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For many people until quite recently, the phrase “American art” conjured portraits of stiff-collared aristocrats or sublime views of rivers and forests. The vision might have included Thomas Eakins’ anatomical wonders and the social criticism of the Ashcan painters—might even have extended to the “triumph of American painting,” the New York School. But it would not have recognized more than a handful of women or—with the possible exception of J. J. Audubon—a single African-American. And it would have found no room at all for any artist in the vastness of California history and geography who did not bring a pre-established reputation to the State.

Now, though, there is a growing recognition in academic and museum quarters of the value of contributions by artists from a broad range of cultural backgrounds. Such recognition parallels a new political awareness of the richness and depth that diversity can bring—has always brought—to our society. And with this awareness, scholars have begun to pay special attention to the regional distinctions in the art of our nation.

The ideal the Laguna Art Museum pursues today is that of a museum that is rigorous in its scholarship and conscientious in its educational presentations, while caring for an exemplary collection of American art. But it differs from other museums of American art in this: its collection will be noted, with time and careful attention, not for its works by Philadelphia or Hudson River painters, but primarily for works created by artists who have been a significant part of the history of art in California.

The point of such an enterprise is not only to preserve good art that might be passed over by Eastern curators and historians, but also to maintain a sense of the original matrix from which some works and artists rise to national or international prominence. Thus, for example, to know the work of a Lorser Feitelson helps to anchor in a historical context the formal and perceptual experiments of better-known artists such as Larry Bell, Tony DeLap and Robert Irwin.

Like California itself—which saw European settlement long before there was an America, yet is known worldwide for experimentation and innovation—the Laguna Art Museum is both a relic of history and a brash upstart. A decidedly contemporary edifice, completed in 1986, embraces the Museum’s 1929 building, which was the first major structure built in Southern California for the sole purpose of exhibiting painting and sculpture. Founded as an “artists’ space” ( as we would call it today) to showcase recent art, the institution for years largely ignored the advanced art of its own era, only to now return to a role as one of the prime venues for contemporary art in Southern California.

As this book attests, the Laguna Art Museum’s Permanent Collection reflects both California’s historical interaction with its artists and the Museum’s own idiosyncratic history. Its compass includes major works by the Museum’s artist-founders (in many cases, the region’s first significant artists), as well as objects that now hang on the Museum walls only-as some of them surely would have insisted-over the dead bodies of the early artists. While far from a complete record of the history of art in California, it does include important works of art from all periods, including a substantial group of very recent works.

It is a collection assembled by an institution with a seventy-five-year history of service to its region. Though the needs of the region have changed radically over that period, and the Museum has responded to such changes, the spirit of its first exhibition in 1918 remains intact: to share the excitement and intensity of human expression in the visual arts.

Laguna Beach in 1918 must have seemed about as far as one could get in the civilized world from the social ferment that was transforming art in Europe. Well away from the main highway, down a dirt track, 300 townspeople lived in board-and-batten cottages strung along the beach. Though the Great War had just ended, one wouldn’t be reminded of international events unless the single telephone in town carried the latest news.¹

But if the little beach town was not subject to the same forces that created the avant-garde artistic movements in Italy, Russia and elsewhere, it did resemble the parts of France where Impressionism had been invented decades earlier. Artists who had trained in France, or wished they had, came to Laguna Beach to practice their craft in a conducive atmosphere, to set up summer schools, or to study in such schools.

Among the most prominent of these artists to take up permanent residence in Laguna Beach was Edgar Payne. It was Payne who, in the summer of 1918, organized a group of artists to convert the old town hall—a simple wood structure sitting vacant in a eucalyptus grove near the center of town—into a gallery for the display of local art. On July 27, they opened their first exhibition; on August 20, they met at Payne’s house to sign a document incorporating the Laguna Beach Art Association, the direct predecessor of the Laguna Art Museum.

Though one purpose of the Association was to sell the works of its artist members, only thirty-five of 150 charter members were artists. This, coupled with educational efforts undertaken around 1921, including exhibitions and lectures in Orange County schools, is a clear indication of the broader mission of the group.

