The New Deal

By MARY MELTON

May 31, 1998 12 AM PT

It was 1930s California, and they were witness to a phenomenal period in the state’s history--the soaring population driven here by Midwestern blight, surging fortunes in oil, the explosion of a medium known as film. These students at the renowned Chouinard School of Art near downtown--Millard Sheets, Phil Dike and Phil Paradise among them--had been asked by their teachers to record California through the mobile medium of watercolor. Inspired by the gritty realism of New York’s Ash Can School, which seized images of that city’s everyday and ordinary, these Californians were stirred to move landscape painting beyond pastoral hills and pleasing sunsets.

Sixty of their works are featured in “California Style: 1930s and ‘40s,” at the Ventura Museum of History and Art through June 14 after a three-month exhibition at the Orange County Museum of Art. The tableaus, culled from private collections by Millard Sheets’ son, David Stary-Sheets, mirror the interests of young men of their generation. We see California through pickup trucks and airplanes, gas stations and gas tanks, steam shovels and copper mines. Though it was the Depression, “they actually saw opportunity here,” says Tim Schiffer, museum curator. “It wasn’t as bad as the rest of the country. People from California didn’t go to Oklahoma, but people from

Oklahoma sure came to California.”

California, however, was no equal-opportunity Eden. George Samerjan’s “Japanese Evacuation (Terminal Island, California),” dated 1942, shows the unloading of a family’s possessions from an open-bed truck to a warehouse in midnight-blue darkness--as close as you get to a political painting in the collection. Its downbeat mood is effectively countered by another work from the same year, Charles Payzant’s “On Leave,” a playful look at, among other characters, a soldier and his swivel-hipped honey taking in the bucolic serenity of a much-different-era MacArthur Park.

“It’s unusual for watercolor to be used as a primary medium,” Schiffer notes. “Traditionally it’s a sketch medium, on-site or not, that’s transferred to oil to be more permanent and grandiose.” Watercolor, he says, lends itself to mobility--it’s lightweight, dries quickly and doesn’t allow for doctoring in the studio. But the immediacy of the medium makes it difficult--light changes, bugs trounce across your canvas. “They are what they are,” Schiffer admits. “You can put 20 watercolors in a portfolio and haul them everywhere.”

Which is exactly what they did. Elmer Plummer’s “Early Morning Traffic,” dated 1935, documents a wide boulevard at dawn; Barse Miller, in the collection’s only portrait, “Little Eva at Summer School,” coaxed a janitor to kick up her feet at lunch hour. What is perhaps most startling is how little some of the L.A. landscapes, rendered 60 years ago, have physically changed. Edward Reep’s “Los Angeles Hilltop,” dated 1937, with its couple ascending one of those classic stairways, past a crudely lettered billboard for “Apartmentos,” power lines and a jagged wood fence, is a Los Angeles still clearly visible in the hills bordering downtown. Replace the long, lonely trains in Emil J. Kosa Jr.’s 1939 “Red Car Terminal” storage yard with those of the Metrolink, or the towering wooden oil derricks of Dan Lutz’s 1937 “Signal Hill” with the metallic rigs there now, and little else of the surrounding landscape needs to be altered.

The movement ended soon after the war. “Modernism became much more accepted,” Schiffer says, “and regionalism kind of stopped.” Perhaps the world became more complicated than gas stations and tunnels as these men grew older. “Maybe they weren’t as naive; maybe they were trying to see a more complex picture,” Schiffer says. (Many of the artists went on to work in animation, and Millard Sheets, the group’s inspirational leader, became well known as a muralist, designer and artisan of Home Savings of America mosaics.)

“This type of art was so out of vogue through the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s,” Schiffer says, “that enough time had to pass so people could look back and not be turned off .” But that wouldn’t come until after the downtown art school closed, shutting its doors in 1972.

So why do the paintings resonate now?

“Because California,” Schiffer replies, “no longer feels threatened by being called provincial.”