While so many painters of his time turned their easels toward the coastline and the idyllic inland landscapes, Armin Hansen documented — in thundering Post-Impressionist paintings as well as intimate, exacting etchings — a rougher slice of life in Monterey: the daily struggle of fishermen who battled the roughest elements of the sea. Their work was vital to the area.
So was Hansen’s.
“Paint what you know,” the artist was quoted in a 1951 article appearing in The Monterey Peninsula Herald’s supplement for the sixth annual American Art Week. Hansen had repeated the point after becoming one of the early Monterey art colony’s most revered teachers.
Born in 1886, Hansen was 17 years old when he began training under Arthur Frank Mathews at Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco — an experience interrupted within three years when the 1906 earthquake devastated the city and the school. Hansen went to Northern Europe; many of his contemporaries went to Paris.
Until he returned in 1912, Hansen had painted mostly Tonalist marine scenes based on sketches he made as a sailor in Nieuport, Belgium. But maritime canvases and etchings he made in Monterey since 1922 distinguished Hansen.
Nino (c. 1922), Salmon Trawlers (1918), and Men of the Sea (1920) exemplify his infallible sense of color and measured textures of paint. In the 1930s, his work grew even more intense with pivotal and dramatic use of light. One of his masterworks during this period was Sardine Barge (c. 1933).
These four paintings stand out in Restless Seas: Works by Armin Hansen, a stellar ongoing exhibit at the Monterey Museum of Art’s La Mirada exhibition space.
“Although Salmon Trawlers has Impressionist attributes — a high horizon and a long foreground — its treatment is Post-Impressionist — solid flat shapes of strong colors,” art historian Nancy Moure notes in her comprehensive book California Art: 450 Years of Painting & Other Media.
She was emphasizing the difficulty in classifying Hansen’s work, which also could sometimes be called Realist and Tonalist. “This bolder treatment was clearly a more appropriate means of conveying the serious topic of man’s struggle with the sea for survival. California artists rarely attracted to such serious themes. … He often dramatizes his work by silhouetting foreground figures.”
The style appealed to Jane and Justin Dart, who bought two paintings — without looking for an artist’s signature, according to Jane Dart’s introduction in the Restless Seas exhibition catalogue. Eventually, she and Justin Dart made the connection, and “so began a most interesting treasure hunt …
“Armin Hansen’s strong affinity for the hard-working fishermen — brave, cold, weary, stoic challengers of the sea and wind — really touched us,” she continues. “Through his work, we learned to be physically and emotionally aware of sea moods and human situations.”
Hansen co-founded the Carmel Art Association and was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1925. He was revered as the area’s best teacher and etcher, revealing sharp details of the wharves and ships with meticulous line, rich blacks, and smart compositions. He drew well-known European artists — including Ferdinand Leger, Alexander Archipenko, and Salvador Dali — to teach at the academy.
In his 1957 obituary that appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, Hansen was quoted as having said, “Every move I have made and everything I have done has always been to go back to the sea and to the men who give it romance. I love them all.”
IF YOU GO
Start with Restless Seas: Works by Armin Hansen at Monterey Museum of Art’s La Mirada location at 720 Via Mirada, Monterey (831-372-3689).
Then visit local galleries that specialize in early California paintings and have works by Hansen. They include
William A. Karges Fine Art at Dolores Street and Sixth Avenue (831-625-4266, 866-797-1840);
James J. Rieser Fine Art at Dolores Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues in Su Vecino Court (831-620-0530, 866-620-0530);
Trotter Galleries on San Carlos Street near Seventh Avenue in Paseo San Carlos Court (831-625-3246) and in Pacific Grove at 301 Forest Ave. (831-649-3246);
and Masterpiece Gallery on Dolores Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues (831-624-2463).
