California Art Club

The California Art Club (CAC), founded in 1909, is one of the oldest and most active arts organizations in California. It celebrated its centennial in the spring of 2010. The California Art Club originally evolved from the Painters Club of Los Angeles. The new organization was more inclusive, as it accepeted women, sculptors and out of state artists. Most of the major early California painters belonged to the CAC, including William Wendt (1865–1946), Edgar Payne (1883–1947) and Franz Bischoff (1864–1929). As the members of the first generation of California Plein-Air Painters aged and died, the membership was filled by a handful of younger professional painters, along with amateur painters and commercial artists. By the 1980s, the membership of the CAC consisted of aging artists and the organization had lost momentum. In 1993, Peter Seitz Adams (b. 1950) was elected President of the CAC. He was a generation younger than most of its members and he and his wife, Elaine Shelby Adams, revitalized the organization, recruiting many of the California's best known landscape and figurative painters. Today its membership consists of representational artists and sculptors, but it is broadly inclusive and includes many women painters as well as painters and sculptors who emigrated to the United States from Europe and Asia. The CAC hosts an annual Gold Medal Exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art each year along with a number of other smaller public and special museum exhibitions. Headquartered in one of the large bungalows that was part of the historic Vista del Arroyo Hotel in Pasadena, the California Art Club has a number of chapters throughout California. It also has a Collector's Circle consisting of patrons of both contemporary and historic painters. The California Art Club is an unusual non-profit organization that attempts to serve several very different constituencies, the more elite, well-established CAC Signature Members, the emerging Artist Members as well as Painting Patrons Members who are often serious amateur artist as well as collectors. Balancing the large and varied membership of the CAC is a difficult task and not without its controversies. Its most recent activities include a large 2010 exhibition of works inspired by Wagner's Ring Cycle held at the Los Angeles Cathedral in conjunction with the Los Angeles Opera's production of the Ring.

Origins of the CAC

The history of the California Art Club is intertwined with that of the Painters Club of Los Angeles which was founded in March 1906 by a group of California's early professional artists in order to arrange exhibitions and further the fine arts in the Southland. After several years and a number of successful exhibitions it became apparent to the members that the scope of the organization, which was open only to male painters, was too limited and a consensus arose to dissolve the organization in order to form one that was wider in scope.

The CAC and California Impressionism

In 1909, the California Art Club was founded in the painter and ceramicist Franz Bischoff's South Pasadena Studio. Among its founding members were Bischoff, Carl Oscar Borg, Hanson Puthuff, and William Wendt. Wendt's wife was the sculptor Julia Bracken Wendt. One of the main objectives behind the founding of the club was to allow women artists to participate. Wendt served as President of the club for six years, during which time the organization grew quickly in prestige. Because the California Impressionist movement was just beginning to emerge in Southern California, as the CAC was being founded, the organization was greatly responsible for popularizing the Impressionist style in California through the work of its artists and its annual exhibitions. Authorities like Professor William Gerdts have long identified California Impressionism as a regional variation of American Impressionism which was a very broad movement that was loosely bound to the French style. Most American and California Impressionists adopted the painterly brush work, brighter palette and colored shadows of French Impressionism and the elementary practice of sketching outdoors, directly from nature or en plein air. From its first exhibitions, the California Art Club became identified with Impressionism. In 1913, in the national magazine Arts Journal, the writer E.C. Maxwell wrote that "From a dozen different writers upon subjects pertaining to the development and trend of art in the west, the word has gone forth to the world that California, that land of golden light and purple shadows, is destined in the course of the next few years to give us a new school of landscape painting...Conditions seem right for a renaissance of art in California...If this art epoch of golden prophecy does not come to pass, it will not be the fault of the California Art Club." The activities of the California Art Club were chronicled in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, the Herald Examiner and the Pasadena Star News. The art columnist for the Times, Antony Anderson was a founding member of the club and he was lavish in his praise of its exhibitions and its leaders, men like William Wendt, Benjamin Chambers Brown and Jack Wilkinson Smith. While the painters of the early California Art Club did not adhere to a stylistic code of any kind, they were all representational artists who worked from life, whether it was out doors, from nature or in the studio from models. The California Art Club was part of a broadly representational movement that held sway in California long after more modern styles of painting became popular elsewhere. In 1919, the painter Helena Dunlap formed a breakaway group of painters that favored a greater degree of experimentation than what they felt the CAC was comfortable with. During the 1910s and the "Roaring 20s" when the American economy bounded back from the post-World War I recession, the California Art Club grew in membership and prestige, but it lacked a permanent location, a headquarters. That changed in 1926, when the wealthy heiress and art patron Aline Barnsdall gave her home Hollyhock House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, to the CAC to use as its headquarters as a fifteen year loan and the club moved into the eight acre property atop Hollywood the following year. The new home allowed the CAC to do lectures and host posh black tie receptions that helped to cultivate patronage and give the artists greater prestige. However, the great stock market crash of 1929 was the first blow to the club as it meant a decline in patronage. Then, as the Great Depression deepened, the club and its membership gradually declined. This decline was somewhat inevitable as the founding members of the CAC aged, moved away or passed away. The first of the major painters of the CAC, Franz Bischoff died in 1929. Its long serving leader William Wendt and Edgar Payne were living in Laguna Beach and had become active in the Laguna Beach Art Association which was founded in 1919. Gradually, during the 1930s, proponents of more modern movements also began to gain a foothold and younger patrons began to purchase their works instead of those of the California Impressionists. The final blow in the decline of the California Art Club was the loss of its headquarters when the lease on the Hollyhock House expired in 1942.

