As the summer season descends upon the art world, museum destinations often increase in popularity as the close of Art Basel and other fairs incite a slight gallery slump.  Nevertheless, FADA galleries remain active exhibiting summer shows and contributing both their knowledge and artworks to ongoing museum exhibitions.  While many associate the act of looking at art with the museum setting, gallery shows offer an intimate space to view other works by museum-favored artists.  Coincidently, many blockbuster museum exhibits this summer feature FADA represented artists, with showcases of their artwork additionally displayed at FADA galleries.  Methods of curation, perhaps approached differently in each art world venue, nevertheless offer an audience various ways to understand artists and their bodies of work in conversation with the themes closely studied by museum and gallery professionals.  A visit to a gallery space broadens ones knowledge of both the art world and decisions behind curation.  Enhance your summer vacation with stops to both museums and galleries; especially considering the personal relationships forged by galleries and artists.  Galleries are often the first to exhibit artists as they navigate their way to cultural status by way of museum patronage.

Jim Dine: Abstraction at Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art

Jonathan Novak Contemporary’s current show focuses on Dine’s dalliance with Post-War art: Abstract Expressionism.  While today he is known for his iconic use of heart, robes and Venus de Milo motifs, Jonathan Novak Contemporary’s curatorial eye illuminates upon Dine’s large abstraction, “a new realm of color, surface texture, composition and form.”  Major contemporary art museums, like the recently renovated SFMOMA (pictured), are also host to Dine’s work.

(ABOVE) Jim Dine, Cheval Blanc Poem – 67 1/8″ x 49″, 2015, Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art. 

Jim Dine, Blue Clamp, 1981, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, SFMOMA. © Jim Dine / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Leslie Sacks Gallery: Group Text

A retrospective of Californian artist Ed Ruscha, Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, opened at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The show meditates upon Ruscha’s visual connection to the West, explored in the works representative of its mythological landscape. 

Ed Ruscha, “A Particular Kind of Heaven”,1983. Oil on canvas, 90 x 136 ½ in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Mrs. Paul L. Wattis Fund, 2001.85 © Ed Ruscha 

Some are enhanced by laconic, yet mystical, phrases, a trait similarly explored in Leslie Sacks Gallery’s current show, Group Text.  Featuring works by Ruscha and notable contemporaries Andy Warhol (whose pop art is deeply rooted on the East Coast.)  It nevertheless explores the powers of words and texts within contemporary consumer culture, manifested in Warhol advertisements or Ruscha’s sparse landscapes.

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937), Question & Answer, 1991, Lithograph, 15 1/8 x 18 inches, Edition of 50, Leslie Sacks Gallery. 

Gustave Baumann, Piñon-Grand Cañon, Color Woodblock on paper, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William Hume, Legion of Honor, San Francisco. 

San Francisco’s Legion of Honor complements the Rushca show with their own, Wild West: Plains to the Pacific.  The exhibit features a color woodcut on paper by Gustave Baumann, heavily represented in the inventories of William A. Karges Fine Art, David Cook Fine Art and Eckert & Ross Fine Art.   Baumann’s colorful depictions of the West’s magnificent, natural scenery, executed through woodblock prints, have had a home in San Francisco since he exhibited at the 1915 Pan-Pacific International Exhibition.

Gustave Baumann, Aspen Red River, Woodcut, David Cook Fine Art.  Click to inquire. 

Gustave Baumann, Grandma Battin’s Garden, Color Woodblock Print, Eckert & Ross Fine Art.  Click to inquire. 

Gustave Baumann, El Velorio, Woodblock, William A. Karges Fine Art.  Click to inquire. 

Artist Robert Cottingham, gallerist Jane Eckert and artist Eric Forstmann

The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts is host to Rockwell and Realism in an Abstract World.  Jane Eckert of Eckert Fine Art, and representative of photorealist Robert Cottingham and realist artist Eric Forstmann, offered their insights about art and the creative processes in a conversation sponsored by the museum and which focused on perspectives on realism and the role of memory, meaning, and personal inspiration in art.

