Time Traveling Through the Laguna Art Museum (Part Two)

[Editor's note: To read Part One of Time Traveling Through the Laguna Art Museum, .]

Wandering down to the bottom floor of the Laguna Art Museum, Landscape and Figuration from the Collection: Early to Mid-Twentieth Century confronts you from all angles, luring you into the midst of a half-century-long transformation of the arts in the Southwest. Delving into a multitude of aesthetic movements—tonalism, impressionism, synchronism, regionalism, social-realism, modernism—the exhibition seems to articulate the artist’s ever-adaptive passion to create new realms of self-discovery, expression, and relation to the world. Landscape features over 30 exemplar works from LAM’s permanent collection, stretching from 1910 to 1961, each encapsulating a moment when centuries of disparate influences embrace before your eyes in oil, time, and place.

Golden Morrow, or Poppy Field (1931) by Granville Redmond (1871-1935) is an immediate standout. Born in Philadelphia, Redmond overcame scarlet fever as a toddler, leaving him deaf in both ears. He most likely visited Laguna Beach for the first time around the turn of the 20th century, after graduating from the California School of Design. In 1917, he participated in the first exhibition of the Laguna Beach Art Association. Around this time, he was befriended by Charlie Chaplin, who between 1918 and 1931 gave Redmond small roles in several of his films, and provided for him a studio on his movie lot in Los Angeles.

Seeing the world in perpetual silence seems to have deeply informed the progression of Redmond’s aesthetic. Stare into the low-key tones of Golden Morrow, and there arrives a lyrical calm in your mind, the rest of the world cut-off by the lush textures of the trees, the muted glow of daylight washing through the leaves, the silent valley meandering in full bloom, unobstructed by pathways or highways, stock market crashes or great depressions.

However, the effects of the Great Depression remain potent in several pieces. For instance, Cynical (1933) by Nicholas Brigante (1895-1989), portrays Brigante’s wife, Francesca, reading the Los Angeles Times, her legs crossed, her expression questioning the validity of the words. Four years later, Time, The Present by Edward Biberman (1904-1986) shows a shirtless man standing erect, ripped with muscles, eyes clinched in anguish, both hands to his mouth, calling out for help.

Several of the works reflect the painter’s discovered reverence for the landscapes and architecture of the desert Southwest. Rancho Church, New Mexico (1930) by Anna Katharine Skeele (1896-1963) depicts the backside of what Georgia O’Keeffe called “one of the most beautiful buildings left in the United States by the early Spaniards.” In Skeele’s rendering, the size of the church is exaggerated, almost as if seen through a fish-eye lens, angled so as not to reveal the crosses that can be seen through the arched portal entrance on the opposite side. In effect, the building appears doorless, almost as if carved out of a mesa, with two humble figures, dwarfed by comparison, walking around it in a counterclockwise direction.

Bastions of the Painted Desert (1910) by Fernand Lungren (1857-1932), the oldest painting in the gallery, is perhaps the most mesmerizing of the desert landscapes. In 1892, Lungren’s career as a magazine illustrator accelerated to new frontiers, literally, when he was hired by the Santa Fe Railway as an artist to sketch along its route. Bastions depicts a desert landscape on edge, void of human presence, the wilderness stark, untouched, vast, and lonely. Steep lines converge toward the horizon, away from the sharply-angled foreground, offering a glimpse of what it might have been like for Lungren to discover such wonders on the railway.

Like Lungren, James Swinnerton (1875-1974) started out as a magazine illustrator and cartoonist, until his life took a sudden turn when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. So he relocated from New York City to the desert, where the geological wonders of the Colorado Plateau—a region centered where the four corners of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet—revitalized his career as a painter, as evidenced by the majestic Grand Canyon (1930). There in the dry desert air, Swinnerton recovered from TB and lived a long, productive life until the age of 98.

While many painters featured in Landscape and Figuration sought refuge in specific regions like the Colorado Plateau or the California coast, others expressed a refuge already awakened within through the use of figures.

In the Garden (1925) by Mabel Alvarez (1891-1985) depicts a beautiful 1920s flapper, a modern of her day. Her eyes appear detached from her surroundings, looking off to the side with deliberate (yet effortless), sullen (yet thoughtful) restraint. In the flowers surrounding her coiffed hair and exposed shoulders, you can sense a rhythm in the harmonious spectral arrangement.

