"All of those things are captured in the art," McClelland says. After World War II, the hippies, beatniks and surfers took over California culture. A few decades later, the war industry would change Long Beach and its environs.
California landscape art movie#
There was a movie culture in Hollywood, and a citrus industry in Riverside. But by the 1920s, California was already changing. The images of golden fields, vendors hawking fruits and vegetables in the street, workers in the missions, and vaqueros working with cattle are all captured in paintings. "The first chapter traces the idea of scene paintings from when the state was founded in 1849," McClelland says. Notables names - Millard Sheets, Phil Dike, Emil Kosa Jr., Milford Zornes and Rex Brandt - are in the Irvine show, as well as relative unknowns such as Ben Norris, John Bohnenberger, Art Riley and Preston Blair. In fact, the Irvine exhibition of 22 watercolors and 22 oil paintings is based on a book he co-authored with his son Austin. His expertise is reflected in the show he guest-curated for the Irvine Art Museum, "California Scene Paintings: 1920s-1970s." He has written more than 16 books on the California Scene Painting movement and its artists. To date, the art collector/dealer/author McClelland is considered one of the foremost authorities on the subject. Morse, Vernon Jay, "The Bridge Builders," 1926, 22 x 28. These California Scene Paintings - works that include people or evidence of human life via of man-made objects such as cars, trains, barns, freeways, coastline piers - were wildly popular before the war, but weren't considered important enough to merit attention from large museums and art critics until very recently. The appreciation for labels as artistic depictions of history led McClelland to develop an eye for paintings that depicted everyday life in California. "In these labels you'd see the Spanish influence, the missions, the Indians - all of California history is depicted," he says.
"When I taught 4th grade, I'd teach history via these labels." Not only did the kids love it, it made teaching history easier. "These labels are California scene art," McClelland says. "Everything I do is linked," he says.ĭuring the turn of the century, fruit labels depicting various scenes of life in California - clear blue skies over idyllic valleys, sunny avenues and palm trees, Spanish missions, seagulls flying over the ocean - perpetuated the California dream to everyone else in the country. But his interest in visual arts stemmed from a love of those packing labels. The son of a painter, McClelland gleaned his early knowledge of art through his mother, who took art lessons from painters in the California scene. Little did he know that this collection would spawn a life-long love of California art.
He liked the fruit labels so much he began collecting them. As a 12-year-old growing up in Orange in the 1960s, Gordon McClelland, guest curator of Irvine Art Museum's exhibition, " California Scene Paintings: 1920s-1970s," worked at the Olive Heights packing house in Orange.
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