Featured in the exhibit is: Oasis, 2013. Robert Cottingham. Jane Eckert Fine Art. All rights reserved.

Source Viewers at the Lam exhibit in Madrid 

“A pioneer of cross-cultural painting that infused Western modernism and African and Caribbean symbolism,” Wifredo Lam is examined at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid,  in an exhibit co-sponsored with the Centre Pompidou and Tate Gallery.  Notable Cuban art gallery Cernuda Arte contributed their knowledge of the artist to the show and were able to attend the opening of the exhibit in France.  They additionally hold works by Lam in their inventory.

Wifredo Lam, Birds, ca 1950, Oil on canvas, Cernuda Arte.

Cernuda Arte at the opening of the Lam exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in Paris

 

Kitagawa Utamaro, Calligraphy Lesson, from the series: 12 types of Women’s Handicrafts, Woodblock, Douglas Frazer Fine Art.  Click to inquire.

    Although our goodbyes to summer were cut short, fall is gearing up for a Coup d’état, and ushering in the season of academics.  With first days of school beckoning back students, this post is an homage to learning (equally supported by FADA’s commitment to scholarship: remember to keep up with Gertrude).  While research topics are chosen at university, art institutions are set on welcoming patrons with new fall exhibitions exploring new fields of art history.      

Wayman Elbridge Adams, A Student of Art, Oil on board, Eckert & Ross Fine Art.  Click to inquire.

   

Ryan Salge, The Theologian, Charcoal on paper, Arcadia Contemporary.  Click to inquire.

  Likewise, after emerging from the slumber of August, FADA galleries are host to new exhibitions: but most importantly, lending their expertise to museum curated shows.  As a parallel to this academic exchange, enjoy works in FADA’s inventory inspired by (the almost mystical) seekers of knowledge.      

Chris Pfister, Young Astronomer, Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art.  Click to inquire. 

  Here’s an all star list of teacher’s pets. (Literally, as in Barend Wijnveld’s Teaching Him a New Trick, even a dog can learn a thing or two).      

John Hubbard Rich, The Violin Lesson, Oil on canvas, George Stern Fine Arts.  Click to inquire.

   

Barend Wijnveld, “Teaching Him a New Trick,” Oil on canvas, Guarisco Gallery, Click to inquire.

 

Fletcher Martin, The Set Up, c.1937-38, Lithograph, David Cook Fine Art.  Click to inquire. 

    The Olympics are upon us: a constant reminder as we frantically check to see who won gold for the gymnastics floor exercise.  As a country’s athletic prowess is brought to the international stage, one can only reflect upon the importance of sport within our daily lives.  While nations are often associated with various sports, and even more specifically with the winter or summer seasons, categories aside, fans of any sport often go through the same emotional highs and lows when rooting on for their favorite team, or even the underdog.      

Elaine de Kooning, Basketball No. 40, 1977, Oil on canvas, Levis Fine Art.  Click to inquire. 

       

Francis Livingston, The Rowers, Oil on panel, Arcadia Contemporary.  Click to inquire. 

    The universality of cheering and the neutrality of athletics offers some sense of peace within the world. Watching sports often conjures emotions-visceral feelings of elation, anxiety and disappointment.  Thus, how do visual depictions of sporting events successfully incite a spectator’s excitement. Perhaps the more difficult task for the artist is instead rendering the champion…or the defeated. Through artistic mediums, athletes become magically elegant subject matters: with the power of art greatly elevating their arduous journey as they are in the throes of competition.      

Henri DeLattre, The Race Between Mac and Zachary Taylor at Hunting Park Course, Philadelphia, July 18, 1849, Oil on canvas, Red Fox Fine Art.  Click to inquire. 

     

James E. Buttersworth, PURITAN Races Towards The Narrows Off Brooklyn – American Yachts Off New York, Oil on board, Vallejo Gallery.  Click to inquire.

