SPLIT EXHIBIT FOCUSES ON MOUNTAIN ART

Artists throughout history have been inspired by California’s spectacular mountain vistas.

“Reaching the Summit: Mountain Landscapes in Southern California 1900-1986” explores the approaches of artists past and present in an exhibition on view through April 27 at both the Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza satellite facility and Saddleback College Art Gallery in Mission Viejo. Each site features 40 works ranging from 1900 to the present.

Lynn Gamwell, Saddleback gallery curator and coordinator of the exhibit, said a definite schism exists between contemporary and older regional art.

“They’re often collected by different people, shown in different galleries, and they’re really in quite different worlds, as far as the people that look at it,” Gamwell said. A major aim of the exhibit, he added, is to “attack that barrier.”

“We want to show some of the threads of continuity between the two styles, between the earlier 20th Century and the later,” Gamwell said. “In other words, to see the links between the two, the influence of the earlier on the contemporary.”

“Reaching the Summit” is modeled after an earlier Saddleback exhibition on desert landscapes, which caught the attention of officials at the Laguna Art Museum and led to the current exhibition. “The co-sponsorship was mostly a funding question, and a space question,” Gamwell said. “They (the museum) rented the show from us, basically. The college organized the exhibition.”

For “Reaching the Summit,” Saddleback brought back independent Western art researcher Phil Kovinick as guest curator to organize the 1900-1940 section of the exhibition, the same period for which he served as curator for the desert landscapes show. Kovinick said one of his aims is to give exposure to less familiar works. “I try to avoid a lot of works that have been exhibited too frequently,” the researcher said. “A lot of these have not been exhibited that often.”

To represent the romantic scenic landscapes popular in the second half of the 19th Century, Kovinick chose two Yosemite Valley views by Thomas Hill. From this starting point, the exhibition moves through work by artists of the early part of the century.

By 1900 the grandiose statements of painters like Hill had fallen from fashion. Later painters of the Yosemite region, such as Christian Jorgensen, Harry Cassie Best and William Clothier Watts, showed a more restrained and less romantic approach to their subjects.

According to Kovinick, while a few of the 24 artists included in the 1900-1940 section of the exhibition remained true to the tenets of the Barbizon School (typified by Hill) and some stayed with realism, more than half displayed some aspect of Impressionism in their work. One, Franz Bishoff, experimented with Post-Impressionism.

From these early dabblings in newer schools of art came the eclectic array of styles represented in the second half of the show, for which Gamwell served as curator. There are realists, such as James Doolin and Don Hendricks, and expressionists, such as Theobald Gillian and Luis Bermudez, and other artists less easily defined. The exhibition also includes the work of photographers, from the pioneering Carleton E. Watkins through Ansel Adams to such contemporary artists as John Acurso and Howard Rosenfeld.

The progression of styles is a vital aspect of the exhibition, according to Gamwell. “One aim of the exhibit was educational, to show the development of a regional style,” she explained.

“Reaching the Summit” includes 80 works, 40 at each site. “We did want each exhibit to be a whole, to go from 1900 to the present,” said Gamwell. “Mainly, we wanted the exhibits to be of equal quality, and for both exhibits to be a complete experience, so people wouldn’t feel if they couldn’t get to one show they haven’t seen it.”

The Saddleback College Art Gallery is open Monday through Thursday, and Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. For information, call (714) 582-4756. The Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza site is open Monday through Wednesday, and Friday, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Thursday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. For information, call (714) 662-3366.

Co-curators Gamwell and Kovinick will give a lecture on the exhibition at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the McKinney Theatre at Saddleback College. Admission is free.