I recently purchased Emerging from the Shadows, Vol. I: A Survey of Women Artists Working in California, 1860-1960 and while reading it I discovered one particularly interesting artist named Viola M. Allen. Her facility with a palette knife seems almost miraculous, so of course I started searching the web for more of her work. Other than a few items available at auction, I haven't been able to find much information. So I wanted to share a couple quotes from the fabulous book by Maurine St. Gaudens.

Viola M. Allen was born on March 14, 1906, in Queens, New York, the daughter of Safarine D. Allen and Minnie (Eschman) Allen. According to her biographical artist's promotional card, she attended, in New York, the Pratt Institute and the National Academy of Design, where she studied under Charles Curran. Her card also indicates that she studied portrait painting with Moskowitz and Borgdonav and sculpture with Haffner and Monahan. A resident of Manhattan, New York, through the 1930s, by the latter part of the decade she had moved to Los Angeles, California; she remained a California resident until her death.

A study of Viola's paintings shows that she was a palette knife painter. Her ability to create realistic compositions by applying oil paint to a canvas, or board, by the use of a flexible painter's palette knife rather than a brush is found in most of her work; it is a difficult technique and one not widely practiced. Palette knives vary in length and width, and each one has a different tip, enabling the artist to achieve a different type of stroke, with the oil painting usually being applied very thickly on the canvas or board. During her career Viola had a commercial art studio in Malibu for many years where she did illustration and advertising art. In California, she exhibited with the California Art Club, 1955-1967.

This was all I could find out about her, and I'm happy to share it on the internet, and hopefully bring a little more attention to an artist who clearly had a control over the palette knife that few have ever achieved.

Of course I had to see if I could find one of her works at a reasonable price, and ebay came to my aid once again. I was able to find this beautiful small landscape listed for a song and now it hangs over my desk next to Sam Hyde Harris and Quincy Tahoma.

I don't think I've ever seen another artist wield a palette knife as fluently as she did, so I'll be on the lookout for more of her work. I hope that the internet can help preserve the legacy of a great artist who clearly deserves a re-evaluation.

I recently attended the exhibit Sam Hyde Harris: Seeing the Unusual at Casa Romantica in San Clemente, California. The exhibit was curated by Maurine St. Gaudens and Joseph Marsman and brought together around 60 pieces by Sam Hyde Harris in just two rooms on the lovely Casa Romantica estate.

Sam Hyde Harris is mostly remembered by collectors today as an active member of the California Art Club who produced hundreds of beautiful landscapes of California in the early 20th century and taught numerous students who went on to great careers. He was also a member of a group called the California Impressionists.

The focus of this exhibit was introducing a modern audience to the massive volume of commercial work he produced. This includes numerous posters for companies such as Union Pacific and the Santa Fe Railroad, as well as advertising pieces for local businesses and theater companies.

Here's the Curator's Statement from Maurine St. Gaudens.

Sam Hyde Harris, Seeing the Unusual explores the diverse oeuvre of this noted twentieth century California artist. Although widely known for the fine art compositions, few people realize the extent of Harris' commercial advertising work. Harris' designs shaped the consciousness of early to mid-twentieth century consumers and travelers. I really was quite surprised that so little attention had been paid to Harris the commercial artist. This exhibition explores this complex aspect of the artist's career.

My personal association with Sam Hyde Harris actually began more than thirty years ago when I was contacted by Harris' widow, Marion Dodge Harris, to catalogue the artist's estate. In the process I discovered examples of work the artist had created for a who's who of clients, not only in California, but across the western United States and nationally. It's the commercial work that today represents an historical record of product lines and services that were a part of everyday life from the 1920s - 1950s.

On a national level, Harris had a long and highly creative relationship with the railroad industry, specifically the Santa Fe, Southern Pacific, and Union Pacific rail lines. His iconic Art Deco themed Southern Pacific's New Daylight poster has become one of the most recognizable images of this art form and one that has become highly praised by railroad and design enthusiasts alike.

Unfortunately, over the years, as is common with many commercial artists, their work has gone unaccredited, and Harris is no exception. Although, with new research and recent descoveries, this oversight is now being corrected, and Harris' commercial designs are being recognized by a new generation of historians.

Harris' commercial work wasn't the only thing in the exhibition, though. There were plenty of paintings of the subjects for which he was most famous, including boats in harbor, and the Chavez Ravine before it was developed.

I spent an hour poring over every piece in the exhibit. Many of the pieces came from the collection of Charles N. Mauch, including several massive paintings that became his most famous posters. I particularly enjoyed seeing the different stages of the Taxco Mission poster produced for Southern Pacific. Through a sketch, a painting, and a print of the final poster, visitors could see the complete evolution of one of his commercial pieces.

I only recently became a fan and collector of work by Sam Hyde Harris, and I was glad to have the opportunity to see so much of his work in one place. I was also glad that this less well-known California artist was being brought to new audiences in the 21st century.

Sam Hyde Harris: Seeing the Unusual ran from November 19, 2021 through February 27, 2022.