The Postwar California Art Club

The war years were a slow time for all arts organizations. With millions of men in uniform and the United States facing what were seen as existential threats in Europe and Asia, there was less interest in exhibitions of art. Some of the younger artists were involved in the war efforts and the founders of the California Art Club and its best known names had reached old age. By the conclusion of World War II, most of the original en plein air painters who had been active in the 1920s and 1930s were no longer active in running the club's affairs. Generally, the leadership of the organization passed to lesser painters, men and women who had been students of the older generation of en plein air painters. The CAC exhibits, which had been in museums and in the Hollyhock House, were held in less prestigious venues and patronage became a secondary concern. Victor Matson was President of the California Art Club in 1961 and 1962. He was a landscape painter and an able organizer who had been active in many of the Southland art organizations. By the late 1960s and 1970s, the ranks of the California Art Club consisted primarily of amateur artists, but there was still a small group of professional painters that were active.

Revival of the CAC

By the early 1990s, Peter Seitz Adams and his friends, also traditional painters saw the need for an organization that could help to bring order to the reemerging traditional art movement in California. He and his wife Elaine, along with their friend and art dealer, Jeffrey Morseburg had been discussing the need for a type of an 'umbrella organization' that could mount exhibitions and promote en plein air and figurative painting. In 1993, Verna Guenther, a member of the historic California Art Club, came to Morseburg to see if he knew anyone younger who would be capable of taking over the venerable organization that then consisted of an aging cohort of painters, Morseburg, recognizing the opportunity, recommended Peter and Elaine Adams because he saw the value in taking over an existing organization to promote traditional fine arts rather than forming a new one. Peter Adams accepted the Presidency of the California Art Club. He has remained at its helm to the present. In order to reorganize the California Art Club, Adams recruited most of the active professional landscape and figurative painters that he knew. The core group of artists who became members of the reorganized California Art Club primarily consisted of students of Theodore Lukits or the Russian landscape and figurative painter Sergei Bongart (1918–1985), artists Adams knew via his relationship with Jeffrey Morseburg. The first wave of painters to join the CAC included Tim Solliday, Bill Stout, Stephen Mirich, Steve Houston, and Dan Goozee. Soon, two students of the Russian Impressionist Sergei Bongar, Dan Pinkham, and Sunny Apinchapong Yang joined along with the California painter, Richard Rackus (b.1922) and the Russian painters, Alexander Orlov and Alexey Steele. Because of the tremendous influx of academically trained Chinese painters in California, the CAC added painters like Mian Situ, Michael Situ, and Jove Wang to its roster. In the early stages of the renewal of the California Art Club, there were no paid employees, it took the significant personal investment of Peter and Elaine Adams, along with thousands of hours of their labor to relaunch the organization. Some of the artists who had been members prior to Adams, such as Don and Wanda Duborow and Rolf and Evelyn Zilmner, who was Chairman of the Gold Medal Exhibition, played important roles in the revitalization>

