California Landscape into Abstraction: Works from the Orange County Museum of Art

California Landscape into Abstraction: Works from the Orange County Museum of Art
by Dan Cameron
One of the recurring themes in California art over the past century is the relationship between abstraction and landscape. Particularly in Southern California, a deep schism opened up in the 1930s between naturalist landscape painters and those of a more modernist inclination, and the breach has never entirely healed. This catalog, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name, includes an essay by OCMA Chief Curator Dan Cameron that explores ways in which artists from the West Coast have played a role in transforming landscape into abstraction (and in some instances, back again), as well as short biographies of the over eighty artists included in the exhibition, some well known and some fascinating re-discoveries.