the first decades of the twentieth century, and is represented in canvases by Maurice Braun, Granville Redmond, William Wendt and others. Beginning in the 1920s members of the Society of Six, among them Selden Gile, Maurice Logan,and Louis Siegriest, painted landscapes in a bold, Modernist style using bright, expressive color.The forty-three artists included in California Grandeur and Genre are some of the most respected names in historical California art. This book provides a lasting record of these lost paintings.

South, Will

Hough, Katherine Plake

Chelette, Iona M.

Arts & Photography

Palm Springs Desert Museum

In recent years, the richly colored, exuberantly painted canvases by artists such as Franz Bischoff, Alson Clark, Joseph Raphael, Guy Rose, and William Wendt have attracted an expanding circle of admirers all across the country. In addition to the work of these established West Coast masters, many less-known California Impressionists are presented here, including John Frost, Evelyn McCormick, Bruce Nelson, and others whose work has not yet been widely discovered. In his far-ranging introductory essay, Dr. Gerdts explores the context of California Impressionism, surveying the movement's sources abroad, the most influential exhibitions in America, and the critical responses to the art and the artists. He introduces the work of an almost entirely forgotten foursome—Helena Dunlap, Detlef Sammann, Ernest Browning Smith, and Jack Gage Stark—who were the first local painters to be identified as Impressionists in Los Angeles and who contributed to an important but long-overlooked moment in the city's cultural history. Will South supplies an enlightening chronological narrative of the California Impressionists, starting with their often-ignored roots in the Hudson River school and other American realist art. Tracing the trajectory of their work from the innovations of the late 1800s to the style's final days in the 1920s and '30s, he offers vital new information and insight about their training and careers, as well as their ideas about art, nature, and the Golden State. Dr. South also provides detailed artists' biographies and an extensive bibliography. At a time when interest in all aspects of regional Impressionism continues to flourish, California Impressionism commands the greatest interest of all. This book will be an invaluable resource and source of pleasure for the innumerable collectors, scholars, and art lovers who find this work—with its wind-swept coasts, majestic mountains, and poppy-strewn fields—irresistibly appealing.

California Impressionism

Gerdts, William H.

History & Criticism

Abbeville Press

As cultural theorists often enjoy pointing out, Southern California, with its motion picture, television, and aerospace industries, is the mecca of artificial culture. In this "here-today-gone-tomorrow" culture, our history has traditionally has been trivialized and discarded, leaving a great deal of the past for us to excavate. Laguna Beach and the Laguna Beach Art Association (the present day Laguna Art Museum) have stood at the center of another sort of culture in Southern California for more than eighty years. From the turn of the century through the 1930's, Laguna Beach was home to the most significant artists' colony on the Pacific Coast. The Laguna Art Museum has been not only the focal point of this art colony but, for the last twenty years, instrumental in uncovering its history as well. Through exhibitions and catalogues such as William Wendt 1865-1946, Early Artists in Laguna Beach: The Impressionists, and California Light 1900-1930, the Museum has explored, and indeed developed, its rich local art history. Along with The Oakland Museum of California, it has been at the forefront of a trend among California museums to focus on regional history, including the Impressionist movement that was centered in Laguna Beach. More recently, The Irvine Museum has devoted considerable efforts to this subject matter as well. What is missing from the many exhibitions originated on this subject is one placing California Impressionism and the art colony in Laguna Beach within the national content. The art colonies that developed at the turn of the century in Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Connecticut, or Shinnecock , Long Island, for example, bear many resemblance, as well as differences, to the growth and popularity of Laguna Beach. The idea for this book came from the Museum's exhibitions committee, an advisory group of curators and art historians who specialize in California art.

Colonies of American Impressionism: Cos Cob, Old Lyme, Shinnecock, and Laguna Beach

Solon, Deborah Epstein

Laguna Art Museum (Laguna Beach, Calif.)

Laguna Art Museum

In and Out of California: Travels of American Impressionists, published to accompany a traveling exhibition, is a revisionist study of artists working in California in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book presents an array of radiant paintings by artists identified traditionally with the history of art in California. The essays by Deborah Epstein Solon and Dr. Will South, however, establish that artists were "out" of California as much as they were "in" during this critical period in American painting. Artists living in California traveled and painted all over the world, often simultaneously maintaining studios in different areas of the country and even in Europe. Scores of artists who worked in California received the same training in academies in both Europe and the United States as those artists who settled in the East - yet their Eastern compatriots have been studied and lauded with a respect thus far denied their Western counterparts. Artists working in California often experienced a two pronged disadvantage: they were either glorified by Western critics - occasionally unjustly - or summarily dismissed by the Eastern art establishment in an equally unjust fashion.

In and Out of California: Travels of American Impressionists

This beautiful volume provides the first comprehensive survey of the Impressionist art of a generation of radiant California artists.

Hudson Hills Pr

Andy Warhol Slept Here: Famous and Infamous Visitors to Utah

History

Americas

Signature Books

Guy Rose: American impressionist [hardcover] South, Will [Jan 01, 1995] … 1882140060

Guy Rose: American Impressionist

Reference

STERN, Jean

Catalogs & Directories

The Oakland Museum

Guy Rose: American impressionist

The Irvine Museum

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