CAC publications and scholarship

Under Peter and Elaine Adams, there has been an effort to connect the activities of the present organization with the history of the California Art Club. From the beginning of the club's revival, the CAC newsletter, edited by Elaine Adams, has an important part of not only publicizing its events but also in communicating with patrons and new members. In January 1994, the California Art Club Newsletter was change from a brief newsletter to a magazine format. It has a cover article, usually on an exhibition of historic paintings. That first issue had an illustration by Colin Campbell Cooper, a feature on the contemporary CAC artist William Stout as well as news of upcoming events. Over the past fifteen years, the CAC newsletter have published articles on a broad range of artists in the CAC newsletter including many features on some of its early members written by art historians and authorities such as Jean Stern of the Irvine Museum whose work has appeared there on many occasions. Newsletter articles have been published on Frank Tenney Johnson and the Alhambra painters of "Artist's Alley," Guy Rose, Millard Sheets, Edgar Payne, Thedore Lukits and William Wendt, all of whom were active members of the California Art Club in the 1920s. The newsletter also publishes previews and reviews on exhibitions of representational painting that its membership may find interesting including painters from the American Impressionist movement, French Salon painters and Victorian Artists. Many of these features have been written by Peter and Elaine Adams also by Gordon McClelland, Eric Merrell, William Stout, Cathy Springs, Amy Scott, Bruce Chambers and Dr. David Farmer. Early in the Adams administration of the California Art Club, the organization began funding professional catalogs for its special exhibitions and annual Gold Medal Exhibitions. These catalogs have featured scholarly essays by Jean Stern, Susan Landauer, Jane Dini and Deborah Solon as well as biographies of all of the exhibition's participants. In the online community, the web site of the CAC has also gradually posted detailed records of the early years of the organization that have been compiled by Eric Merrell, one of the CAC artists with a scholarly bent and interest in California History. Merrell has worked his way through a number of archives in order to find and post records from the California Art Club exhibitions and meetings as well as photographs of its many presidents.

Rebirth of early California Impressionism

The rebirth and steady growth of the California Art Club would not have been possible without the tremendous groundswell of interest in California Plein-Air Painting or California Impressionism as the two terms are used interchangeably. The gradual revival of interest in historic California artists made it possible for the living painters who work in the same tradition to thrive. Historically, from the time interest in the first generation of Plein-Air Painters like Edgar Payne, William Wendt, and Marion Wachtel began to decline in the 1930s, until the 1970s, and there was little interest in Early California paintings; even masterworks of California Impressionism were available for just a few thousand dollars. They were undervalued and dismissed as "The Eucalyptus School". Led by a number of pioneering Art Historians like Nancy Moure, then with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Southern California, and Harvey Jones of the Oakland Museum in Northern California, dealers, collectors and art writers began to recognize the major movement of Impressionist-influenced painters that had been active in California between 1910 and 1940. Interest in California's Plein-Air Painters was aided by the historic preservation movement and interest in the California Arts and Crafts Movement. By the late 1970s, galleries and antique "pickers" were beginning to recognize that the Plein-Air School was good business, as there were thousands of paintings in the homes of local residents, flea markets and second-hand stores.

The second generation dealer Jean Stern, who was then at the helm of the Peterson Gallery in Beverly Hills, hosted retrospective exhibitions for artists of the Plein-Air School with small color catalogs, signaling that the early painters of Los Angeles were worthy of attention. His younger brother George Stern, an attorney, opened the George Stern Gallery in Encino. Raymond Redfern, another second generation dealer began to specialize in the works of the Laguna Beach painters in the Orange County area. De McCall, a Bellflower art restorer, began to buy and sell the works of the California Impressionists. Marion Bowater opened the Bowater Gallery on La Cienega's Gallery row and began to specialize in Plein-Air Painters. In 1977, the Laguna Museum hosted a retrospective for William Wendt, the most important figure in early Los Angeles painting, an exhibition that was curated by Nancy Moure. The following year, Moure released her landmark, Dictionary of Art and Artists in Southern California Before 1930, which allowed collectors to identify the artist they were rediscovering.

In 1981 in conjunction with the Los Angeles Bicentennial, an exhibition of early California paintings was held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as well as The Peterson Gallery and Morseburg Gallery, which hosted exhibitions as part of the official bicentennial activities. In 1982 Plein-Air Painters of California: The Southland was published by Ruth Lilly Westphal. Written by Westphal with introductory essays by Terry DeLapp, Thomas Kenneth Enman, Nancy Moure, Martin Peterson, and Jean Stern, the book elavated the value of those art works it included and gave new collectors a group of artists to look for. By the end of the 1980s, major works by California painters could demand more than one-hundred thousand dollars and significant paintings by most of the best known painters ranged in the tens of thousands of dollars. This meant that new collectors, drawn to the en plein air style and California subjects, would see that collecting the work of contemporary artists working in the same tradition as a way of owning Impressionist paintings for an affordable price.

