Noted UC San Diego Art
Historian Bram Dijkstra to Lecture
on Masterpieces of San Diego Painting
at Oceanside Museum of Art April 10

April 1, 2008

By Dolores Davies

Nationally recognized scholar and art historian Bram Dijkstra, a professor emeritus of American comparative literature at University of California, San Diego, will give a talk on April 10, 2008 at 7 p.m. at the Oceanside Museum of Art, on an exhibit of some of the finest works of San Diego painters that recently opened at OMA.

Trigon, ca. 1939. Marius Rocle (1897-1967) oil on canvas, 40 ½ x35 inches. Collection of K. Lyle Hugenberger and Peggy Rocle Hugenberger.

As guest curator at OMA, Dijkstra assembled some of the finest paintings from private collections and museums for Masterpieces of San Diego Painting: Fifty Works from Fifty Years, 1900-1950. The show, which is accompanied by a 140-page catalogue written by Dijkstra, features some of San Diego’s most renowned painters who lived and worked in the region during this period, including both the celebrated plein air painters of San Diego such as Maurice Braun, Charles Fries, Alfred Mitchell and Charles Reiffel, as well as the heralded San Diego modernists, including Belle Baranceanu, Dan Dickey and Ethel Greene. The exhibit closes June 29, 2008.

San Diego’s early painters exquisitely captured the pristine yet rough beauty of the region’s mountains, valleys, ocean and desert.  According to Dijkstra, artists like Braun, who founded a local Academy of Art that attracted other noted artists to the region such as Alfred Mitchell, were bowled over by the “unusual individuality” of San Diego’s diverse landscape as well as “the warm, penetrating sunlight” and the gentle, benign climate “unbuffeted by wind or rain.”

“As the works in this exhibition demonstrate, during the first few decades of the last century the features of the local landscape Braun had enumerated with such enthusiasm, indeed lured numerous artists into producing some of their finest work, “ said Dijkstra. “Thus, throughout the twenties and even during the early thirties, the most visible presence in the San Diego art world would continue to be the landscape painters who were closely connected with what has since become known as California Impressionism.”

Matilija Poppies, Albert Valentien (1862-1925) gouache and watercolor on paper, 24x19 ½ inches, Private Collection.

But, with the start of the Great Depression in 1929, greater variety began to emerge on the San Diego art scene and the bucolic backcountry landscapes of the plein air artists  gave way to the modernist paintings of Belle Baranceanu, Ethel Greene and other more experimental painters like Marius Rocle.   Ironically, due to the institution of the depression-era WPA art programs, many San Diego artists flourished during this period, ushering in a new collegial atmosphere among artists, free of competition and pressures to conform or cater to the often conservative tastes of area patrons.

“In the midst of the Great Depression, San Diego experienced a remarkable renaissance of interest in the arts on the part of the general public,” explained Dijkstra.  “In addition, the artists themselves were encouraged to explore new ways to explain their own artistic interests to more general audiences. Most of the professional artists in the San Diego region knew each other, and the period’s burgeoning spirit of social cooperation encouraged them to work together on various projects. Under the influence of the essentially egalitarian subsistence wages extended by the various Art Projects to artists regardless of sex, the disdain in which males artists traditionally held the work of their female colleagues, no matter how high the actual quality of that work, began to lessen to such an extent that artists of both genders could occasionally be caught working together without rancor.”

The exhibit also reflects the attraction Mexico, and Baja California in particular, held for San Diego painters in the 1930’s. Paintings of a Tijuana street scene, traditional Mexican villages and Mexico’s Indians, are featured alongside works of pastoral landscapes and seascapes, as well as nudes and still lifes.

The Yellow Robe, 1927, Belle Baranceanu (1902-1988), oil on canvas, 44 1/8 x34 inches. Collection of the San Diego Museum of Art (Gift of the artist).

Dijkstra, a top authority on the history of 20th century American art, has written extensively on artists and artistic and cultural influences from the early twenties though the Modernist period.   His most recent books include Belle Baranceanu: The Artist at Work, and American Expressionism:  Art and Social Change, 1920-1950.   The latter work, considered a landmark book, honors the previously neglected works and ideals of the American Expressionism movement, which because of its often controversial nature was censured by the government, denying the genre any significant representation among mainstream art. The book coincided with a traveling exhibition curated by Dijkstra that include many of the powerful but forgotten works of the American Expressionist era.

Media Contact: Dolores Davies, 858-534-0667