A True Picture of LACMA and Early Photographers

In recent years, L.A. has snapped out of a chronic case of historical amnesia. A welcome example of this drift is the L.A. County Museum’s “High Lights, Shadings and Shadows: LACMA, Pictorialism and the International Salons of Photography.”

The rather windy title designates an exhibition of nearly 100 photographs. They serve to revive a largely forgotten chapter in local history and art. The principal actors in this little drama are the museum and the local photographic community during the first half of the century. The institution we know today as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art evolved from the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art established in 1913 in Exposition Park. The indigenous photographic sphere of the day crystallized around an organization called the Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles.

In the melodramatic version of ensuing events, these two institutions are cast as bad-guy mossbacks opposed only by such heroic isolated avant-garde Modernist pioneers as Edward Weston.

Cold water gets dribbled on this simplistic scenario by this exhibition’s curator, LACMA’s Tim B. Wride. His persuasive, crisply written brochure points out that from 1918 to 1945, the museum hosted an annual international photographic salon. Organized by the Camera Pictorialists, the event was so respected it characteristically drew as many as 2,000 entries worldwide. About 200 were picked to show. Purchases made each year came to form the core of LACMA’s permanent photography collection. Wride selected this show from the trove.

And guess what? Weston is represented by one of his then-radical bell pepper compositions. Moreover, Wride points out, Weston suggested the prototype of the annuals when he organized the museum’s first-ever photography exhibition in 1916. The present show also includes advanced photography by Imogen Cunningham and such lesser-known figures as Shinsaku Izumi, Hiromu Kira and Kaye Shimojima.

If this inclusiveness comes as a surprise to some photography buffs, it’s probably because Modernist historians bum-rapped the Pictorialists as aesthetic reactionaries. Wride’s version revises their stereotypical image as photographers mainly bent on gaining artistic credibility by imitating painting.

There’s plenty of evidence that they did. An atmospheric landscape by Charles Job clearly had Monet on the brain. Another by Leonard Missone is in the accents of the Barbizon School with its clouds and cows. If these folks were derivative--and some were--they were also skilled, serious and open to a wide range of influences.

While artists like Karl Suchy couldn’t resist the picturesque blandishments of Venice or Dutch windmills, plenty of others were drawn to modern life. J. Vanderpant’s “Colonnades of Commerce” and William Rittase’s “So This Is New York” see the oppressive beauty of the city even when their accents are those of Stieglitz, Steichen or Strand.

Not every artist is interested in creating a trademark style or establishing a designer-label name. Not every lesser-known artist who looks like a better-known artist is actually an imitator. There is such a thing as shared affinities and parallel sensibilities. J.F. Mortimer’s “All’s Well” looks like a gloss on Winslow Homer, but you just get the feeling it isn’t.

I think commentators who know a lot of art history can put works of art at a disadvantage by being too hung up on genealogy. If Henri Berssenbrugge’s portrait looks like a Gustave Klimt, it still has a life of its own. Wride’s show reminds us of two things. There is such a thing as just plain intrinsic merit. And when history seems too clear-cut, there’s probably something wrong. He deserves a medal.

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* “High Lights, Shadings and Shadows: LACMA, Pictorialism and the International Salons of Photography,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through Aug. 10, closed Wednesdays, (213) 857-6000.