Pacific Arcadia: Exhibit
traces California dream
BY DIANE MANUEL
Artist
Theodore Wores had a fine touch for capturing the sensual
detail of exotic neighborhood markets, including the
"stiffness of thickly embroidered silk brocades and
the moist, taut surface of freshly caught fish,"
says curator Claire Perry.
In
"Pacific Arcadia: Images of California,
1600-1915," which opens today at the Cantor Arts
Center, Perry, curator for American art, has gathered
more than 200 paintings, photographs, advertisements,
prints and maps that focus on the long history of the
California dream.
When Wores painted New
Year's Day in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1881, for
example, it was seized on by civic leaders who were eager
to promote the city to sophisticated Easterners.
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"The images were all
part of the campaign by business people, railroad owners,
merchants and financiers to convince people that
California was a place where family farms and private
business could flourish," Perry says. "The
images were selected with outsiders in mind."
The exhibition is the
largest yet organized at the newly renovated center and
the first major show to analyze the art of California
through an interdisciplinary lens. It will be on view at
Stanford through June 27, and then will travel to the San
Diego Museum of Art and the Joslyn Museum in Omaha.
"'Pacific Arcadia' is
the most ambitious exhibition ever organized at Stanford
and it will set a standard for years to come for the kind
of scholarly, interdisciplinary exhibitions that the
center intends to present," says Tom Seligman, the
John and Jill Freidenrich Director of the center.
"It is also timely that this exhibition, about art
and the humanities in California, takes place during the
50th anniversary of the School of Humanities and
Sciences." 
Harvest Time,
William Hahn. De Young Museum.
The exhibition and its
national tour are made possible by Ford Motor Co. Other
support has come from the Hon. Laurence W. Land, Dr. A.
Jess Shenson and the Bernard Osher Foundation.
The full-color, 300-page
catalog for the exhibition, which grew out of Perry's
doctoral dissertation at Stanford and is being published
by Oxford University Press, explores idealized portrayals
of early California, from the Spanish explorers of the
17th century to the urban developers of the early 20th
century.
"That was the
question I wanted to answer what were the roots of the
California dream, how far back did it go?" Perry
says.
Working with her adviser,
Wanda Corn, professor of art history, Perry explored the
holdings of a number of local institutions, including the
Oakland Museum, the Bancroft Library and the University
of California-Berkeley, the California Historical Society
and the Society of California Pioneers. She turned up
paintings, diaries, letters and photographs, and found
the museums' curators universally generous.
"A handful of
scholars had done the first level of research into
California images and cultural history, but no one had
done the kind of thing that is happening now with works
of art from, say, the Hudson River School," Perry
says. "No one had looked at economic, political and
environmental issues in California and talked about
paintings in the light of those issues."
Perry began tossing her
notes into subject piles and before long had the makings
of six categories. Those themes have morphed into the six
sections of the Piggott Gallery, which are painted tasty
salmon, sherbet green, light orchid, sky blue, buttercup
yellow and bubblegum pink.
The "Terrestrial
Paradise" section of the first-floor gallery holds
the earliest known representations of California,
including the works of 17th- and 18th-century mapmakers
that picture California as a huge island flanking the
west coast of North America. Artists who traveled with
early Spanish, French and Russian expeditions portrayed
the natural abundance of the land with sketches of
fertile valleys, deep harbors and docile natives.
"To travel from
Acapulco to Baja California was a brutal
experience," Perry says. "The winds blew the
wrong way and the seas were very rough, so any crews that
got as far as the end of the peninsula probably said to
themselves, 'Phew, it's an island, let's not sail past
it.'"
Islands also had a special
significance at the time and were thought to be magical
places overflowing with pearls and riches, she adds.
"Everyone was looking
for the big mother lode somewhere maybe here [in
California]," Perry adds. "And mapmakers, who
were eager to sell maps, also bought into the idea
because an island was much more attractive to buyers than
a boring, straight coastline."
The focal point of the
"Golden Dream" section is a huge 10-by-16-foot
oil painting by Charles Christian Naul, dated 1856 and
titled Saturday Night in the Mines. After gold was
discovered in the Sierra foothills in 1848, paintings,
drawings and prints of the gold fields celebrated the
miners and ideals of personal freedom and economic
success. Naul's four miners are gathered around a table
illuminated by a single candle.
"Miners were very
concerned with showing that they were good Americans,
that they adhered to certain moral codes, that they
weren't total anarchists," Perry says. "So we
see them here in a domestic setting, weighing the day's
diggings and cooking the evening meal."
Landscapes of California's
rich central valley and still lifes of local produce
illustrate the "Cornucopia of the World"
section, as artists of the mid-1850s turned to pastoral
themes. By encouraging comparisons with the farming
countryside of New York, Massachusetts and other Eastern
states, artists like Samuel Marsden Brookes and John Ross
Key painted vivid invitations to come West and explore.
The Sacramento River
Valley, ca 1872-1873. Albert Bierstadt. Private
Collection
"You don't see any
giant farming machinery or extensive irrigation setups in
the landscapes," Perry notes. "They simply show
that California had different environmental conditions
than the old farmsteads back home in Vermont." Some
of Perry's personal favorites are found in the "Rush
for Wilderness" section, which portrays California's
impressive natural wonders, from Yosemite Valley to the
Sierra Nevada and giant redwoods.
In Albert Bierstadt's 1872
oil painting Seal Rocks, San Francisco, a seal
feasts on a golden garibaldi fish and gulls pluck juicy
morsels from the water in the foreground as a towering
wave prepares to crash into an arched rock formation.
"In his early
paintings of California, Bierstadt is overwhelmed by his
wonder and his enthusiasm for this great new subject
matter," Perry says of the artist. "It's all
new and unexplored, and you can read his excitement in
the canvas."
When the transcontinental
railroad was completed in 1869, the California image
makers swung into high gear to lure Easterners away from
grand tours of Europe and toward the beauty of the West,
which they compared to an idyllic Mediterranean. Artists
represented in the "Spanish Arcadia" section
composed nostalgic visions of old rancho days, complete
with bold vaqueros and dark-eyed seņoritas.
In Ranch Scene,
Monterey, California, an 1875 oil by William Hahn,
the vaqueros and their cattle have ground to a halt, and
the gracious hospitality of the period is suggested by a
woman in a dark shawl who carries several glasses of beer
to the riders.
"Urban Visions"
completes the exhibition with images of San Francisco's
well-kept neighborhoods and bustling markets attempts
to position the city as the West Coast counterpart of
Boston, New York and Chicago. Paintings of Chinatown also
alluded to the nation's gateway to Asia and the lucrative
Pacific trade.
An interdisciplinary
symposium on "Pacific Arcadia" is scheduled for
April 30 and May 1 at Stanford, and a CD-ROM, The
Changing Image of California, will be distributed to
schools nationwide.
For more information about
the new exhibition, visit the Cantor Arts Center website
at www.stanford.edu/dept/ccva/. SR
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