Swooning over Rihanna’s latest “Sledgehammer” video for StarTrek (although her makeup seemingly borrows from fashion icon Michele Lamy), one senses that current trends favor an aesthetic cultivated by the scientific. While video games claimed the hearts of teenage nerds in the 90’s, geeking out is lauded with every new sci-fi program circulated. Virginia Berresford, Woman on Steps, Oil on canvas, George Stern Fine Arts.  Click to inquire.

 

The repetitive rectangular form composing the stairs seems to evoke a pixelated quality to the work. Both the woman and geometrically rigid background in which she is situated are unnervingly familiar.

 

Brad Kunk

le, Tidal, Oil and gold leaf on board, Arcadia Contemporary.  Click to inquire.  

 

Kunkle’s subject seems to dwell in the realm of a stormy planet. Now in vogue as a rebooted series, StarTrek fits into a pop culture phenomena where creators, even in the fashion world as exemplified at the Met Gala’s latest theme: Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology-have come to acknowledge that daily life now relies on the scientific ingenuities which are not the stuff of imagination anymore. Jeff Gillette, Beach, Acrylic on canvas, Bert Green Fine Art.  Click to inquire.  Gillette’s Beach is evocative of a future dystopia. James Rosenquist, Where the Water Goes Colored, Pressed Paper Pulp, Contessa Gallery.  Click to inquire. 

 

Rosenquist’s work models an imaginative space craft. Fascination with tech’s future potential spans across all time periods. Virginia Berresford’s Woman on Steps from George Stern Fine Arts uses a pictorial technique which seemingly appears pixelated. Like past movies, 2001: A Space Odyssey, etc., art, like works pictured below, anticipates or incorporates technological advances, however outlandish they may be.

Henry Moore, Eight Sculpture Ideas, 1980-81, Etching and aquatint, Leslie Sacks Gallery.  Click to inquire.  

Moore’s undulating forms float amidst the drawing.

Seung Hoon Park, Textus 145-1, Digital print, PYO Gallery LA. Click to inquire. 

 

Park’s distorted point of view resembles the metallic scales decorating the gowns of the Met’s recent Gala.                  

A model patron orders at Brasserie Gabrielle Source Karl Lagerfeld’s Brasserie Gabrielle, staged within the magnificent beaux-arts structure of the Grand Palais (seasonally decorated for each collection as portrayed in Simon Procter’s photographs), provided spectators the ideal ambience to experience Chanel’s 2015 Ready-to-Wear collection.  It’s also the inspiration for this post celebrating the bohemian enclave and popular artist locus: the café (is the diner its American equivalent?).

Simon Procter, Chanel, The Crucible, Grand Palais, Paris, C-print, Rosenbaum Contemporary Gallery.  Click to inquire.  

 

Procter’s photograph documents the evolution of Chanel’s interior design takeover of the Grand Palais.

 

Simon Procter, Chanel Couture—Spring/Summer 2006, Paris—Le Grand Palais, C-print, Rosenbaum Contemporary Gallery. Click to inquire.

 

Recalling the baroque eclecticism of popular 1920’s brasserie hangouts with its fabulous Art Deco furnishings, Lagerfeld’s Brasserie Gabrielle was a space transfigured to a timeless past. Models entered through a brass-revolving door to a “catwalk” of upholstered red booths lit by groupings of cream globe lamps and a central mahogany bar area attended to by waiters.  An homage to Parisian café society, Brasserie Gabrielle exuded a distinct French provenance as models nonchalantly occupied the coveted booths to be waited upon with croissants.

Source

The interior space played into spectators’ francophile fantasies of Paris’s famed “Femmes de Brasserie,” immortalized in the art historical canon with Manet’s and Degas’ muses.  In its resurrection of the revered French institution, the Parisian’s outdoor apartment, the interior accumulated power through its clichéd symbolism.  Evoking modern brasseries with its leather and mosaic design accents, Brasserie Gabrielle and its temporary occupants were brought into a space of understated luxury and thus highlighting the clothes’ wearability. Embodying bourgeoise notions of seeing and being seen, spectators were captivated by the brasserie stage, but perhaps most notably conscious of one another.

