California Art Club - Revival of The CAC

Revival of The CAC

By the early 1990s, Peter Seitz Adams and his friends, also traditional painters saw the need for an organization that could help to bring order to the reemerging traditional art movement in California. He and his wife Elaine, along with their friend and art dealer, Jeffrey Morseburg had been discussing the need for a type of an 'umbrella organization' that could mount exhibitions and promote en plein air and figurative painting. In 1993, Verna Guenther, a member of the historic California Art Club, came to Morseburg to see if he knew anyone younger who would be capable of taking over the venerable organization that then consisted of an aging cohort of painters, Morseburg, recognizing the opportunity, recommended Peter and Elaine Adams because he saw the value in taking over an existing organization to promote traditional fine arts rather than forming a new one. Peter Adams accepted the Presidency of the California Art Club. He has remained at its helm to the present. In order to reorganize the California Art Club, Adams recruited most of the active professional landscape and figurative painters that he knew. The core group of artists who became members of the reorganized California Art Club primarily consisted of students of Theodore Lukits or the Russian landscape and figurative painter Sergei Bongart (1918–1985), artists Adams knew via his relationship with Jeffrey Morseburg. The first wave of painters to join the CAC included Tim Solliday, Bill Stout, Stephen Mirich, Steve Houston, and Dan Goozee. Soon, two students of the Russian Impressionist Sergei Bongar, Dan Pinkham, and Sunny Apinchapong Yang joined along with the California painter, Richard Rackus (b.1922) and the Russian painters, Alexander Orlov and Alexey Steele. Because of the tremendous influx of academically trained Chinese painters in California, the CAC added painters like Mian Situ, Michael Situ, and Jove Wang to its roster. In the early stages of the renewal of the California Art Club, there were no paid employees, it took the significant personal investment of Peter and Elaine Adams, along with thousands of hours of their labor to relaunch the organization. Some of the artists who had been members prior to Adams, such as Don and Wanda Duborow and Rolf and Evelyn Zilmner, who was Chairman of the Gold Medal Exhibition, played important roles in the revitalization.