Selections from The Irvine Museum Review

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Selections from The Irvine Museum ReviewMy copy is a well-made hardback, about 9 inches wide by 11 inches tall. It's 128 pages long in a sturdy, sewn-in-signatures binding. ISBN 0-9635468-0-5. (It also comes in a paperback.) Published in 1992 by the then new Irvine Museum (Irvine California, close by John Wayne Airport) and intended to accompany an exhibition selected from its excellent collection for traveling to the Fleischer Museum in Arizona and to the Oakland Museum in Northern California.
Within the book there are many color reproductions, all quite good. Additionally, the colorful dust jacket folded around the book shows that enormous and wide Granville Redmond painting that hangs behind the front desk of the Irvine Museum. It's one of those quintessentially Eucalyptus School paintings of some halcyon Southern California landscape in sap greens, cadmium yellows and cerulean blues, all depicting rolling mountain foothills carpeted in flowing rivers of lupines and poppies anchored here and there by stands of oak. One feels he should leap over the museum's reception desk, jump through the picture frame and shamelessly roll on the flowers like some old hound. (The book also shows some of Redmond's other style, his unsurpassed Tonalist work. Unfortunately none of Redmond's incomparable blue water nocturnes, painted around San Francisco Bay, are included.) And Redmond is just one of many artists represented in the Irvine collection and this book.
In addition to the color plates, there are a few old black and white photos about the text showing long-gone artists at work in the outdoors, "en plein aire" and "sur le motif". Always fascinating to see. In those early Twentieth Century days, painting outdoors required a good deal more intestinal fortitude than today, with our light-weight hiking gear and off-the-shelf plein aire painting outfits, to say nothing of reliable, comfortable cars firmly footed on dependable tires. One old photo in the book shows the artist with white cloth covers over his parked auto's scrawny black rubber tires so that the sun won't surely cook a blowout. Given the times and the remote mountainous location, Alson Clark could not simply call road service on a cell phone!
Besides the nice reproductions, there are three good essays by well-regarded experts on early California art, Jean Stern, Janet Blake Dominik, and Harvey Jones. The first essay is intended as a general if short review of Impressionism in America. The second and third essays target respectively the paintings done in Southern California and those made in Northern California. The Irvine, and its collections, seem focused on California, its art and its artists, from the Gold Rush to post World War Two, but stop well short of today. The museum's art is a lot about yesterday's California rather than as now, entirely about the artist. The book closes with a section of interesting artists' biographies, a short bibliography and an index to artists and paintings in the book. This last is always welcome, enabling the reader to quickly find favorites, etc.
All in all it's a worthwhile addition to your art library.Selections from The Irvine Museum Overview

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