Works on Paper

Clinton Adams

1918-2002

Theme/Style – Modernism, Abstraction, still life, landscape, townscape

Media – Oils, tempera, gouache, watercolor, mixed media, lithography

Artistic Focus – As a painter and printmaker, Clinton Adams produced a mix of traditional representation and Modernist abstraction. Proficient in many media, he is known for his clean, abstracted architectural forms, the richly-toned watercolors he produced in the 1940s and 1950s, and also as one of the most important influences on the development of fine art printmaking in the United States. An acknowledged authority on the subject of lithography, Adams created handsome original prints, wrote seminal books, and was a key figure in the renowned Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles and Tamarind Institute in New Mexico.

Career Highlights –

Clinton Adams was born in Glendale, California in 1918, and studied at UCLA, earning a Bachelor of Education degree in 1940 and a Master’s degree in 1942.
Adams began teaching at UCLA as a graduate student around 1941, and in 1942 he was included in exhibitions at the American Contemporary Gallery in Los Angeles and the “Artists of Los Angeles and Vicinity” show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
After serving in World War II, he became a full professor of art at UCLA around 1946 and began to study lithography. By 1948 Adams, along with other artists such as Jean Charlot, Henrietta Shore, June Wayne and Lorser Feitelson, was working with noted lithographer Lynton Kistler to produce prints for exhibition.
Adams exhibited with the California Water Color Society at the Pasadena Art Institute in 1948. He was represented by Los Angeles’s Felix Landau Gallery in the 1950s and 1960s, and was included in the 1950 First International Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio with Ray Bertrand, Rico Lebrun, Fernand Léger, Pablo O’Higgins and others, as well as in shows at City Hall, Los Angeles in 1951 and UCLA’s Fine Arts Gallery in 1956 with Annita Delano, Stanton Macdonald Wright, and others.
Adams remained at UCLA until 1954, when he left Los Angeles to chair the art departments at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and the University of Florida in Gainesville.
When fellow printmaker June Wayne founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1960, Adams returned to serve as its Associate Director.
He continued his association with Tamarind after relocating to New Mexico in 1961; and when the Workshop’s funding in Los Angeles ran out, Adams encouraged its move to the University of New Mexico in 1970, where he was Dean of the College of Fine Arts. Once in New Mexico, the name of the workshop was changed to the Tamarind Institute, with Adams as its director and also editor of the journal The Tamarind Papers.
Adams remained actively involved in the University of New Mexico as a professor and administrator while working with Tamarind and pursuing his interest in early American lithography. He authored a number of books including the definitive history American Lithographers 1900-1960: The Artists and Their Printers (1983) and coauthored, with Garo Antreasian, The Tamarind Book of Lithography: Art & Techniques (1971), which is considered the standard text on the subject.
Adams served as director of the Tamarind Institute until 1985, when he retired from both teaching at the university and his role at the Institute.
Adams had more than 30 solo shows during his career, including at the aforementioned Felix Landau Gallery, Los Angeles, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, California State University Northridge, and Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, NM. His tempera painting Barrington Street (1951) was included in the important exhibition “Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2000-2001.
Adams passed away in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2002. The exhibition “Clinton Adams: Memorial Retrospective, 1918-2002” took place later that year at the Tobey C. Moss Gallery in Los Angeles. The catalogue raisonné A Meticulous Serenity: The Prints of Clinton Adams, 1958-1997 was published in 2012.
Adams’s work is in the collections of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts; the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena; the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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Francis Joseph Bruguière

1879-1945

Theme/Style – Tonalism, Pictorialism, Abstraction

Media – Photography, filmmaking, painting, sculpture

Artistic Focus – With other members of the Photo-Secessionist movement, Francis Bruguière sought to legitimize photography as a fine art medium. His Tonalist/Pictorialist photographs of San Francisco’s streets and buildings often used soft focus and subtle variations in tone to invoke the Impressionist painters; and his dreamlike depictions of the city’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition and the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego looked beneath their festive surfaces to reveal them as places of fantasy and mystery. Bruguière was also a pioneer in experimental photography and abstract filmmaking, using techniques such as shaped or cut-paper designs to create patterns of light and shadow.

