Culture - An Artful Latitude

Monterey has art history deeper than any other West Coast city, traceable to topographical renderings created by artists aboard scientific expeditions. Their work depicted the Pacific Ocean until they reached Monterey and began documenting the area’s topography, plants, animals, and people.

Early art in Monterey, the state capital under Spanish rule (1769-1822), was mostly decorative, created for the missions. During the Mexican era (1822-1847), however, artists jutted into different directions — from decorative to documentary, particularly as the Mexican-American War loomed. When the yearlong war broke out in 1846, some artists painted battle images, while others focused on the warm, ranch-style-living scenes propagated by the U.S. occupation. Alfred Sully, son of U.S. portraitist Thomas Sully, painted a well-known example, Monterey, California Rancho Scene (1849), a watercolor in the Kahn Collection at the Oakland Museum of California.

The war took a hard toll on Monterey. Under U.S. rule, California moved its capital to Sacramento in 1854, and the Monterey and Salinas Valley Railroad went broke in 1874, making the peninsula virtually inaccessible.

Monterey’s savior could arguably have been San Franciscan Jules Tavernier, who came on commission to sketch the mission at Carmel in 1875. He stayed for three years and encouraged artist friends — most notably Charles Rollo Peters, known for tonalist nocturnes of weathered adobes — to visit the coast. Tavernier became revered for his influence on the fledgling artist colony.

When the new Southern Pacific Railroad reopened access to Monterey, the work of local artists began to attract tourists to Hotel Del Monte, which opened in 1880 as the area’s first grand resort hotel.

Monterey became the heart of Northern California art after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Artists fled from the city in a wave that helped the coastal economy and refined the area’s reputation as an artist colony. Hotel Del Monte opened the area’s first commercial gallery in April 1907. And the colony’s landscapists gained widespread acclaim at the 1915 Panama- Pacific International Exposition.

Around this time, two important U.S. Impressionists — William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam — spent time in the area. Chase taught at the Carmel Arts & Crafts Club’s summer school and painted Monterey, California (1914), held by the Oakland Museum of California. Hassam, who came to the West Coast for the 1915 exposition, detoured to Carmel and painted Point Lobos, Carmel (1914), held by the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art. Guy Rose, Francis McComas, Arthur Matthews and William Ritschel also influenced the regional style.

Armin Hansen, a former mariner in northern Europe, who helped found the Carmel Art Association, painted fishermen on docks and the shoreline in bold, Post-Impressionist style. One of his best-known examples is Salmon Trawlers (1918), part of The Jane and Justin Dart Collection at the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art.

In the 1930s, modern art began to stir interest. One rare Modernist of the time, former rancher Clayton S. Price, painted ranch scenes in angular, abstract fashion. August Gay, the first painter to join the Society of Six, the Bay Area’s earliest group of modern artists, was a fellow renter with Price in Monterey’s Stevenson House who depicted Monterey views in saturated colors before retiring in 1928.

By 1945, Modern art had gained a foothold, having been introduced at the 1915 exposition.

The adventurous spirit of the Monterey Peninsula’s art scene remains as vibrant as ever, with dozens of galleries exhibiting early and contemporary Impressionism as well as a variety of other styles by mostly U.S. and European artists.

Take time to view some of the collections at Monterey Museum of Art. It holds significant bodies of work by Hansen, Ritschel and Ansel Adams. The museum has two locations: La Mirada [720 Via Mirada, (831) 372- 3689], an exquisitely furnished home in one of Monterey’s oldest neighborhoods, and Civic Center [559 Pacific St., across from Colton Hall, (831) 372-5477]. The museum includes eight galleries, the Buck Education Center and Library and a museum store. Both locations are open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and 1 to 4 p.m. Sundays. Admission is free to members and $5 for nonmembers; admission to one location will get you into the other for free.