Staff Pick | Monthly Muse October 2021

I love how the decorative arts bring aesthetic beauty into the home environment for the simple pleasure of looking and to create a sense of place. This porcelain vase by “Impressionist china painter” Franz Bischoff (1864 – 1929), as he was known by his late 19th -/early 20th-century contemporaries, is rich in style and color. The elegance of its elongated, moss green shape draws the eye to the shoulder clustered with fat, yellow poppies resting on slender stems swaying towards the base. There is an Arts and Crafts simplicity and symmetry to California Poppies that reveals Bischoff’s technical mastery of illustration and composition, which he learned as an apprentice in his native Bohemia.

After emigrating to the United States in 1882 and later settling in the Los Angeles area with his family in 1906, the artist joined the California Art Club, where he expanded his practice to watercolors and oil paintings on canvas. He also explored a Post-Impressionist style that used color liberally, perhaps inspired by his new friends and surroundings. During the gray days of winter, I imagine this vase prominently positioned on a fireplace mantle, inserting the warm California sun into a chilly living room and signaling the promise of summer.

Anne Bergeron
Interim Deputy Director, Langson IMCA

Staff Pick | Monthly Muse September 2021

I think about Charles Rollo Peters standing in front of this mission, waiting for his eyes to adjust as night falls. The delicacy in the light transitions caught my interest—and prompted me to consider how I perceive the world once the sun has set. The mission in Starlit Mission, Carmel is painted just off-center, appearing still and dormant as if it were sleeping in the night. There is an atmospheric density within the painting, that feels like the night is blanketing the canvas. Though it is a nocturne (a painting style that depicts scenes evocative of the night), there is a strong presence of light that allows a revelation of detail in the work. This light warms the aerial perspective, illuminating the stars in the night sky, and the impression of a dirt road.

Though the painting is enveloped in darkness, none of the shadows are in an absolute black tone. The absence of black conjures a warm, human feeling as if the mission is breathing. The night will bring the new day, and life will once again resume within the walls. For me, the painting speaks about transitional time and space—capturing darkness when it is quiet and heavy.

Hiroshi Richard Clark
Graduate Student Assistant Researcher (Collections Department), Langson IMCA

Staff Pick | Monthly Muse August 2021

What is the secret in Helen Pashgian’s Blue Secret? My initial response points to the single, radiating, brushstroke-like mark that interrupts the green-blue, curved, rectangular plane hovering between the surface and the wall. This mark, however, poses more questions to me than it answers. Pashgian is an artist increasingly recognized as one of the most influential members of the Light and Space movement. In her practice, the object is not the artwork. In Blue Secret, light is not merely that which illuminates the work, but instead forms its very matter.

The secret of Blue Secret, in my view, is two-fold: the internal illuminated stroke produced through the artist's use of different materials as well as the obscure workings of light itself. Here, rather than simply revealing an image, light is rendered mysterious. It is not only an exterior transmission between the artwork and the viewer, but matter with its own strange corporeality. Blue Secret exposes the materiality of light, toying with its impenetrable and alien logics. For me, the work simultaneously evokes an atmosphere of reflection—the calm, blue, minimal plane and its singular interruption—and a feeling of destabilization. Embodiments of light, like the ghostly mark in Blue Secret, are all around me and form my visual world. Rather than revealing the world to me, perhaps these moments of light hide themselves as I navigate a universe of secrets.

Zachary Korol-Gold
Graduate Student Researcher (Curatorial Department), Langson IMCA

Staff Pick | Monthly Muse July 2021

Florence Arnold’s Landscape (1959), with its warm purple and brown hues, conveys a continuity between shadow and light, night and day, land and sky. Its geometric shapes resemble temples, radiating a sense of the sublime and infusing the work with a spiritual component. As someone born and raised in Central Europe, I am compelled by Arnold’s desert setting, so unlike anything I knew in my old life, at once evoking and contradicting the myth of the “New World.” What pulls me into this desert landscapes is the feeling of history it inspires, which is at odds with the settler narrative of California as a new and emerging space. It is impossible to look at rocks formed by millions of years of erosion and exposure to the elements and not get a sense of deep time, geological and human.

On a visceral level, the landscape serves as a visual reminder of history. Arnold’s juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern is a new take on an old theme, one she achieves through the abstract breakdown of the landscape into simplified shapes and colors. The painting’s generic title transcends locale, and its ordered and highly aestheticized portrayal of a complex space suggests tensions inherent in the American West.

Sara Černe
Former Interim Project Analyst and Executive Assistant, Langson IMCA