Source

Similarly, artistic depictions of restaurants, brasseries and the like cultivate an audience’s imagination of the conversations, ideas and inspirations incubated in the café.  While we’re now accustomed to bringing our laptops to work at Starbucks, Brasserie Gabrielle and other restaurants in these works confirm that cafés are still the glamorous, aesthetically quirky and universal offices to all creatives.

Edward S. Goldman, Café Chihuahua, Acrylic on canvas, David Cook Fine Art. Click to inquire. 

Imagining Goldman’s Café Chihuahua as the local hangout for many.

Michael Carson, Lounging, Oil on panel, Arcadia Contemporary.  Click to inquire. 

Carson transports his audience to a chic destination.

John Michael Carter, Morning in Sorrento, Oil on linen, Eckert & Ross Fine Art.  Click to inquire.  

A more relaxed morning to catch up with the daily news.

Ralph Goings, Booth Group, Watercolor on paper, Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art.  Click to inquire.  

Goings’ photorealistic work monumentalizes the mundane in this dining scene.    

Gustave Baumann, The Country Circus, Color Woodblock Print, Eckert & Ross Fine Art. Click to inquire.

As last month’s post was an ode to the more quieter tones of city life, today’s post showcases the often overlooked representations of life in the countryside.  While this city girl’s simple assumptions of rural life calls for the cowboy subjects, it nevertheless suggests that rural life can be just as busy as the urban scene.

Robert Aaron Frame, Farm Lands, Oil on canvas, George Stern Fine Arts.  Click to inquire.

The country, often looked upon as a retreat, ultimately conjures ideas about isolation, which as explored in last month’s post, can also be experienced in the city.  Not to be viewed as an anthesis to city living, these artworks underline that certain truths about daily life can be parallel in both rural and urban habitations.

Olaf Wieghorst, Untitled, Cowboy on Horseback Rifle Left Arm, Pastel on paper, Thomas Nygard Gallery.  Click to inquire.

 

Vaughn Flannery, Walking Ring, Greentree Stables, Saratoga, Oil on panel, Red Fox Fine Art.  Click to inquire.

 

In comparing representations of the city and the country, what colors are associated with each artwork, which subject do we associate with each genre? What moods are evoked by each type of representation?

 

 

William Sanford Mason, Caught Napping, Oil on canvas, Godel & Co. Fine Art, Inc. Click to inquire.

 

Edward S. Goldman, Alley, Acrylic on canvas, David Cook Fine Art.  Click to inquire. 

While most engage in and seek out urban lifestyles for the activity of the hustle and bustle, representations of city life in artworks, most notably by Edward Hooper, resolve to find the stillness and loneliness of the supposed busy streets.  An anthesis to perceived attributions to urban spaces as meccas for motion, it nevertheless highlights that artists have inherited city life differently.

John Baeder, Town Square Diner, Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art.  Click to inquire. 

Louise Nevelson, City – Space – Scape V, Painted wood, Contessa Gallery. Click to inquire.

In interpreting these various perspectives on city life, what do these artists wish to extract from the common experience of living in cities? In which ways can their audiences relate to the subtleties of their depictions-the unnerving (and relatable) capability of finding stillness?

Bertrand Meniel, Roaring, Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art.  Click to inquire.

Ben Schonzeit, Sixth Avenue, Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art.  Click to inquire.

As seen in Edward S. Goldman’s Alley,amidst the noise, people still search to carve out those quiet moments.  How would you represent the city you live in?

Michael Rosenfeld, “Blue City II,” Oil on canvas, Arcadia Contemporary.  Click to inquire. 

Andreas Feininger, Unloading Coffee at Brooklyn Dock, New York, Silver gelatin print, Contessa Gallery.  Click to inquire

Simon Procter, Valentino Eight Haute Couture 2010, Paris, C-print, Rosenbaum Contemporary Gallery.  Click to inquire.

We’re all living vicariously through Instagram for updates on this year’s Met Gala with its enigmatic theme, “Manus X Machina.” While evoking the grand balls of Renaissance’s past-where costumes were just a slight upgrade of dress- corsets were a daily thing at Versailles-it’s a big deal today when one is transformed from lounging sweatpants to a glamorous debutante in just mere hours.