Fascinated with color theory from an early age, Alvarez studied the theosophical writings of Will Levington Comfort (1878-1932), which advocated among many things Eastern mysticism, meditation, and a belief that rays of color carry a vibratory quality, some intrinsic spiritual property, capable of awakening dormant aspects of divinity within a person. As luck or synchronicity would have it, in 1919, she became a student of Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890-1973), who exposed Alvarez to the Synchromist Movement, aimed at evoking musical sensations through a symphony of colors. In this sense, the scales of the flowers in Garden give voice to the anonymous woman’s painted, pursed, silent lips.

Like Alvarez, John Schwankovsky (1885-1974) was fascinated by mystical ideas. Introduced to theosophy by his wife, he explored its tenants of the infinite potential of human consciousness on the canvas. In Woman at the Piano (1920), a woman with closed eyes commands the keys in a meditative trance, her figure balanced by an expansive orange-gold-fiery flower made of stars within stars, its self-similarity suggestive of fractal geometry. Squiggly vertical splices in the painting stretch across the image like sound waves thinning the veil of perception, a pink-violet pentagon radiating through. It’s not a stretch to imagine the flower continually unfolding into star systems and galaxies according to the music’s frequency; the woman’s poised fingers, part of the star blending into her face, her consciousness anything but dormant.

Schwankovsky went on to live in Laguna Beach for a time, where he wrote an art column for the South Coast News, and became active in the Laguna Beach Art Association … which brings us further back in time to early regionalist members like Edgar Alwin Payne (1883-1947), Elsie Palmer Payne (1884-1971), Jospeh Kleitsch (1882-1931) and Karl Yens (1868-1945).

Self-taught artist Edgar Payne was the first president of the association, having visited Laguna Beach in 1911. His oeuvre includes the desert Southwest, French and Italian harbor scenes, the Alps, and the High Sierra, such as the featured Sierra Packer (1939). In 1917, Payne returned to Laguna Beach with his wife, Elsie Payne—Elsie’s A Decent Burial (1942) is also on display, the only watercolor in Landscapes—and their daughter. Kleitsch followed in Paynes’ lead, moving to L.B. in 1920, where he vowed to portray the town in multiple paintings before the onslaught of inevitable real estate development. The Old Post Office (1922-1923) depicts, in bold colors and bravura brushwork, the charming beach town’s General Store on a bright afternoon, where residents used to receive their mail. Here, a dog sits up on the steps, an empty wooden crate waits in the road, and a structureless bluff in the background stands blanketed in chaparral.

The Ride with a Snap, Venice, California (1918) was painted during the final year of WWI, the same year Karl Yens helped to found the Laguna Beach Art Association. Born in Germany, he immigrated to the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. In Yens’ bold and decorative style, Ride with a Snap evokes distant memories of childhood innocence. Smiling children ride on a merry-go-round, grasping the harnesses of faux horses that are frozen in mid-gallop with crazed, wild-eyed shouts of pain in their high-gloss expressions.

In 1993, Ride with a Snap was presented as a “living picture” in the Pageant of the Masters, paying tribute to the 75th anniversary of the association. Yens lived and worked in Laguna until his passing in 1945, a day before President Roosevelt died, less than a month before Germany surrendered to the allied forces, and less than four months before the first nuclear weapons test of an atomic bomb (codename “Trinity”) at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, bringing humankind into a new mind-bending Atomic Age a mere 21 days before the weapon’s first deployment of indiscriminate destruction over Hiroshima.

WWII forced artists of the day to confront not just the atrocities of war, but the implications of nuclear technology, and the post-war social realities at home. Many began to glorify the triumphs of every day hardship, finding optimism in spite of poverty and despair, the rise of McCarthyism and a Second Red Scare (1947-1957).

Francis de Erdely (1904-1959) grew up in Hungary during the first World War. His sketches and early paintings of the devastation got him banished from his home country by the Gestapo, and so in the 1930s he fled the rise of fascism to America. In Day’s End (1947), a young mother cradles her baby to sleep after feeding, her breasts illuminated in the day’s final hours. The father rests his head in his hands, looking down at his first born: an early Baby Boomer. He tries to ignore the dark, cramped living quarters, or perhaps he tries to repress memories from the war. Nonetheless, their dingy laundry is hanging to dry, and there are some vegetables on the table. Together, this nuclear family has made it through another day.