Gold Medal Exhibition

Like other venerable arts organizations, such as the Royal Academy in London or the National Academy of Design in New York, the biggest event on the CAC calendar each year is the annual Gold Medal Exhibition. Today, the Gold Medal Exhibition is held at the Pasadena Museum of California Art each spring. Previous locations include the Pasadena Museum of History and the Luckman Arts Center at California State University, Los Angeles. Works are juried into the exhibition, and each year a single Gold Medal is awarded in Painting and Sculpture, voted on by the artist members of the organization. The 2009 Gold Medal was awarded to Peter Adams. Recent Gold Medalists for painting include Steve Huston, Ryan Wurmser, Mian Situ and Jeremy Lipking.

When Peter Adams took over the leadership of the organization, the first exhibitions for the revitalized CAC were held at the Los Angeles Arboretum in Arcadia, managed by Gold Medal Chairman Rolf Zilmer. After a few years there, the annual exhibition moved to a much more impressive space, the galleries of the Luckman Fine Arts Center, at California State University, Los Angeles. At that venue, a number of works by historic painters of the California Art Club were included for the first time, including paintings by Sergei Bongart, Colin Campbell Cooper and Theodore Lukits. The Annual Gold Medal Exhibition then moved to the Pasadena Museum of History's galleries on the ground of the historic Fenyes Mansion in Pasadena. For the first time, a comprehensive color catalog was prepared for the exhibition with an essay by an art historian biographies of all the participants. A large exhibition of historic works by significant early painters was included, along with biographies in the catalog. In recent years, the Gold Medal Exhibition has been held at the Pasadena Museum of History in downtown Pasadena, a recently built museum in downtown Pasadena.

Special Exhibitions

Under the leadership of Peter and Elaine Adams, the California Art Club organized a series of thematic exhibitions at both art and natural history museums. The Adams saw that there was a natural relationship between landscape art, ecological awareness, and natural history. In 1996, the California Art Club organized the California Wetlands Exhibition at the Natural History Museum in historic Exposition Park in Los Angeles. This exhibition included works by artists such as Bill Stout, Marcia Burtt, Meredith Brooks Abbott, Debra Hulse, Arny Karl, and Peter Adams. In May through August 1998, the CAC mounted Treasures of the Sierra Nevada at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, featuring works by historic California artists like Edgar Payne, Jack Wilkenson Smith, and Theodore Lukits, as well as contemporary painters like Adams, John Budicin, Dan Pinkham, and Karl Dempwolf. The Carnegie Museum in Oxnard, California, hosted a large exhibition of works by painters from the California Art Club in 1994, entitled, "The California Art Club: 85 Years of Art," where Adams' work was featured prominently. In 1997, Peter and Elaine Adams and the California Art Club organized a traveling exhibition which contrasted the work of American Impressionists and Classical Realist painters from the East and Midwestern United States along with the California Impressionists. Titled, "East Coast Ideals West Coast Concepts," the exhibition traveled from the Carnegie Museum in Oxnard to the Springville Museum of Art in Springville, Utah to the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. Among the historic artists represented were William McGregor Paxton and R.H. Ives Gammell, representing the Boston School, and Theodore Lukits and Maurice Braun, representing the California Impressionists. Contemporary artists included the works of Richard Lack, Allen Banks, and Stephen Gjertson, representing the East coast and the Midwest; and Peter Adams, Gregory Hull, and Tim Solliday representing the West coast. The California Art Club also organized and sponsored a traveling exhibition entitled, "Theodore Lukits, An American Orientalist," dedicated to the Asian-themed works of Thedore Lukits, who had first been a member of the California Art Club in 1922 and was later made a Life Member. This exhibition of colorful still lifes and figurative works originated at the Pacific Asia Museum in the fall of 1998 and traveled to the Carnegie Art Museum in the winter of 1998 and 1999, then concluded at the Muckenthaller Cultural Center in Fullerton, California, in the Spring of 1999. Later in 1999, the California Art Club began a relationship with the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in Malibu with the exhibition entitled, "On Location in Malibu," which was another show that brought awareness to the troubled California Coast. The exhibition, organized by Peter and Elaine Adams and curated by the Weisman's Michael Zakian ran from May to August, featuring the work of dozens of CAC painters including David Gallup, Alexey Steele and Stephen Mirich.