Luvena Vysekal, The Aesthete, Oil on canvas, George Stern Fine Arts.  Click to inquire.

Stephen Mackey, “The Looking Glass,” Oil on panel, Arcadia Contemporary.  Click to inquire.

Oscar Theodore Jackman, “The Promenade” – Seville, Spain, c. 1920, Oil on canvas, Trotter Galleries. Click to inquire.

 

Though we have major FOMO, the elaborate costumes on these canvases’ elegant figures best represents the merging of fanfare and art currently experienced at the Gala.  Embracing the avant-garde, the Met Gala, with its edgy themes, allows for once-in-a-lifetime outfits and couture.

George Bellows, Portrait of Mrs. Walter Richter, Oil on canvas, Godel & Co. Fine Art. Click to inquire.

Manuel Robbe, Le Menége (The Merry-Go-Round), Color aquatint, Galerie Michael.  Click to inquire.

 

Whether depicting the original costume queens or artful photographs of the runway, let these fashionably dressed muses inspire the imaginary outfit you would wear to attend the Gala. In fact, what would you wear?

George Deem, Terboch Silver Dresses, 1979, Mixed media on paper, Eckert Fine Art Gallery + Art Consulting. Click to inquire.

 

Jean-Pierre Cassigneul, Sacha au Bouquet, 2013, Oil on canvas, Guarisco Gallery.  Click to inquire.

FADA goes international: Salon de Fleurus signage at Muzeum Sztuki in Poland

Museum visitors conversing in the Salon de Fleurus at Muzeum Sztuki

While FADA members are exhibiting an exciting array of gallery shows throughout the nation, FADA has gone international with the installment of Salon de Fleurus at the second oldest museum dedicated to Modern Art, Muzeum Sztuki, in Łódź, Poland.  FADA, whose galleries showcase important works of art ranging from Old Masters to Contemporary Art, supports Salon de Fleurus in a collaborative promotion of art scholarship with Independent Curators International.   

Cubist Conversations at Muzeum Sztuki

An evocation of Gertrude Stein’s Parisian apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus Before jet-setting off to Poland, a petit peek of the Salon was hosted in FADA’s booth at the LA Art Show in February.  While taking selfies with Gertrude, patrons enjoyed a Salon setting complete with ottomans and divans evocative of Gertrude Stein’s seminal twentieth-century Parisian apartment where she first assembled artworks from the provocative, Avant-garde artists who make up the foundations of any great Modern Art collection today.

 

Patrons get comfortable at Salon de Fleurus during the LA Art Show

Behind the Scenes at the LA Art Show

Salon de Fleurus’s installation at the LA Art Show spurred wonderful dialogs about the past, present and future of art, especially when situated amongst one of the West Coast’s most popular art fairs. In its voyage to Europe, especially to one of world’s oldest museums of Modern Art, Salon de Fleurus reveals that new questions can be posed and pondered as it travels to different contexts and places within the art world. FADA is thrilled to be apart of this conversation.

Next Up: 

McDonough Museum of Art Youngstown, OH, United States January 20, 2017 – March 10, 2017

