RIVERSIDE, CA.- The Riverside Art Museum presents California Seen: Selections from the Tom and Christie Accatino Collection, on view through September 3, 2005. Tom and Christie Accatino, based in Riverside and Palm Springs, have been collecting landscape paintings of California for over thirty years. On view are selections from their collection, including plein-air works from the late 19th and early and mid 20th century by such masters as William Keith, Fritz Kocher, Claude Buck, Myrta Herbert, Conrad Buff, Agnes Pelton, Orrin White and Milford Zornes.

Essay by Peter Frank on Accatino Collection at Riverside Art Museum:

From the moment it was acquired by the United States, the “California Republic” began sitting for its portrait. Artists from all over the country and Europe began to flock to the sprawling new state, attracted by its lushness, its wildness, and most of all its astounding variety. The very first artists here were reporters, drawing and photographing glimpses of California’s grand and modest glories. But the elements of artistic style quickly crept into their work. After all, while the Rocky Mountain and Southwest desert regions provided impressive enough subject matter, only California could satisfy the diverse demands of painters schooled in the dramatic vistas of the Düsseldorf and Hudson River schools, the woodsy subjects of Barbizon, the intimate townscapes favored by the Dutch, or, later, the high, open colors and spaces of Impressionism. It took many kinds of artists to capture California’s many topographies and atmospheres.

We talk now about a school of California plein air painters, but the only thing that artists as different as William Keith, Fritz Kocher, Agnes Pelton, and Conrad Buff and the generations of artists they represent had in common was the desire to depict nature as they found it on the West Coast. There are several schools of plein-air painting here. Together they constitute a tradition a tradition that continues to this day. Indeed, there is a contemporary resurgence of interest among California artists in painting the great outdoors and a concomitant resurgence of interest among curators, collectors and critics in California’s bygone outdoor painters.

Tom and Christie Accatino began collecting art several decades ago. They have always favored portraiture and religious subjects, but one whole chamber of their collecting heart beats loudly for landscape, and especially for landscapes of California subjects. The passion is partly that of natives (or near-natives) for the land of their youth, and partly that of fervent collectors who came across a whole undervalued category of excellent art at the outset of their search. That category is undervalued no more. The Accatinos should be cleaning up at the auction house, but they are not horse traders or real-estate speculators; they are (to use Aline Saarinen’s term) proud possessors, devoted to their pictures and loathe to part with a one.

This selection, drawn from the Accatino’s Riverside and Palm Springs collections, spans about a hundred years of artmaking in California. It documents the ferocity of the landscape and also its taming, for better or worse, at the hands of men from the east (whether east was the original 13 colonies, England itself, or Spain). It also documents the evolution of art in an epoch during which artistic practices and definitions were subject to rapid and radical change. From our vantage, the changes here from, say, the 1870s to the 1930s don’t seem so radical. Indeed, the wild arguments of modernism came late and diffuse to the shores of the Pacific; by time Californians were painting like Impressionists, Parisians were painting like Cubists. By comparison with the ism parades of Munich and New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Laguna and Carmel offered the gentle reassurance that painting changed only as much as nature did.

Nature, of course, has changed a good deal in our era, and California has become one of the hotbeds of new artistic thinking. Even our contemporary plein air painters paint smog and sprawl, machines and McMansions as often as they paint shoreline rocks or Sierra sunsets. But they do so only because they seek the same truth in nature, however much is left of it, as did their predecessors and because, however many more malls and freeways there may be in 2005, California is still much the eyeful it was in 1905 or 1855. What we can see from the Accatinos’ pictures is what remains as well as what has been lost. What remains is the light and the foliage and the astounding variety of landscape. What has been lost is paradise. If these paintings speak beyond the decades about anything, they speak of a vanished idyll. They may overstate the case, but what they remind us is that, as we came to California, we were not cast out of Eden; we cast Eden out before us.

Peter Frank.