LONG BEACH, CA.- The Long Beach Museum of Art presents California Landscapes, featuring paintings, watercolors, photographs and ceramics, drawn largely from the Museum’s permanent collection, supplemented by loans from artists and collectors from throughout Southern California. California Landscapes depicts the unique beauty of the Golden State as envisioned by artists who call, or called, California home.

The exhibition fills the entire Museum with vivid images of the California landscape, including works from the turn of the 20th Century to today. The exhibition features the work of early California Plein Air painters, later works by California Scene painters of the 1930s and 1940s, and concludes with contemporary works that both capture and respond to California’s unique urban and natural landscape. California Landscapes is organized by the Long Beach Museum of Art for presentation from June 3 through August 21, 2005, and is curated by Sue Ann Robinson, the Museum’s Director of Collections.

California Landscapes begins with works that feature early California Impressionists and significant Plein Air painters who were particularly concerned with color and light, dating from the turn of the 20th Century through the 1930s. It is these artists who crystallized an “edenic” view of California that persists today. Among the artists are Pasadena-based artist Franz Bischoff, husband and wife team Elmer Wachtel and Marion Kavanagh Wachtel, William Alexander Griffith, Jean Mannheim and Dana Barlett. Also included are works by San Diego-based artist Maurice Braun, who viewed nature as a source of spiritual renewal. California Landscapes also features selections from Long Beach Museum of Art’s important collection of paintings by George Henry Melcher, who focused on the Topanga Canyon area and Santa Monica Bay.

California Landscapes also presents works by California Scene painters of the 1930s and 1940s, including watercolors by Phil Dike, Rex Brandt, Charles Keck, George Gibson, Emil Kosa, Roger Kuntz and Leonard Cutrow. The final group includes contemporary natural and urban landscapes by artists such as watercolorists Kirk Pedersen and Carl Aldana, modern Long Beach scenes, such as those captured in the photographs of Tom Paiva, works created in response to nature and natural landscape, such as the unique visions of Sharon Ellis and Astrid Preston, and unusual approaches to landscape subjects by artists such as ceramists Tony Marsh and Steve Portigal.

California Landscapes is the fourth in a year-long series of exhibitions and cultural programs entitled California Visions. Organized by the Long Beach Museum of Art, California Visions highlights the remarkable achievements of artists who were raised in the Golden State or who immigrated to California attracted by its beauty, its embrace of innovation, or its promise of hope and opportunity. California Visions is comprised of four major one-person exhibitions featuring seminal California artists, two large group exhibitions, a year-long series of permanent collection installations and related offerings of lectures, performances, readings, art making workshops for children, and other cultural programs. California Visions, and the California Landscapes exhibition in particular, advances the Museum’s long-standing commitment to California-based artists, and provides a context within which important work in the Museum’s collection might be seen and better understood by the general public.

This exhibition is sponsored by The Gordon and Ruth Dougherty Foundation, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCoy, R.K. Properties, Jean and Charles Lane, Daniel and Pamela Munzer, Ania and Michael Sullivan, Long Beach View and Yellow Book USA.