Salon de Fleurus at Muzeum Sztuki

Salon de Fleurus at Muzeum Sztuki

Muzeum Sztuki and Salon de Fleurus

“Salon de Fleurus” is a work about art and art history, a contemporary reconstruction of Gertrude Stein’s Parisian salon that existed at 27 rue de Fleurus from 1904-34. It is a project that displays and references a story of modern art’s beginnings through one of the first gathering places for burgeoning young artists such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Stein herself. It was in Stein’s salon that paintings by Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso were seen exhibited together for the first time both by her peers and transatlantic art experts who spread the word back home, eventually creating the American narrative of European modern art familiar today. Through painted reproductions exhibited within this constructed interior, the “Salon de Fleurus” questions where, why and how certain narratives of modern art originated through the salon structure that first canonized them. These copies are perhaps more significant and tell us more about history than the original artworks themselves by weaving fiction into history and leaving space to contemplate and reconsider the past. When one looks at Picasso here, they are viewing Picasso through the lens of Stein. “Salon de Fleurus” is dedicated to assembling, preserving, and exhibiting memories on early modern art. Its permanent exhibit was located at 41 Spring Street, New York, and was open to the public from 1992–2013. Since then, it continues to appear in cities across the world. The arrival of the “Salon de Fleurus” at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź is an opportunity to confront various narratives about the beginnings of modern art: Parisian and American accounts and the local history of the museum in Łódź. First and foremost, it encourages us to revisit – through looking at a reconstructed copy of Gertrude Stein’s salon – our own historical account: the story of the “source” contribution of the a.r. group, which established the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź as both a modern museum and a museum of modern art. The presented versions of acclaimed artworks from Stein’s salon are not simply counterfeits or technical reproductions, but new handmade copies of modern masterpieces (dated 2015). They are thus repetitions, which bend time and introduce us into the world of fiction, which cannot be simply disregarded as not genuine. Copies of paintings and this Salon reconstruction offer an alternative story about modern art, drawing attention to the fact that art criticism and art history are also stories – meticulously spun, woven on the basis of narrative patterns and images. The Salon reminds us that the history of modern art is produced through the use of reproduced images, which enable adequate circulation strategies and contribute to the popularity of modern art. They enhance the uniqueness of the originals through their duplication and dissemination.                                      

FOUR REASONS WHY HISTORIC ART REMAINS IMPORTANT TO THE CALIFORNIA MARKET

By William A. Karges Fine Art Editorial Staff

What is it that has always attracted people to Early California painting? Works created during the period between 1870 and 1940 by artists such as Granville Redmond, Guy Rose, and William Ritschel continue to remain popular among people of all ages. With the current frenzy surrounding modern and contemporary art, why are collectors, museums and gallery visitors still so fascinated by this more traditional style of painting?

Granville Redmond (1871 – 1935) “California Landscape” SOLD

1) Traditional art is self-sustaining Certainly there is ample room for all types, mediums, subjects, and talents in the art world. The nature of art is to encourage experimentation, and to open viewer’s minds to new ways of thinking and experiencing the world. Art is a medium that, at its best, evokes an emotion, but it has many purposes, including breeding thoughts and ideas, and connecting us to each other through the simple fact that the works were created for humans by other humans.

However, as corporate marketing agencies spend huge sums to convince visitors of flashy art fairs, surfeit with celebrities, that it’s perfectly normal for a canvas painted blue with a white line to sell for $43.8 million dollars, one begins to suspect that the contemporary art world is more about a “scene” than about the art itself.

Yet the private market for historic California art remains strong without all the fanfare and high-priced marketing of its modern, postmodern, and abstract brethren. The reason is that collectors of these prior genres tend to be more self-educating – that is, historic collectors appreciate the visual aesthetic qualities of the work, but also foster connoisseurship by seeking the historical significance of the objects themselves. The market is driven less by external trends and more by a conscious intellectual endeavor to understand the contextual whole.

2) It preserves our history For over one hundred years, the California Art Club has existed for the exclusive purpose of fostering and preserving the rich tradition of fine art in California. One of the oldest, largest, and most active art organizations in the country, it continues to attract an increasing number of new members, and any study of the history of the art of the region will contain by necessity the history of the CAC and its members, such as William Wendt (1865–1946), Edgar Payne (1883–1947), Franz Bischoff (1864–1929)

Edgar Payne (1883 – 1947) “Sierra Lake” Oil on Canvas, 40 x 50 inches AVAILABLE NOW

Other groups, such as the Traditional Fine Arts Organization, continue to grow in popularity and membership. The TFAO, a non-profit group “dedicated to furthering education in American Representational art through advocacy, publication, and research,” similarly works to preserve the history of the arts.

