Synopsis:

Beginning with the arrival in 1786 of the French artist Gaspard Duche de Vancy, California's Monterey Peninsula became a favored destination of painters. With the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, a major exodous of artists from the Bay Area ended up in Monterey, Pacific Grove and Carmel, establishing an artist's colony which became famous nationally and internationally. The film looks at these artists and the themes that consumed them, from the beauty and fragility of the landscape to the danger to, and sometimes death of, its fishermen on a hostile sea.

Book Excerpt:

``She was an artist of destiny, lost in Carmel,'' said photographer Edward Weston of the modernist painter Henrietta Shore who exhibited with and was compared favorably with Georgia O'Keefe in her youth. Although Robert Henri called her one of the great women painters of her time, Shore spent her last years, and died, in a San Jose, California sanitarium.

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Author Comment:

Many of the artists in this film were early conservationists. In the beauty of the land they also saw its vulnerability. Through their paintings one can see what has been saved and what has been lost, creating a valuable record. Many also recorded the human condition of the region, creating in paint what writers like John Steinbeck and poets like Robinson Jeffers were describing in words.

Topics/Categories:

Art

Type of Work:

DVD

Publishers:

Mac and Ava Motion Pictures Monterey Museum of Art

Awards:

1992 and 1997 (expanded version) CINE Golden Eagle

Original Publish Date:

1992-01-30