Career Highlights –

Francis Joseph Bruguière was born into a wealthy and prominent banking family in San Francisco, California in 1879. His maternal grandfather was Peder Sather, a generous donor to the University of California, and his brother was painter and physician Peder Sather Bruguière.
In 1901 Bruguière married actress Lila Convere and pursued an art career, studying painting in Europe; but on his return to the U.S. he met Alfred Stieglitz in New York and decided to take up photography. He studied with Frank Eugene, and Stieglitz included several of Bruguière’s photographs in the groundbreaking 1910 Photo-Secessionist International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at the Albright (now Albright-Knox) Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY.
Back in San Francisco, Bruguière set up a studio and began photographing the city and its people. He had a solo show of his photographs at Vickery, Atkins & Torrey galleries in 1912, and was included in a group show at the city’s California Club that same year.
In 1915 Bruguière produced one of his most famous bodies of work: his photography of the buildings and grounds of San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) and San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition (PCE).
To commemorate the PPIE, Bruguière and George Sterling collaborated to create The Evanescent City (1915), comprising a poem by Sterling and nine of Bruguière’s photographs. The piece was first printed in Sunset magazine and was also published in book form.
A book of Bruguière’s Pictorialist photographs called San Francisco was published in 1918, and contained 26 images of the city, including Chinatown and Telegraph Hill.
Around 1918 Bruguière moved to New York City, where he established a studio and worked as a photographer for Vanity Fair, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as the city’s Theatre Guild.
Bruguière’s longstanding experimentation with new techniques and light processes culminated in his famous series of cut-paper photographic abstractions and a one-man show at the Art Center of New York in 1927.
Also around 1927, Bruguière moved to London, where he designed stage sets and photographic murals, and in 1929-1930 he co-created the first British abstract film, Light Rhythms, with Oswell Blakeston.
In 1936 Bruguière was included in the landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his photograph Abstraction was illustrated with work by Juan Gris and Raymond Duchamp-Villon in a review of the show in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Around 1937 Bruguière abandoned photography to concentrate on painting and sculpture, which he pursued until his death in London in 1945.
In 2015-2016 the exhibition Dream City: The 1915 Panama-California Exposition took place at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, highlighting Bruguière’s photographs of the PCE. Other posthumous solo shows for Bruguière took place at the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY (Quest for Light, 1959); Witkin Gallery, New York (1977); and in California at the San Francisco Museum of Art (with Robert Frank) (1967), the de Young Museum (1968), Friends of Photography in Carmel and a major Bruguière retrospective at the Oakland Museum (1978). A monograph, Bruguière: His Photographs and Life, by James Enyeart was published in 1977.

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Beatrice Wood

1893-1998

Theme/Style – Dadaism, Sophisticated Primitivism, figurative art

Media – Ceramics, pottery, watercolors, drawings

Artistic Focus – Her spirited enjoyment of life was the inspiration for Henri-Pierre Roche’s famed novel, Jules et Jim. Her mastery of ceramics and pottery prompted Anais Nin to declare that “water poured from one of her jars will taste like wine.” Wood’s work is renowned for its provocative, humorous and often pointed depictions of complex subjects and human relationships. Her pottery features glazes that range from deeply pitted surfaces to lustrous metallic and iridescent finishes, and an almost haphazard application of color that results in surprising effects. Wood’s creative spirit infused her work well beyond her 100th birthday.

Career Highlights –

Born in 1893 in San Francisco to proper Victorian parents, Wood rebelled against convention from the start.
In 1910, she was sent to Paris by her mother, where she began her studies at the Academie Julian and observed Monet at work in Giverny.
Returning to America upon the outbreak of World War I, she settled into the artist’s life in New York, pursuing work in the theater and dance as well as the fine arts. She met Roche and Marcel Duchamp, both of whom played a major role in her life, personally as well as professionally.
By the 1930s, Wood had moved to Los Angeles, where she began studying ceramics simply to fashion a teapot to complement a set of plates she had purchased. Her legendary career as ceramic artist and potter began.
Wood continued working daily, well into her 100s, in the Ojai, California studio she established in the late 1940s.
In 1998, she died at the age of 105.