The CrockerArt Museum in Sacramento, established in 1885 and home to a vast and important collection of early California paintings, recently tripled its size and has become one of the leading art museums in California, and the recently opened Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University, displaying a significant collection of 20th century representational art, is drawing large, enthusiastic crowds.

The history of art in California is quite literally the history of the people, places, and events that have shaped the world we live in. Without organizations and patrons dedicated to the preservation and appreciation of this artistic legacy, our own history would be lost to the fog of time.

Maurice Braun (1877 – 1941) “Mountain Paths” Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches AVAILABLE NOW

3) Historical art preserves our environment In order to understand the reasons for this enduring love of paintings created in the “Golden State”, a good place to look is the California landscape itself.

California landscape paintings, plein air works in particular, call attention to the exceptional and unparalleled beauty of the hills, mountains, deserts, and farmlands of California which, in turn, remind us of the fragile nature of our unique habitat. As with John Muir, we are inspired to become better custodians of these precious lands, and to protect and nurture the environment.

Gilbert Munger (1837 – 1903) “El Capitan, Yosemite, 1876” Oil on canvas, 21 1/2 x 31 inches AVAILABLE NOW

Early paintings of Yosemite, by artists such as Gilbert Munger and Thomas Hill, served to draw attention to that area, and helped to spark a new era of conservation and environmental protection for its unique and exceptional beauty. Artists and writers were extremely important in influencing Nineteenth Century trends in American conservation.

One of the great museums in the state is the Irvine Museum, which is dedicated to the preservation and display of California art of the Impressionist Period (1890-1930). In her welcoming statement for the Irvine Museum, the institution’s founder, real estate heiress Joan Irvine Smith, notes that “Much of what originally made California a ‘Golden Land’ was directly linked to the environment, especially the land and water that nurtured and sustained a rare quality of life. Over a hundred years ago, the splendor of nature fascinated artists and compelled them to paint beautiful paintings. As we view these rare and remarkable paintings, we are returned, all too briefly, to a time long ago when the land and its bounty were open and almost limitless.”

Ross Dickinson (1903 – 1978) “Sycamore Canyon” Oil on canvas, 32 x 36 inches AVAILABLE NOW

4) The market is strong In spite of – and at least partially because of – a recent surge in turnover of contemporary art, current auction records for important paintings from the Early California period are remarkably strong. Today’s overheated market for contemporary work with little or no proven track record is providing astute collectors with a perfect opportunity to acquire certain early California paintings on the private market at somewhat more modest prices than those seen a decade or two ago, just as Joan Irvine was able to acquire historic paintings for the museum by circumventing the contemporary art bubble of her own time.

Simultaneously, important major works by the most popular artists in the genre are commanding stronger prices than ever, proving again that the market for the most desirable first-rate works still remains bullish. A painting by William Wendt (1865-1946) “The Old Coast Road”, circa 1916, was sold in April 2015 for $1,565,000, setting a new public record for the artist. The Director of Fine Arts at Bonhams in Los Angeles, Scot Levitt, commented of the sale, “This was the most exciting sale that I have had the distinction to auction in my 30 years working with the company”.  Shrewd collectors know that significant paintings from this genre continue to enjoy an enduring position in the history of art, and can comfortably count on the fact that their importance and relevance over time has been repeatedly proven.

While all of this may be somewhat of a simplification, it’s clear that the appeal of historical California art is multi-faceted and often rooted in deeply-felt emotions and fundamental human nature. The pieces from this halcyon era inspire us to care more about, and protect, our fragile environment. 

Orrin White (1883 – 1969) “Thru the Valley” Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches AVAILABLE

They can make us feel peaceful, centered and quiet, and can function as a counterpoint to the fast pace of today’s world that’s crowded with glowing screens, overflowing email inboxes, and ringing cell phones. 

Gottardo Piazzoni (1872 – 1945) “Under at Tree, 1918” Oil on board, 5 x 7 inches

They can bring us joy, pleasure, and memories of happy times spent with people we’ve loved. And, most importantly, the paintings from this special era in California history make us feel connected to the past, connected to the land and the environment around us, connected to the artists through time, and to each other.