En Plein Air

En plein air is a French expression which means “in the open air” and is used in particular to describe the act of painting in the out-of-doors, specifically using watercolors since oil paints don’t transport as easily. The Long Beach Museum of Art is having just such an exhibit, but it is so much more than just watercolors that were painted out-of-doors.

When one visualizes the scenario of an artist painting out-of-doors, it creates a sort of painting within a painting. There is this bucolic scene of someone with a canvas propped up on an easel while sitting slightly to one side of it on a little folding stool, or maybe even standing, all the while balancing a small kidney-shaped palette splotched with different-colored dabs of paint in one hand with a thumb through a small hole to steady it, and in the distance is the landscape that is being seen and somehow recreated on the canvas. And that was what I expected.

The Long Beach Museum of Art is a wonderfully romantic and imposing example of the Craftsman Bungalow which was built in 1912 on a grassy bluff overlooking the ocean. Known as the Milbank House for years, this California Craftsman Bungalow uses the natural materials and rugged texture of wood shingles and clinker brick. The prominent gables and projecting rafter beams are typical of the style. The exterior of the main house and carriage house have looked the same for decades and have never been “remuddled,” so they retain their original integrity. This particular morning was one of those moody, fog-bound Long Beach days with the fog horns droning out there in the void and the house sitting there on the bluff like something out of a movie set with just a hint of Norman Bates going for it. With this weather, maybe it would be better to visit another of their current exhibits, Modernism and the Wichner Collection, and not blandly stare at a bunch of landscapes. Always expect the unexpected.

In this en plein air exhibit, the works are more than just what the painters saw. Instead of being presented with a peaceful landscape inspired by whatever the weather and hour of the of day provided at the time, we are given a more complex vision of space and time that includes a sort of solidity; sometimes peaceful and straightforward, sometimes political with a message, but generally always with a quiet thoughtfulness. Perhaps it’s because the painters in the exhibit had a kind of solidity to their lives besides their art.

California, Seen examines the important California scene, painting movement through paintings depicting the rural, urban, and changing landscape of southern California by such featured artists as Emil Kosa, Jr., Phil Dike, Millard Sheets, Leon Amyx, Charles Keck, and Loren Roberta Barton — some of the most well-known California scene practitioners. To provide context, the exhibition began with works representing the regional movements that were popular in the Midwest and New York, including works by Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and others.

As opposed to the often dark and brooding realist styles from those parts of the country, many of the works in California, Seen were painted in vibrant watercolor. The medium, owing its popularity to the radiant climate of southern California, allowed artists to work out-of-doors and capture their “scenes” at specific moments when the natural light was ideal. Artist George Post (1906-1977) described it as: “…that the first split-second reaction, that first wonderful visual image, is the thing one must try to project on paper, not the very literal and painstaking eyeful.”

This exhibit is a collection of artists who contributed more than just their paintings to us. They were family men with impressive day jobs. Emil Kosa, Jr. was an art director for Cleopatra, for which he won an Academy Award. George Gibson worked for the studios, designing and painting backdrops that were 60’ x 150’ and were works of art in their own right. Many of these artists were respected teachers in our foremost schools. Some were book illustrators. Their bios reveal none of that self-absorbed “artist-in-torment” suffering that seems to be embraced by so many artists. All of the California scene painters lived lives that were fully engaged with their communities, families, and responsibilities as citizen artists.

Although California scene painters generally portrayed their environments as fresh, energetic realms of natural beauty, they also portrayed American ingenuity often dealing with heady issues of social realism, urbanism, and industrialization. It seems what initially began as traditional en plein air landscapes evolved from inanimate objects to live subjects, eventually progressing to industrial scenes that mirrored and paralleled the economic and political atmosphere of the time. One of the images that came to mind as I wandered through the exhibit is the Newbery/Caldecott award-winning children’s book from 1932: Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. The story is of the period with the “I think I can” plot using their current technology. The illustrations are pure en plein air but using watercolors with gradations of gray to create the character of the loyal, hard-working steam shovel. As Phil Dike said, “A painting is not good because it looks like something, but because it feels like something.” I wonder what we tend to remember the most: what we see or what we feel? The situation has a great deal of influence too, and seeing this exhibition on a chilly, foggy, California beach day with fog horns invisibly communicating in the background certainly helped create the experience.