Like Yens and de Erdely, Phil Dike (1906-1990) was a member of the California Water Color Society. A prominent California regionalist in the 1930s and 1940s, he also worked as a color coordinator and story designer on animated classics like Snow White and Fantasia. Dike left Disney in 1945 and returned to painting and teaching full time. Then came Fisherman’s Rocks (1947), which marked a moment of post-WWII transformation, bridging elements of classic and abstract seascapes. In Rocks, ships are sailing out to sea from Corona del Mar (where Dike and Rex Brandt formed the Brandt-Dike Summer School of Painting that same year). The horizon is slightly arched, high on the canvas, and feels as distant as ever. Yet the rocks on the coast are constructed out of rectangle splinters and earth-tone splatters, suggestive of an intrinsic explosive potential within matter itself (i.e, nuclear fission), while reinforcing fundamental tensions between life on land and life at sea. By the 1960s, Dike’s work would reach near total abstraction.

Several of the later pieces in Landscape and Figuration push the aesthetic further into modern abstractionism. The Card Players (1956) by antiwar activist Hans Gustav Burkhardt (1904-1994) integrates the cubism of Picasso, while Woman in Orange and Brown (1956) by Keith Finch (1919-1993) reflects the artist’s ambition to merge figuration and abstraction into something never seen before. And others, like Lavanderas (1961) by Dan Lutz (1906-1978), who was partially deaf, express in bold lines, deep reds and blues, the painter’s passion for that which he could never create: music, particularly jazz and gospel. Although, staring at the clotheslines stretched-tight by the wind, you need not hear a thing to see that the sheets and the trousers in Lavanderas are dancing.

Doubling back up the stairs, you can travel to the turn of the 21st century and enter Reproductions by Brad Coleman (1961-present), a pairing of two series of works: the Field paintings, and Sheep I-X (1998-2010). Both series examine the act of reproduction through the reimagining of rural imagery (vegetables, chickens, sheep, etc.) in terms of conceptual high art like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Field Painting, Blue Sky, Vegetable Ellipse (2002) and Field Painting with Chickens (2005) appear at first to be highly realistic renditions of vegetables and chickens, but when taken as a whole, what emerge are abstract landscapes of Coleman’s youth, growing up in the flat farmlands of northwest Ohio, rendered with an emphasis on the picture plane itself. In Blue Sky, vegetables hover in an illusory circular orbit in front of a skyscape of dark blue clouds and violet light streaking through. In Chickens, your eyes keep adjusting between focusing on a single still-life vegetable, and their collective illusion of three dimensions as the colorful harvest diminishes toward the horizon before getting interrupted by a row of five black and white birds arranged in a symmetrical formation.

Coleman has been the Lead Pastor at Church By The Sea in Laguna Beach for nearly 13 years. All of the Field pieces, particularly Field Painting with Vessels, Arcs (2010-2011), reflect his fascination with the spiritual implications of geometric patterns, such as the Golden Ratio (1.618), which can be found in countless repeating forms in nature, from the seeds in the center of a flower, to the bracts of a pinecone, to the shell of a snail. Coleman incorporates the Golden Ratio into the dimensions of Vessels by centering a 5x3 foot rectangle within a similar 8x5 foot rectangle (all Fibonacci numbers). A grid of teapots and jars appears to rotate on an axis, a vanishing point just beyond view that simultaneously serves as the source of light. As a whole, the vessels start to resemble rays of harmonic light, the arc a cathedral ceiling.

“I want the work the have a kind of religious presence to it,” says Coleman. “I’m really interested in ideas of harmonic design, like inherent design in nature.”

The Sheep series, on the other hand, emphasizes the imperfect geometries of mass-production. The project began in 1998 when Coleman learned about Dolly (1996-2003), the first successful cloned sheep through nuclear transfer. Blending biological, mechanical and technological processes of reproduction, Sheep I is a drawing of a photograph of a sheep, already two steps removed from the thing-itself. Coleman then drew Sheep II from Sheep I, Sheep III from Sheep II, IV from III, V from IV, VI from V, etc., copying a mark from a mark from a mark, etc. By the time you get to Sheep XII, with its high-contrast, stylized lines, the lifelike aura of Sheep I (by comparison) has vanished. The subject of the series has become less and less a sheep, not even a photograph of a sheep, and more and more the marks themselves.

Unless your eyes are closed, Coleman’s pieces are bound to entice you—whether to see the vessels as rays or the sheep as marks—to do the unfathomable: slow down.

Extract, Landscape and Figuration from the Collection: Early to Mid-Twentieth Century and Brad Coleman Reproductions run through May 15 at the , 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach, 949-494-8971; lagunaartmuseum.org. Open daily 11 a.m.-5 p.m. and on First Thursdays Art Walk. Admission: $12 general; $10 students, seniors, active military; free for children under 12 and museum members.