En plein air painting events

En plein air painting, the practice of painting outdoors, directly from nature has always had a social aspect to it. In the late 18th century and early in the 19th century, after the conclusion of their academic studies, many European painters went south to Rome to paint Roman ruins and the Campagna. Then, in the first half of the 19th century the French Barbizon school began to gather in the Fountainbleu forest to paint, lodging in the tiny village of Barbizon. Painters traveled their together, sketched on the forests and plains of the region and socialized together in the little inns in the evenings. As the years passed, a number of painters moved there and Barbizon became the first of many art colonies where en plein air oriented artists lived and painted.

As the en plein air movement was revived, large, well organized festivals were organized where artists worked out of doors for a few days and then exhibited and sold their work. The first such event organized by the California Art Club was held at Mission San Juan Capistrano in the summer of 1995, sponsored by the art patron Joan Irvine Smith. This was a large event, with 83 artists participating. The mission events were very popular with members of the California Art Club as well as collectors and nine of these large scale events were held at the mission before sponsorship and interest declined. Smaller, more casual "Paint-Outs" are also a fixture on the California Art Club calendar, where artists paint in scenic locations or paint models in outdoor settings.

CAC organization

Membership

The California Art Club membership is broad, with more than 3,000 members in a number of categories of membership. Signature Members are the most established painters who have been approved for membership by their peers from the ranks of Artist Members. Artist Members are juried into the organization from new applicants and the ranks of the Painting Patron Members. There is a category for out of state artist members, enabling the group the benefit of having the work of some of America's best traditional painters. There is also a large membership of Patron Members and also a Collector's Circle, which requires a donation to the organization.

Mission statement

The California Art Club's primary purposes are to promote the fine arts in the fields of painting, drawing and sculpture referred to as traditional and representational art, with a special emphasis placed on the academic traditions and craftsmanship established by the founders of the corporation; to produce and promote art exhibits that foster understanding and interpretation of the traditional art heritage; and to furnish educational opportunities in the fine arts. Additionally, the corporation may engage in any activities that are reasonably related to or in furtherance of its stated charitable and public purposes, or in any other charitable activities.

Exhibitions

• Pasadena Museum of California Art – Annual Gold Medal Exhibition
• CAC Gallery at the Old Mill, El Molino Veijo, San Marino, California
• Marston's Restaurant, Pasadena – temporary exhibitions
• The Historic Blinn House, Pasadena – temporary exhibitions

Notable historic members

• Franz Bischoff
• Theodore Lukits
• Carl Oscar Borg
• Edgar Alwin Payne
• Hanson Puthuff
• Granville Redmond
• Guy Rose
• Arny Karl
• Marion Wachtel
• William Wendt

Notable current members

• Peter Seitz Adams
• Tony Pro
• Armand Cabrera

See also

• Landscape art
• California Tonalism
• Decorative Impressionism

References

• Morseburg, Jeffrey, The Return of the California Impressionists, Art of California, Unpublished Manuscript
• Trenton, Patricia & Gerdts, William, California Light: 1900–1930, Laguna Beach Museum of Art, Exhibition Catalog, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1992
• Morseburg, Jeffrey, Theodore Lukits: The Jonathan Art Foundation Collection, Johnathan Club, Los Angeles, 2010
• Morseburg, Jeffrey, Theodore Lukits: An American Orientalist, Exhibition Catalog, Forward by David Kamansky, Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, California, 1998
• Adams, Peter & Adams Elaine, East Coast Ideals, West Coast Concepts, Carnegie Museum, Oxnard, California Introduction by Suzanne Bellah, Exhibition Catalog, 1997
• Stern, Jean, Treasures of the Sierra Nevada, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Exhibition Catalog, 1998
• Susan Landauer, Ph.D., "The California Art Club, A History", American Art Review, March 1996, p. 44–51

External links

• Official website
• Springville Museum of Art, Site of CAC Special Exhibitions
• Haggin Museum, Stockton, California, Venue for CAC Special Exhibitions
• Weisman Museum, Pepperdine, Venue for Special On Location in Malibu Exhibitions
• Web site Devoted to the Life and Art of Thedore Lukits, CAC Life Member
• Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Collection of Plein-Air Pastels including CAC Members Living and Deceased
• Pacific Asia Museum Web Site, Venue for CAC Special Exhibitions
• American Legacy Representative for several CAC signature members
• The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Venue for Special Exhibitions
• National Academy of Design, New York, Allied Organization