California Watercolor Painters in Context, essay by Donelson Hoopes- page 1

California Watercolor Painters in Context

by Donelson Hoopes

The emergence of a strong watercolor movement in Southern California and San Francisco which began in the I920s was the product of a gradual cultural migration that originated in the East a hundred years before. As such, it reflected the broader development of the nation's art.[1] In the case of watercolor, its debt to English precedent was particularly strong; indeed, for the first hundred years of the history of its use in America, the majority of artists who employed watercolor here were of British origin. Largely through the efforts of watercolorists such as the Englishman Joshua Shaw and the Irishman William Guy Wall, whose works were translated into engravings, the general public first began to appreciate the beauties of the American landscape. The popularizing of our landscape culminated in the publication of more than one hundred watercolor views by another English artist, William Henry Bartlett; for the American public, his American Scenery became the definitive statement of the picturesque ideal in art.[2]

Originally, watercolor was adopted by landscape painters as a medium of convenience; watercolor sketches, relatively easily made in the field, were converted later in the studio into fully-developed paintings in oil. Gradually, artists came to see that the medium possessed special qualities of its own which merited consideration as an independent avenue for artistic expression. In the United States the first organization to champion watercolor was organized in New York in 1850, modeled after the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolors which had been formed in London some twenty years earlier.[3]

The dominant style among American watercolorists at mid-century was characterized by precise drawing and delicate coloration and derived largely from the teachings of the eminent English critic and artist John Ruskin. Through his seminal writings on the works of J. M. W. Turner, such as Modern Painters, published in the United States in the 1850s, Ruskin fostered a brief but pervasive movement in this country toward the ideal description of nature through careful observation and meticulous depiction. Watercolor renderings of nature were commonly favored by his American disciples, who thus advanced a style that was overtly a branch of the English Pre-Raphaelite Movement.[4] But it was not until the 1870s, when a number of major native-born artists
emerged as important practitioners, that the critics began to refer to watercolor as "the American medium."[5] Winslow Homer, who combined a more fluid style of painting with a robust and unsentimentalized view of nature, stands as the epitome of the authentic American artistic sensibility; and his career as a watercolor painter, which culminated about 1905, was as fully important as that with the oil medium.

While the preponderance of work being produced during the nineteenth century was derived from the landscape of the Eastern seaboard, a few artist-explorers, such as Alfred Jacob Miller, George Catlin and Seth Eastman, were making watercolor views of aboriginal life and of the vast and remote reaches of the trans-Mississippi West. However, it would not be until the turn of the century, with the gradual establishment of a cultural base in San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as in artists' colonies in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico, that quantitatively significant contributions to the nation's art would be made by artists using Western subject matter for their inspiration.

One of the greatest factors for change in American art in the first decade of the twentieth century was the movement led by Robert Henri, who championed a return to painterly values and a realistic view of contemporary life. A teacher as well as a painter, Henri fostered the advent of the short-lived, but significant group of dissidents who came to be known as the "Ashcan School." Their rejection of decorative impressionism and the genteel tradition that permeated much of the painting espoused by the academic establishment helped to redirect the course of American painting before the introduction of European modernist art into the nation's cultural mainstream. Henri's influence on California painters began to be felt in 1914, when he temporarily moved from New York to La Jolla. His presence as a major exhibitor in the Panama-California Exposition held in San Diego in 1915 undoubtedly proved inspirational to regional artists who were then forging a strong local style of expression grounded in painterly realism.[6] Although landscape painting was their principal avenue of expression and not the figurative subjects favored by Henri, California artists seemed to gravitate naturally toward the aesthetic of painterly realism so forcefully expressed in Henri's work. Such tendencies can be seen especially clearly in the productions of painters like Maurice Braun, his pupil, Alfred R. Mitchell, and others who made their careers in San Diego.[7]

During the period between the two world wars, an important and distinctly indigenous style of painting appeared in a number of localities of the United States. Termed "Regionalism," it favored subjects which celebrated the unique character of American life. The most well-known aspect of this movement was promoted by John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood, and Thomas Hart Benton, who based their work on the legends, history, and topography of their native midwestern scene. In the Far West, artists like John Sloan, who was one of the prominent figures in the Ashcan School, transported their vitality of vision to fresh and hitherto untapped areas such as Santa Fe, which had been "discovered" by Robert Henri as early as 1914. As Santa Fe began to host visiting artists and frequently became the adopted home for painters like Randall Davey, another Henri disciple, it also fostered careers of native-born westerners such as Fremont Ellis, whose romantic landscapes were permeated by Henri's realist sensibility. As Henri's influence had set the tone for Santa Fe artists who followed him, so neighboring Taos began to assume a distinct character in terms of the kind of art that began to appear there in the 1930s. The presence of many transplanted easterners -- Georgia O'Keeffe and Andrew Dasburg among them -- who embraced modernist tendencies conditioned much of the aesthetic climate associated with the avant-garde art of Taos.

The art of California, particularly that of the Southland, also received the impress of external influences during the early decades of the century. The allure of California's scenery attracted the leading exponents of American impressionism during these years. In 1914 both Childe Hassam and William Merritt Chase traveled to Carmel to paint and conduct outdoor painting classes. Hassam made several trips to the West Coast over the next decade, and was a considerable influence on one of the major Los Angeles collectors of the day, William Preston Harrison. In fact, Harrison's donations over a span of several years to the Los Angeles Museum, a benefaction that included several Hassams, made that institution one of the first in the region to boast a collection of American art.

Another important influence was the work of the prominent Mexican painters Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose approach to realism was heavily weighted by socialist and revolutionary fervor. The work of Los Angeles-based Fletcher Martin, who in 1932 assisted Siqueiros on a mural project in Santa Monica, reveals the artist's lifelong commitment to themes resonant with concern for the human condition.[8] On the other hand, a more intellectual aestheticism was energetically promoted by the cosmopolitan, European-trained Stanton Macdonald-Wright, one of the founders of the modernist abstract color movement called "Synchromism." As director of the Art Students League of Los Angeles (1922-1930) and later as a teacher of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles (1942-54), Macdonald-Wright was a major force in the area for the promotion of modernism.[9]

Between these two stylistic positions, the Southern California regionalist artists practiced a form of realism that was a conservative and distinctly indigenous mode of painting. Following the plein air tradition, they flourished during the first decades of the twentieth century. One of the leaders of this school, William Wendt, was largely self-taught when in 1906 he moved from Chicago to Los Angeles. There he introduced a vigorous mode of impressionism that comfortably subsumed the older tonalist style of Arthur Mathews and his followers. His eminent position within the California artist community earned him election in 1911 as the first president of the embryonic California Art Club. He exhibited nationally and in 1926 won the coveted Ranger Purchase Prize at the National Academy of Design in New York. Indeed, Wendt's connections with the East Coast art world were secure enough that in 1928 he was asked to join the advisory committee of the American Artists' Professional League.[10]

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