A few months back I saw an absolutely gorgeous painting come up for auction. The listing said it was by one of my favorite artists, Sam Hyde Harris. Unfortunately, the painting was unsigned, and it was listed at a pretty low price. Both of these things gave me pause while considering bidding on it. We all know how common fraud is in the art world. How could I be sure that this piece was genuine?

You can never be 100% sure that a piece is genuine. This is doubly true in an online auction where you can only see a handful of pictures of a piece. There were several aspects of this piece that made me think twice.

1. It was unsigned
2. It was a slightly unusual composition for the artist
3. It was listed at a lower starting price than most pieces by Sam Hyde Harris

I took a risk on the piece anyway, and I managed to pick it up for a very reasonable price.

But that was only the beginning of the journey. Once I got the piece in my hands, I tracked down the Sam Hyde Harris expert Maurine St. Gaudens. Maurine literally wrote the book on Sam Hyde Harris, and she had the documentation from his estate to be able to conclusively prove whether a piece was by him or not.

Harris was a member of a group called the California Impressionists, so I wasn't surprised to find that Maurine was located in California. After speaking with her, I agreed to bring the painting down to her studio in Los Angeles, where she could authenticate it.

Maurine is an exceptionally interesting person. She is a tiny woman around age 70 with long brown hair down her back. She is an art conservationist, so her studio is absolutely overflowing with art. Her own collection hangs in every available spot on her walls, and the standing room is filled with paintings that she is working on.

Her collection includes dozens of paintings by California artists of the 20th century, and especially female artists about whom she also wrote the book.

When I arrived at her studio there was a very tall man wandering around as well. He turned out to be the noted Sam Hyde Harris collector Charles N. Mauch. When I handed the painting over to Maurine for authentication, Charles took me back to a garage and started showing me more paintings by Sam Hyde Harris. It turned out that they still had some paintings left over from his estate, and I was welcome to look through them and maybe even purchase a few (more on that in a future post).

Here's one of the beautiful pieces that Charles showed me.

When Chuck and I were done browsing the wonderful paintings in Maurine's garage I finally made my way back to her studio to hear the verdict.

Maurine was happy to tell me that the painting was a genuine Sam Hyde Harris. She was able to verify this in two ways. First, she found the painting in the inventory made by the estate when Harris died. Second, she had actually seen other versions of this painting. It turns out that Harris made multiple sizes of most of his paintings. He first made a sketch, then a very small study, then a 12x16 version, and finally a larger version. She had seen the larger version of my painting in the past, so she knew that mine was indeed legitimate.

She was also able to tell me, based on the inventory number, that the painting was created some time in the 1930s. So it's a relatively early easel painting for Harris, because at that time he was more focused on his career as an illustrator.

She authenticated the work by painting her mark on the front and signing the back. I drove it back to San Jose, where it now sits above my desk. I think it's one of my favorite pieces in my collection right now, along with the big Quincy Tahoma painting that I had restored.

Buying a painting like this at auction is always a bit of a risk, but in this case the risk paid off in spades. Not only did I get to hang a beautiful piece of California history on my wall, but I also got to meet some amazing people. It goes to show how a great piece of art can inspire and unite people even many years after its inception.

There is very little information available online about the California artist Margo Alexander, and that is a shame. I was recently fortunate enough to pick up a small and interesting piece by her and I wanted to make sure to share what I knew about her online. I don't know the title of the piece, but it's one from a series she called Sophisticated Provincials, and they are still widely available at reasonable prices on ebay.

Margo Alexander was a muralist and printer who ran a large art studio in California in the first half of the 20th century. Here's what it says about her in Emerging from the Shadows.

In Los Angeles, she established her reputation as a muralist, creating custom murals for private homes and public buildings. As in her oil and watercolor paintings, her mural subjects included figurative, landscapes, still lifes, and genre scenes. She also designed fabric, china, and table linens. By the early 1940s, she employed six full-time artists at her Los Angeles studio to assist with mural commissions and with her more commercial production of serigraphs, which she called "Sophisticated Provincials," which were created using a hand reproduction technique she developed that attempts to retain the spontaneity of an original painting. These were simply signed "Margo."

What I think is interesting about Alexander is that she was commercializing screen prints in a way very similar to what Andy Warhol claimed credit for decades later. She was pumping out these small, semi-handcrafted works that were designed for the mass market. It's true that these small, quaint scenes haven't withstood the passage of time as well as Warhol's, but I still think she needs to be put in the same context as Warhol.

Here's the piece I picked up for $8 on ebay. It's only about three inches square.

Here's what it says on the back, if you're having a hard time reading the small print.

Widely recognized for the dash and color of her original paintings and murals, this popular western artist strove to develop a hand-reproduced technique retaining all the piquant spontaneity of her prized originals.

THIS, with the support of her associates, Ann Bode and a talented staff, in the seclusion of her tree-covered old-world studio, she has achieved and proudly presents herewith her original hand-replica of...

I can't read what was originally in the box at the bottom, so I can only speculate at the title.

I hope that by putting this online I can preserve some memory of an artist who was successful enough to run her own store in Los Angeles for decades.