California Art Club
Other notable members include Sir Winston Churchill,[10] Dean Cornwell,[11] Nicolai Fechin,[12] Sam Hyde Harris,[13] Alfredo Ramos Martinez,[14] and Richard Neutra.
"[3] By the time of the club's Second Annual Exhibition in 1911,[24] membership had increased by about thirty members, including nine women: Helena Adele Dunlap (1876-1955), Helma Heynsen Jahn (1874-1925), Mary Ann Van Alstine Bartow (1848-1924), Alma May Cook (1884-1973), S. Henrietta Dorn Housh (1855-1919), Helen Hutchinson (1866-?
[27] The organization grew quickly in prestige under Wendt and Brown, connecting itself with the newly formed Museum of History, Science and Art in Exposition Park.
Helena Dunlap studied with William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) in New York City and André Lhote (1885-1962) in Paris, and Charles Percy Austin was a pupil of John Twachtman (1853-1902).
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.
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.
In the club's formative years, meetings were held at locations around Los Angeles, including members' homes and studios,[32][33] various schools and galleries,[34][35][36] and the Earl House, 2425 Wilshire Boulevard in Westlake Park.
By the early 1920s, the club resolved to seek a more permanent location and laid out plans for a building fund with a goal to raise $150,000 primarily by exhibiting and selling artwork.
[40] At the CAC's Annual Exhibition at Exposition Park in 1931, members Ruth Peabody (1893-1966) and Phil Dike (1906-1990) won top honors for their work, which were dubbed "ultra modern.
"[41][42] Another member, Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973),[43] was a co-creator of Synchromism, an early abstract, color-based mode of painting which influenced artists like Donna Norine Schuster (1883-1953).
[47] 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 outdoors, from nature or in the studio from models.
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 clubhouse.
That changed in 1926, when the wealthy heiress and art patron Aline Barnsdall (1882-1946) gifted her home Hollyhock House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, to the CAC to use as its headquarters as a fifteen-year loan.
During “an animated meeting” at their temporary headquarters at 623 Park View, the CAC looked at two feasible options: Aline Barnsdall had offered the club use of Olive Hill, her estate in Hollywood; a second option comprised another location at “the southwest corner of Grand View and Third Street.”[48] Two years later the idea of a permanent clubhouse was still enthusiastically discussed, but 1925 saw the Club forced to restructure their project due to its being “suspended temporarily on the resignation of the business manager.” Strong interest remained despite the fact that they hadn’t yet reached their fundraising goal.
[49] With the Club’s efforts stalled, Aline Barnsdall approached the City of Los Angeles about managing a section of her estate as a cultural arts center.
Overlooking Hollywood Boulevard to the east and presenting panoramic views west towards the Pacific Ocean, the 36-acre hilltop estate south of Griffith Park was originally slated to include multiple structures dedicated to the arts.
The discussions between the City and Miss Barnsdall about how the property could be used included a stipulation that the California Art Club be given a lease on Hollyhock House lasting fifteen years.
[60][61] CAC member Richard Neutra debated architecture with Rudolph Schindler, José Clemente Orozco visited a club meeting in April 1930 while working on his murals at Pomona College,[62] and David Alfaro Siqueiros gave a lecture at a dinner in his honor on June 17, 1932.
[63] A week before his CAC lecture, Siqueiros had unveiled his first Los Angeles mural, Street Meeting, done on an exterior wall at Chouinard Art School.
The group assisting him included CAC members Henri Gilbert de Kruif (1882-1944), Robert Merrell Gage, Barse Miller, Paul Starrett Sample, and Millard Sheets.
[64] Shortly after his lecture at the Hollyhock House, Siqueiros would begin work on América Tropical with the help of 29 artists including CAC members Dean Cornwell, Karoly Fulop, and Frederick John Vrain Schwankowsky.
It didn't go over well, and the headlines made it to Life Magazine: “The outraged artists set up their own canvasses on the museum’s steps and terrace and along the walls as examples of what should have been shown inside.
Three radio patrol cars rolled up to the museum’s entrance and a swarm of police waded through canvasses of sunsets, mountain landscapes, pretty nudes and Chinese vases.
Annual exhibitions were held at venues such as the Greek Theater in Griffith Park (1949–66), Brand Library in Glendale (1979, 1982, 1990), and even a short-lived California Art Club Gallery located at 1309 Westwood Boulevard for a handful of years.
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, such as Sam Hyde Harris.
However, after the Great Depression, Modernism, and World War II, the California Art Club fell on hard times, but still managed to exist, howbeit on a much smaller and scale.
Peter Seitz Adams, a member in earlier years (he exhibited in the 68th Annual Gold Medal Exhibition in 1977),[79] was contacted by longtime patron member Verna Gunther and 43rd CAC President Charles I. Harris (1922-2012) to take over the helm of the neglected California Art Club; Adams was elected the 44th President of the California Art Club in October 1993.
[81] The first wave of painters to join the reorganized California Art Club included Dan Goozeé, Steve Huston, Stephen E. Mirich, William Stout and Tim Solliday (December 1993),[82] (January 1994),[83] Alexey Steele and Jove Wang (February 1994),[84] Daniel W. Pinkham and Sunny Apinchapong-Yang (June 1994),[85] Meredith B. Abbott, John Budicin, Marcia Burtt, Karl Dempwolf, Richard Rackus, Roy Rose, and Leonid Steele (July 1994).
In 1997, 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," 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.