Clifford Wight

ca. 1900-1960s

Theme/Style – California Modernism, figurative art

Media – Oils, murals, sculpture

Artistic Focus – Clifford Wight “came, created and departed without biographical traces.” He was born in England around 1900 and in 1922 began working in Mexico as a mural assistant to Diego Rivera.

Career Highlights –

Wight accompanied Rivera to the United States and assisted the artist with mural work in Detroit Michigan, at the San Francisco Art Institute, and at Rockefeller Center in New York. The famous Rockefeller fresco was destroyed in 1933 because it contained a portrait of Lenin.
A similar controversy attached itself to the frescoes painted by Wight as part of the Coit Tower works sponsored by the Public Works of Art Project in 1934. Wight’s creations, iconic figures of a farmer, a cowboy, a surveyor and a steelworker, were deemed acceptable by the San Francisco Art Commission. Nonetheless, the detail connecting two of the figures, a segment of chain with the words “In God We Trust,” the Blue Eagle symbol of the NRA, and a hammer and sickle with the words “United Workers of the World,” created so much concern that its presence helped delay the Tower’s opening through the summer of 1934. Some thought the artist was “inviting the average citizen to make a choice among the three.” Only after the potentially offensive symbols were whitewashed did Coit Tower finally open.
Wight expressed offense at the censoring of his work, claiming that the elements were merely symbols of alternative systems and not propaganda.

Suzanne Scheuer

1898-1984

Theme/Style – California Modernism, landscapes

Media – Oils, murals, sculpture, lithography

Artistic Focus – A San Francisco native, Suzanne Scheuer was one of the muralists commissioned by the Depression-era Public Works of Art Project to create the Coit Tower murals. In addition to her Coit Tower work, she created murals in the Berkeley post office, and in post office buildings in Caldwell and Eastland, Texas.

Career Highlights –

Early in her career, Scheuer worked most often in watercolor and gouache.
Scheuer’s Coit Tower mural, an illustration of the news gathering and distribution process, is notable for its use of reds and blues, colors not normally associated with the usual earth tones of the fresco palette. The mural depicts the submission of a news item to an editor, its incorporation into the printing process, and the eventual distribution of the news to a street-side newsstand. The hot news, proclaimed on the front page of an issue of the San Francisco Chronicle reads, “Artists Finish Coit Tower Murals, April 1934.”
Following the Depression, Scheuer moved from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, California, where she continued painting and sculpting.
She also taught at the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California.

Elsie Palmer Payne

1884-1971

Theme/Style – California Scene, figurative art, landscapes

Media – Oils, watercolors, sculpture

Artistic Focus – A painter of people and community, Elsie Palmer Payne employed her keen observational skills to bring to life the people and places she visited, creating works that captured “the character and ambiance of the people.” Whether painting in downtown Los Angeles, the Southwestern United States, the Sierras, or abroad, Payne’s canvases were “adept at capturing local color through the precise rendition of costume and specialty goods that each region is noted for.” Her paintings were praised for their “great sense of solidity… the overall effect is that of richly decorative line…”

Career Highlights –

Early in her career, Payne worked most often in watercolor and gouache.
She also created small-scale sculptures in clay or plasticene, choosing these quicker and easier-to-stop-and-start media in order to tend to her husband Edgar’s career as a painter, as well as caring for their daughter and the family household.
The couple separated in 1932 and Payne began focusing her efforts on oils, and mounted exhibitions outside of the Laguna Beach art community.
She also opened an art school in Beverly Hills, and expanded her subject matter to include Southwestern Indians, flowers, and people, painted in both genre and portrait formats.
Her later work, which included such American Scene compositions as Bus Stop, Thrifty Drug Store, A Colored Gentleman, The Picnic, and Los Angeles Harbor, presented their subjects with an honesty that reminded many of Ashcan artists’ treatment of their subjects.