Traditional Tastes Find a Good Home at Los Angeles Art Show - Brief Article

LOS ANGELES--Forget, for a moment, the cutting edge of the contemporary scene. Collectors continue to be drawn to less flashy, more reserved traditional art, as evidenced by the growing success of the six-year-old Los Angeles Art Show, presented annually by the Fine Art Dealers Association (FADA), a non-profit organization of art dealers offering period and regional paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and photography from the 19th and 20th century. Held Sept. 14-17 in Los Angeles, the FADA expo showcased art geared to traditional tastes, including works by William Wendt, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Albert Bierstadt, Granville Redmond, Joseph Henry Sharp, Maurice Braun, Thomas Moran, Maynard Dixon, and Rembrandt, whose etchings were on view at Galerie Michael's booth.

FADA is riding an explosion of collector interest in precisely those realism genres its members extol: 19th and 20th century American Impressionism, plein air landscape, Western Americana, WPA and regionalism, maritime, Hudson River School, Taos Society, Barbizon, the Paris Salon, London's Royal Academy and other academic art and portraiture. And as this annual exposition has expanded to include some 48 art dealers--just 30 of them members of FADA--even mid-century modernism, with its interest in form and color, is represented at the show.

The opening night preview benefit, raising funds for the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, brought in some 800 attendees, according to Fair organizer Kim Martindale. This being Los Angeles, star sightings included Diane Keaton, Steve Martin and the costar of TV's VIP show, Molly Culver. Martindale expected overall attendance to reach 5,000, because, he said," I think L.A. is coming into its own as a center for the arts."

Many of the dealers present make a market in narrowly-defined art genres. For example, Questroyal Fine Art of New York specializes in American paintings of the 19th and early 20th century. Rehs Galleries, also of New York, focuses on "important" academic art. William A. Karges Fine Art, of Carmel, Calif., and Los Angeles, specializes in early California paintings. Vallejo Gallery of Newport Beach, Calif., concentrates on period maritime paintings from the past three centuries. Thomas Nygard Gallery of Bozeman, Mont., emphasizes historical art of the Northern Plains, as well as Taos Society and Rocky Mountain schools.

America's oldest art gallery, Vose Galleries of Boston, was also an exhibitor at the show. Founded in 1841 as an artist's supply store in Providence, R.I., the business--by now a gallery--expanded to Boston in 1880, where it has actively served collectors since. Early Vose generations were largely responsible for introducing the French Barbizon School to America, while later generations promoted the Hudson River School painters and American Impressionists.

Newcomers Exhibit

This year's FADA show also featured several new-to-the-expo art dealers. Penny Perlmutter traveled from San Francisco to participate, after, she noted, "coming to the show before, as a visitor not a dealer.... This is a well-done show, well-organized and handsomely presented, and focused appropriately to the kind of material I exhibit." Perlmutter specializes in work by women artists during the Modern Period, 1900-1940.

Also new to the show was Kenneth Canfield, owner of 20-year-old Canfield Gallery in Santa Fe, N.M., a specialist in Modern art of the 20th century. "We had a very good initial response from collectors at the fair," acknowledged Canfield, "and I'm highly optimistic. One of the many reasons we came to this show is because of the high quality of the dealers in the show. There are several galleries here whose work I admire very much, and I wanted to be included."

This year's Los Angeles Art Show was dedicated to FADA founding member David Stary-Sheets, who died earlier this year. David Stary-Sheets and his wife, Susan, also founded Stary-Sheets Fine Art, an Irvine, Calif., gallery specializing in California scene painters. These California regionalist artists were the contemporaries of Grant Wood, Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton. Working during the 1930s and 1940s, these artists generally worked in a realistic, narrative manner, mostly in watercolor, depicting the regional landscape, ranging from farms to beaches to urban scenes. Susan Stary-Sheets was an exhibitor at the FADA show, showcasing works by Dong Kingman, Emil Kosa, Jr. and Millard Sheets, who was David's father.

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