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Put Me Amongst the
Girls
California Women Modernists
Spencer Jon Helfen Fine Arts
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These broads can
really paint. A number of gentlemen talked about Ronald Colman at the
gallery premiere, because of Edna Reindel’s portrait of him (meant to
be seen further away than is practicable here), and a number of ladies
didn’t know what to think. The works are in all manner of styles,
from abstract to trompe-l’œil, and nearly all were painted in the first
third of the twentieth century, “up and down the California coast”
of America. As always there are problems here for the East Coast, which
prefers to call the shots even when it’s drawing blanks, figuratively
speaking, but that’s not our problem, which is to consider a couple
of dozen able painters most of whom are little-known.
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Certainly there
is Helen Lundeberg in her portrait style à la Urbino and a canyon
landscape with a tall dead tree in the foreground painted in one continuous
movement, definitively laid on throughout in thin oil showing the texture
of the canvas (as the portrait on celotex has the mottled honest look of a
fresco). Dorr Bothwell, Mabel Alvarez, Helen Forbes and Agnes Pelton are
great and essential painters whose works are not a secret in the West. I
don’t know, however, how familiar the generality are with Helen Clark
Oldfield, whose still life Brown Bowl is a marvel of abstract
composition figuring numerous planes in space as effects of focus. Lilian
May Miller astounds with her ukiyo-e Orange Sailed Junk of the Han.
Margaret Bruton has a bright ghost-town watercolor, Main
Street—Gold Hill,
and the Stuart Davis school is represented by Dorothy Winslade and Leah
Rinne Hamilton.
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Grace Clements
has a superb nude life study drawing, and from around the same time a
striking watercolor of San Francisco Bay (1930). They all learned
their Cézanne, Nabis, Cubism and whatnot, the way California painters have
always learned their business, and then applied themselves to the views and
problems at hand, like Belle Baranceanu around 1935 in a great small
painting called The Steeple, Hollywood.
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