The Paint of ‘Wrath’

In a painting from the mid-1930s, a shirtless John Steinbeck kneels on the beach, poking moodily at a rock with a stick, utterly oblivious of the nude woman behind him who dries her long hair. As the waves move closer to shore and the sun hangs low in the summer sky, a couple embrace, a bearded man relaxes with a drink and a woman in a red dress strums her guitar.

“Beach Picnic,” by Judith Deim, is one of the few works in “This Side of Eden: Images in Steinbeck’s California” that portrays the community of artists and like-minded souls in the Monterey environs during the Depression and the decades on either side of it. In addition to author Steinbeck, this gathering included Deim (the woman in red) and marine biologist Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck’s traveling buddy.

At the Laguna Art Museum through Jan. 10, this exhibition being circulated by the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas aims to evoke the social realism that (in addition to a network of friendships) linked the author of “The Grapes of Wrath” with painters of the area.

The novelist, who initially worked as a laborer to support his writing, lived inland in Salinas, then a ramshackle community of canneries, honky-tonks, flophouses and modest homes that grew up alongside the vegetable fields. Although he also wrote in a lighter vein, his big subject during the 1930s was the inexorable power of brute forces--acts of God (drought) or those man-made (cruel labor practices)--that upset the natural order between humans and their environment.

Most of the artists in the show are illustrators at heart: clumsy or able chroniclers of the region’s picturesque surroundings and raucous good times, providers of occasional sharp-eyed glimpses of the lives of migrant workers.

Unlike Steinbeck, the painters were far more casual and anecdotal, working small and (with a few exceptions) lacking evidence of a larger vision.

Not that we learn much about these artists and their ideas. Only two--including Millard Sheets, whose art-dealer son, David Stary-Sheets, is one of the three primary financial supporters of the show--are discussed in detail in the catalog.

For that matter, Steinbeck’s outlook and his connection with the art community also remain vague in this disjointed show, which perhaps suffers from being taken out of its original context (a museum devoted to the author’s life and career).

In any case, the work in the show is strongest when it memorializes the San Joaquin Valley’s shaggy, “Cannery Row”-type characters or gazes sympathetically at workers pausing in their labors.

Fresno-born Maynard Dixon was probably the best known of the painters associated with the area, where he worked sporadically in the 1920s and ‘30s. Motivated largely by his wife, documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, Dixon began to focus on social issues in the mid-1930s, a few years before Steinbeck published “Grapes,” his famous novel about Dust Bowl migrants.

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In the arid hills of Shafter, he painted “Okie Camp,” an image of a lone migrant couple taking shelter from the dust-choked air in a fragile-looking tent on the sand.

“Going Nowhere” (1938) shows a man with a bedroll on his back--and a spiffy overcoat that suggests he only recently joined the ranks of the unemployed--walking along the railroad tracks that slice across the canvas. For all his rootlessness, he looms up against the sky like a hero. Dixon establishes this ennobling vision with a low vantage point and dramatic lighting.

Except for Sheets--represented by three watercolors of migrant fieldworkers that illustrated a 1939 Fortune magazine story--most of the artists in the show are little-known today.

Sam Colburn--father of Bolton Colburn, the Laguna museum’s director--had a delicately distinctive watercolor style. In “El Nido/ Blackcrow,” small, liquid areas of color illuminate the faces and postures of a motley group of card players, from the lady in a hat to the swaggering young cowboy and the square-shouldered blond character with a pet crow.

Frances Brooks steeps “Salinas Cardroom” in a haze of shadow and smoke revealing bulky dancing bodies, drunks slumped on barrels and a woman bawling the words to her partner’s guitar music. Similarly, Oscar Galgiani’s “Saturday Night Dance at Ginger Gulch,” also from the early ‘40s, captures a wild night of booze and music under the ubiquitous full moon.

While Lee Blair’s untitled watercolor of two men--they are huddled at the edge of a narrow bed in a dingy hotel to share the contents of a paper-bag dinner--evokes the hardships of the mid-’30s, scenes of workers in the fields tend to lack this sense of intimate involvement. The larger political view--the militant spirit of workers’ struggles with farm bosses--is nowhere to be seen.

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Perhaps the most outspoken image of solidarity with labor in this show is George Corbit’s undated “Digging Clams.” The trio of round-shouldered workers is endowed with a massive, dour presence that owes a lot to German Expressionism.

At the other extreme, Henrietta Shore’s “The Artichoke Pickers” is a stylized tourist’s postcard, chockablock with bright color (yellow hats and sacks, orange vests) and the lively rhythms of the plant leaves. The faceless men performing the backbreaking work are little more than bit players in Shore’s aesthetic scheme.

* “This Side of Eden: Images of Steinbeck’s California,” through Jan. 10 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. $5 general admission, $4 students and seniors, free for children younger than 12. (949) 494-6531.