California Art Club - The CAC and California Impressionism

The CAC and California Impressionism

In 1909, the California Art Club was founded in the painter and ceramicist Franz Bischoff's South Pasadena Studio. Among its founding members were Bischoff, Carl Oscar Borg, Hanson Puthuff, and William Wendt. Wendt's wife was the sculptor Julia Bracken Wendt. One of the main objectives behind the founding of the club was to allow women artists to participate. Wendt served as President of the club for six years, during which time the organization grew quickly in prestige. Because the California Impressionist movement was just beginning to emerge in Southern California, as the CAC was being founded, the organization was greatly responsible for popularizing the Impressionist style in California through the work of its artists and its annual exhibitions. Authorities like Professor William Gerdts have long identified California Impressionism as a regional variation of American Impressionism which was a very broad movement that was loosely bound to the French style. 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. From its first exhibitions, the California Art Club became identified with Impressionism. In 1913, in the national magazine Arts Journal, the writer E.C. Maxwell wrote that "From a dozen different writers upon subjects pertaining to the development and trend of art in the west, the word has gone forth to the world that California, that land of golden light and purple shadows, is destined in the course of the next few years to give us a new school of landscape painting...Conditions seem right for a renaissance of art in California...If this art epoch of golden prophecy does not come to pass, it will not be the fault of the California Art Club." 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. 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 out doors, from nature or in the studio from models. The California Art Club was part of a broadly representational movement that held sway in California long after more modern styles of painting became popular elsewhere. In 1919, the painter Helena Dunlap formed a breakaway group of painters that favored a greater degree of experimentation than what they felt the CAC was comfortable with. 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 location, a headquarters. That changed in 1926, when the wealthy heiress and art patron Aline Barnsdall gave her home Hollyhock House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, to the CAC to use as its headquarters as a fifteen-year loan and the club moved into the eight acre property atop Hollywood the following year. The new home allowed the CAC to do lectures and host posh black tie receptions that helped to cultivate patronage and give the artists greater prestige. However, the great stock market crash of 1929 was the first blow to the club as it meant a decline in patronage. Then, as the Great Depression deepened, the club and its membership gradually declined. This decline was somewhat inevitable as the founding members of the CAC aged, moved away or passed away. The first of the major painters of the CAC, Franz Bischoff died in 1929. Its long serving leader William Wendt and Edgar Payne were living in Laguna Beach and had become active in the Laguna Beach Art Association which was founded in 1919. Gradually, during the 1930s, proponents of more modern movements also began to gain a foothold and younger patrons began to purchase their works instead of those of the California Impressionists. The final blow in the decline of the California Art Club was the loss of its headquarters when the lease on the Hollyhock House expired in 1942.