December 2010

Musings Under House Arrest

No, it’s not what you might think: I haven’t been arrested; and no, I’m not a political prisoner in a totalitarian country.  Rather, I am composing this missive bonded to my sofa in Laguna Beach. Under doctor’s strict orders, I sit recuperating (for a long time) from a ruptured Achilles tendon incurred during a late-October tennis game in Italy.   As I confront this interim reality, I have had to learn to sit still, be patient and unconditionally surrender, none of which are my strong suits.

When I asked for advice on avoiding insanity during this time, a spiritually evolved friend somewhat cryptically wrote to me:  “What a wonderful opportunity for transformation— you have nothing to do, no one to be, nowhere to go.”   After recoiling from and then accepting this advice, I decided, among other things, to immerse myself in plein air art history.

To my good fortune,  just after my election as your President, longtime friend Jim Swinden of the Irvine family, and Jean Stern, Executive Director of The Irvine Museum and newest member of the LPAPA Board, graciously bestowed upon me a set of magnificent plein air books produced under Museum sponsorship.  With some self-doubt, I promised Jim and Jean that I would read all of them cover to cover and not allow them to gather dust on my coffee table, unread.

My newfound state of nothingness gave me the opportunity to fulfill that promise.  In so doing, I have gained substantial enlightenment on the plein air genre from about 1850 to 1930 and some perspective on where we stand today.

Along with their sumptuous visual feast, the Museum volumes present excellent scholarly history and analysis. If you haven’t read them, I urge you to go without delay to the Museum or their website:  www.irvinemuseum.org .

My reading of the texts has thus prompted the theme of my message to you as 2010 draws to a close:

We are treading in artistically perilous waters; but we can effectively navigate the current, if we take definitive action.

The Museum essays trace the development of  plein air from mid-19^th century beginnings in the French villages of Barbizon and Giverny via the palettes of luminaries such as Courbet and Monet, to America through the Hudson River School, thenceforth westward to California to the first plein air apotheosis in the 1920s, and then its eclipse in the Great Depression.

In considering this chronology in light of the present Great Recession, it became apparent to me that this artistic history can repeat itself, at least in vague similarity.  In fact, I believe that, in 2010, we may be at an artistic turning point similar to 1930. Why do I suggest this possibility and what can the plein air community do to forestall or to mitigate a reversal of fortune?

The plein air genre declined in the 1930s because its base of patron financial support was weakened by the crash of 1929 and subsequent events. The eclipse likely had nothing to do with the decline of the quality of landscape painting per se. Rather, economic disaster and other trends that I have yet to divine put plein air painting in a deep freeze for many years and discouraged the emergence of a new generation of landscape painters, until the genre’s more recent revival.

During the Depression, people lost the optimism, extroversion and sense of possibility that animates landscape painting. For a time, then, plein air was no longer relevant to the Zeitgeist.  War, then post-war expansionism, industrialization were all non-conducive to the genre’s sylvan message – our connection to and the primacy of Nature.

But with the environmental shocks of the late 1960s and the birth of the environmental movement, the conditions for the renaissance of landscape painting presented themselves. Regionally, this interest included the entry of Joan Irvine Smith as a powerful and passionate patron of landscape art and spurred the genre’s revival of the last two decades.  The emergence of LPAPA and its prestigious Invitational are also testimony to this rebirth.  Generally prosperous conditions allowed artists to flourish through strong patronage and sales during this period.

Geopolitically, the effusive albeit short-lived epoch of American unipolar power after the end of the Cold War, coupled with ever-growing awareness of vanishing landscapes, can also be viewed as contributory to the 1990s regeneration of plein air.

However, 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis clouded these sunny conditions. In California, government gridlock and recession have only added to the malaise.

In this context, LPAPA events have recently struggled to maintain sales volumes and artist and patron participation. The LPAPA Invitational has trended away from being a signature national landscape painting event to, at the moment, a more regional one, with less geographically diverse participation in part due to artist financial constraints.  Lower sales volumes and prices have also dissuaded some artists from participating in the event.  Some of our members perceive a decline in quality, although the works presented at the 2010 Invitational cast doubt on that perception.  However, attendance figures at various LPAPA events indicate that patrons have not lost their passion for plein air; but broadly considered, they do have diminished capability to support it at the moment.

So you can see that the present trend has disturbing parallels to the decline of plein air at the beginning of the Great Depression.  Are we doomed to another artistic drought?  Not necessarily. The prospect of climate change and vanishing landscapes did not exist in the 1930s.  Moreover, the shock of the recent financial crisis has fostered some return to basic values, not the least of which being reverence for the primacy of nature to guide our affairs and survival.

While we cannot effectively control the course of geopolitical events and economic trends, we can chart a course for reasonable artistic prosperity in difficult times.  I recall from my studies in Florence in the 1970s that much of the renowned art and architecture was produced when that city-state was under external and internal siege. Despite difficulties, Florentine art was still nurtured by powerful and capable patrons. Conditions here and now are not entirely dissimilar to the Florentine experience.  Accordingly, I believe that we can achieve analogous results -- with courage, resolve and resilient patronage.

In succeeding messages, I will detail specific actions LPAPA is taking to accomplish this outcome and to effectively serve your interests.


Greg Vail