Download PDF scan of original article

For more than seventy years the Laguna Art Museum has been home to a fresh-faced and buoyant kind of art that has come to be known as “California Impressionism.” This phrase is a misnomer if it implies any but the most tenuous connections to the theory-based art born in France decades before the earliest painting in this exhibition. But it is a phrase that has stuck, filling the need for naming works that clearly share a common identity and common source.

Yet even as this catchall name has come into general use—and by default has entered the American art-historical lexicon—there have been few organized attempts to define its meaning. What is California Impressionism, and where did it come from? Who were its major practitioners, where did they get their training, and how does their work relate to that of Impressionists elsewhere in America? What are the shared tenets and impulses affecting this art and our perception of it?

This book and the exhibition it accompanies are among the first attempts to deal with such questions in a scholarly way. Although the essays represent diverse approaches to these questions, from old-line formalist to New Age environmentalist, they are the product of some of the leading minds in the field at this time. If this effort is not the definitive one, that is only because there is still so much work to be done, so small a corps of workers, and so few institutions sponsoring the work. We are proud that the Laguna Art Museum has fostered this serious study in an area too often ignored.

One might ask whether such regional studies are worth the effort. Surely the artistic achievements of these California painters—in what was then a backwater agricultural region—cannot compare to the revolutionary European advances of the same era. But why should they be compared? They are as different in kind as the foods, or songs, or geographies of two distinct cultures.

Speaking for the members and the Trustees of the Laguna Art Museum, I add to Patricia Trenton’s acknowledgments my own thanks to the many lenders, authors, and others who made this project a reality. Dr. Trenton herself has earned special thanks for her devotion to quality in every aspect of her dealings with the Museum.

The Museum is deeply grateful to The Fieldstone Company for its substantial financial assistance, and for the caring attention its officers have devoted to this project and to the history of art in Southern California. Few museums have friends so generous and so enlightened.