It is also clear that the Association wanted permanence. As early as 1921 the members had architect Myron Hunt design a fireproof building. Under the presidency of Anna Hills, a highly-respected artist, and with the support of Mr. and Mrs. James Irvine and other community leaders, funds were raised and a site determined. The building, the Steele Gallery of the current Laguna Art Museum, opened on February 16, 1929.

It was not until February 8,1941, however, that the Association decided to establish a Permanent Collection. In keeping with the LBAA’s decidedly conservative bent, the decision was made to limit the collection to deceased artists. By 1951, when the group opened a major addition to the gallery building, the collection consisted of about thirty works by George Brandriff, Elanor Colburn, William A. Griffith, Anna Hills, Thomas L. Hunt, Joseph Kleitsch, William Riddell, Norman St. Clair, George Gardner Symons and others.

By the late 1960s the Association’s function as a showcase for member artists was pretty much an anachronism. Commercial galleries now existed as outlets for the work of artists who earlier would have found no place to show, and the property taxes levied on the gallery threatened the Association’s fiscal health. Moreover, the gallery was performing educational and exhibition roles similar to those of a museum, establishing an art school (now the independent Art Institute of southern California) and presenting such important shows as Media Explored (1967) and retrospectives of the work of Karl Benjamin (1965) and Robert Natkin (1970).

In July 1972, under the leadership of collector/dealer Jack Glenn as president, the Laguna Beach Art Association officially became the Laguna Beach Museum of Art. The name was changed again in 1986, to Laguna Art Museum, with the opening of a renovated and expanded building.

Ninety percent of the 3,120 objects now in the Permanent Collection of the Laguna Art Museum have been acquired since the 1972 decision to fully pursue the goals of a museum. A number of these works have come to the Museum as part of large gifts. In 1980, for example, through the efforts of then president Barbara Steele Williams, a group of seventy-five works were transferred from the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation. These were primarily “California School” paintings, 1930-1950.

In 1984 the Museum received the Carl S. Dentzel estate of about 300 paintings, works on paper and sculpture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Photographer Barbara Kasten donated ninety contemporary photographs in 1987, adding substantially to a photography collection distinguished by the unparalleled Paul Outerbridge holdings given by the artist’s widow in 1968. In 1988, Mrs. George Kennedy Brandriff donated forty-one paintings by her husband, including the only known modernist works by the well-known plein air artist, and from the late Pauline Hirsh’s estate came an important collection of Los Angeles sculpture and painting from the sixties and seventies.

In celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Museum, many generous friends made important gifts to the collection. These are listed in an appendix at the back of this book; however, three gifts especially notable for their size and quality are those of Nancy Noble and Dennis Hudson (thirty-nine works by the artist John Paul Jones), René and Norma Molina and Charlie Miller (170 silkscreen prints produced at Self-help Graphics, the largest collection of Chicano prints in a public collection), and Louise and Richard Newquist (fifty post-1970 paintings and sculptures).

The works of art highlighted in this volume are a critical selection, made by the curators of the Laguna Art Museum. In selecting the objects to be included, we made a special effort to choose works from all periods represented in the collection. But we avoided duplication of works documented in the last selected catalogue, Virginia Steele Scott Memorial Collection and Examples from the Permanent Collection (1980). We also chose to limit ourselves to painting and sculpture, simply for the sake of visual consistency.

This book makes no pretense of recording all the works in the Permanent Collection, nor even all the most important works. It is, instead, a celebration: of the art and artists of California, of the generosity of many friends and supporters, and of the Laguna Art Museum’s three quarters of a century of service to the people of California.

1. Information on the history of the Laguna Art Museum and its predecessors, the Laguna Beach Art Association and the Laguna Beach Museum of Art, is drawn primarily from Nancy Dustin Wall Moure and Joanne L. Ratner, A History of the Laguna Art Museum, 1981-1993 (Laguna Beach, CA: Laguna Art Museum, 1993). The book was commissioned by the Museum as a Seventy-fifth Anniversary project. ↩︎