Redmond’s art legacy: poppies
Exhibition at Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum looks at artist who embraced new state flower as his specialty a century ago
“Granville Redmond: The Eloquent Palette,” on view at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento through May 17, has its visual charms (California landscapes of 100 years ago) and a great backstory (deaf artist finds success despite an indifferent world).
At the same time, it prompts questions: About curatorial choices regarding what to share from the vastness of any prolific career. About the art and craft of painting. About how we look at pictures.
Born in Philadelphia in 1871, Redmond was brought by his parents to San Jose soon after a bout with scarlet fever left him permanently deaf. In 1879, his parents sent him to what was, for the time, an enlightened boarding school in
Berkeley that nevertheless called itself the California Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb. (Today it is the California School for the Deaf, located in Fremont.) There, Redmond studied art with, among others, the prominent
San Francisco sculptor Douglas Tilden, who was also deaf, and who would become a lifelong friend.
With support from the school and its benefactors, Redmond progressed rapidly as an artist, training at what is now the San Francisco Art
Institute and, eventually, in Paris. The Crocker exhibition opens with a very Frenchlooking painting from 1895, “Matin d’Hiver (Winter Morning),” a work that was accepted into the prestigious Paris Salon exhibition. It is an attractive and authentic picture, though one heavily influenced by Impressionist artists of a generation earlier. It was passed over for a Salon prize.
When his funds ran out in France, Redmond gave up other efforts that might establish his international reputation and returned to California. He hung out his shingle as an artist and illustrator in Los Angeles, got married and had three children.
That biographical background, much of it shared as wall labels in the exhibition, says a lot about the artist’s choices in later life. The gist of what is said, however, appears only between the lines: Redmond could not devote himself entirely to l’art pour l’art, to art for its own sake. He needed money.
He began bouncing up and down the California coast, Los Angeles to San Francisco, with sojourns in the Monterey area and in Menlo Park. He supplemented his art earnings with
“Granville Redmond: The Eloquent Palette”:
10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday; Thursday until 9 p.m. Through May 17. $6-$12. Crocker Art Museum, 216 O St., Sacramento. 916-8087000. www.crockerart.org work as an actor in silent films, backed by his younger friend Charlie Chaplin.
And around 1906, when the California Legislature named the poppy as state flower, Redmond made the most significant decision of his artistic career. He became a specialist.
Of the 83 paintings in the Crocker exhibition, at least 35 could be described as fields of poppies. Others are fields of lupines, dotted with the orange flowers.
Crocker curator Scott Shields, a respected expert on the history of art in California, organized the exhibition. One might ask why he decided to hang so many pictures so close to identical in subject and feeling, but I prefer to trust the exhibition more than what its curator might say about it.
For one thing, it seems the honest thing to do. Redmond made so many poppy pictures that he himself complained he could not devote himself to the works he wanted to paint. “People will not buy them,” the exhibition catalog quotes him as saying about other subject matter. “They all seem to want poppies.”
But it’s just as likely that Shields and the museum calculated that today, as 100 years ago, the myth of California as a verdant, goldcarpeted land of blue skies and clear air would captivate an audience.
Pictures are never merely of a subject, they are about a topic. The admirer of a poppied Redmond landscape may or may not see a representation of a specific glen or mountain — the works in the show are identified by generic titles and probably were never identified geographically by their author. (Indeed, even dates are omitted from many object labels here, as if the curator has decided that decades of artistic practice are indistinguishable, or don’t matter.)
There are moodier paintings, Redmond’s socalled “tonalist” works, that feel to me truer and are, at the very least, relief from the monotonous, feigned cheer. “Fog Burning Off ” (1905) is one such view, where a disturbance in the waters of a marsh suggests sound, movement, change.
In most of the works the artist produced in a lifetime that spanned 64 years, however, the viewer is faced with an object coated in strokes of broken color, a la the Impressionists, a surface faceted in jewellike dabs. The title of one, “Silver and Gold” (1918), says it all: These are places to be valued for the metaphors they suggest, not for what they are.
Ever balmy, always pristine, perpetually victorious in the struggle that life is divinely designed to be.
When the California Legislature named the poppy as state flower, Redmond made the most significant decision of his artistic career.