'This Side of Eden' exhibit opens National Steinbeck Center
By Steve Hauk and Patricia Leach
Most early 20th Century California artists were attracted to the state's landscape and coastline. But there were those as absorbed by the human life around them as the writers, filmmakers and photographers of the period, and they were quick to record their impressions.
Maynard Dixon's 1935 paintings "Okie Camp" and "No Place to Go,' for instance, might seem sympathetic responses to John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath." But if so, Dixon was a mind reader the novel was not to be published for another four years. The artist was simply responding in his own way to a nation enduring hard times. And while Judith Deim's "The Argument," a Monterey street scene painting off our men, could pass as an illustration for Steinbeck's "Cannery Row," it was painted in 1939, six years before that book was to appear in print.
This is not to suggest that Steinbeck or any other writer necessarily owed a thematic debt to the painters. It is a way of pointing out that the painters were as socially aware as other artists and seeing the world through their own eyes.
Works by Dixon and Deim are among some 65 art works that make up "This Side of Eden Images of Steinbeck's California," the inaugural exhibition of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California.
"Americana # 2" by James Peter Cost courtesy of Clint Selleck
The Center, located in Salinas' Old Town just two blocks from the Victorian house where John Steinbeck was born and grew up, celebrated its grand opening June 27. A $10-million, 37,000 square foot facility, it features an interactive exhibit hall devoted to Steinbeck's world and literature, movie theater, lecture forums, museum shop and restaurant, a library and archives of 30,000 pieces, including letters, photographs and first editions and the changing gallery exhibition gallery that houses "This Side of Eden Images of Steinbeck's California."
Most of the painters in this exhibition were recognized in their lifetimes. Certainly Maynard Dixon, Gottardo Piazzoni and Armin Hansen were very successful and are now recognized as major American artists. Several are contemporary and painting productively. Judith Deim, James Peter Cost and Jay Hannah among them.
Others among the early artists, such as George Cecil Corbit, Burton Boundey and Jane Berlandina her exhibition painting "Prune Pickers" exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1933 were honored in their lifetimes but have since been forgotten or neglected. Hopefully, this exhibition will help to rectify that.
Some of the art works directly reflect Steinbeck's literature, such as two illustrations by East Coast artist Peggy Worthington Best, who had been a friend and sketching partner of Norman Rockwell, for the 1947 Viking deluxe edition of "Tortilla Flat."
There is a portrait of the writer himself, by Deim, and a drawing by Ellwood Graham, both done as Steinbeck wrote .`Sea of Cortez." Another Deim painting called "Beach Picnic" shows Steinbeck, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts to become famous as "Doc" in the novel ..Cannery Row" and friends on a Monterey area beach in the mid-1930s. A third Deim painting, called "The Argument," is set on
Cannery Row in 1939.
"China Camp" by Ray Strong o/m, 18" x 24", Courtesy of Lida Scarborough Art Conservation
Three very important watercolors by Millard Sheets are seen publicly in the exhibition for the first time since 1939, when they appeared in a Fortune Magazine feature on California's migrant field workers. They were discovered in the artist's studio in 1988. One depicts a woman bathing her children in
"Colorado (River) ditchwater," in another the artist cuts away the back of a tent to show a weary woman leaning over on her cot as, in the distance, children climb onto a school bus.
While the exhibition covers both Northern and Southern California, a major body of the work covers the areas from which Steinbeck drew much of his inspiration the Salinas Valley and the Monterey region.
Two watercolors are by Leon Amyx, who came to the Salinas Valley in the 1930s as a young man and taught art at Hartnell Community College in Salinas for nearly four decades. His watercolors are a sensitive and vital chronicle of life in the valley. One piece shows fieldworkers competing in volleyball on a summer evening. Today the game would likely be soccer.
Frances Brooks preceded Amyx to the Salinas Valley. She was a year older than Steinbeck, born five years before her family lost its San Francisco home in the 1906 earthquake. At the age of fifteen she came to Monterey to study art with Armin Hansen then walked the more than one-hundred miles home, sketching and painting along the way. Harvey Jones, senior curator of art at the Oakland Museum of California, calls Brooks among the very best "of the lesser known California artists."
On the Monterey Peninsula, Sam Colburn and Bruce Ariss recorded on paper and canvas the life Steinbeck was depicting in his writing. Ariss, who accompanied Steinbeck on a trip to Mexico, lost most of his work through a series of fires.
Colburn specialized in the fisherman's life ashore (mending nets, tending boats, hanging out), often with a whimsy also found in his exuberant watercolors of the sometimes tipsy patrons of the bar El Nido on Monterey's then rowdy Lower Alvarado Street.
An exhibition watercolor by Colburn called "The Jeeps" belonged to Steinbeck's first wife, Carol. Colburn gave it to Carol Steinbeck after she earned a mechanic's certificate to repair Army jeeps during during World War II. Carol Steinbeck was a very strong influence on Steinbeck's writing as editor, critic and "drinking buddy," and the Colburn painting reminded her of "good times with good pals," according to Carol's stepdaughter, Sharon Bacon.
Many artists of the period and represented in the exhibition found employment with the Hollywood studios and helped make animated films now considered classics. The catalogue cover of field workers is by Art Landy, who drew for Disney Studios and Walter Lantz Productions.
Burton Boundey had different roots, coming out of Wisconsin to study with Ashcan School founders Robert Henri and George Bellows. Boundey eventually settled on the Monterey Peninsulas where he became known for modern coastals and landscapes, yet included man, often in scenes of quiet isolation, in many of his compositions.
Boundey likely met Steinbeck, who seemed comfortable among artists. In addition to Judith Deim and Elwood Graham, Steinbeck numbered James Fitzgerald, also a Steinbeck portraitist before leaving Monterey to settle in Maine in Rockwell Kent's former home on Monhegan Island, National Academican Howart Everett Smith and Armin Hansen among his acquaintances or friends.
Most of those artists were just beginning careers that would bring them fame or notoriety, while Steinbeck was beginning a career that would win him international fame and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
"This Side of Eden Images of Steinbeck's California" will run through Sept. 13 at the new National Steinbeck Center, One Main St., Salinas CA. 93901. An illustrated, color catalogue accompanies the exhibition. For information call 408-753-6411.
Patricia Leach is the executive director of the National Steinbeck Center and the former director of the Redding Museum of Art and History, and the Campbell Historical Museum and Ainsley House, both in California.
Steve Hauk wrote the award-winning film "Time Captured in Paintings The Monterey Legacy" for the Monterey Museum of Art He is a writer and art dealer and former trustee of the Monterey Museum of Art.