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Exhibit looks at work from the Mathewses, who pioneered style
By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art and architecture critic
Published on Sunday, Jun 22, 2008
The dream of life informed, surrounded and furnished by art effectively ended with the Great Depression. Suddenly, there were more pressing concerns than the ideals of eternal truth and beauty.
That doesn't mean the ideals were forgotten — merely set aside until a more prosperous time.
Unfortunately, when prosperity did return after World War II, it was with an entirely new set of aesthetics and prejudices under its belt, and the Arts and Crafts movement, with its emphasis on the artisanal spirit of medievalism, and of art nouveau, with its love of the art of Japan, had retreated from the aesthetic landscape.
Through Sept. 7, however, a fascinating glimpse at those ideals is on view at the Akron Art Museum in California as Muse: The Art of Arthur & Lucia Mathews.
Arthur and Lucia Mathews were the creators of what has become known as the California Decorative Style, a unique fusion of artistic European influences at the turn of the 20th century and into the 1920s (including art nouveau, the international Arts and Crafts movement, Puvis de Chavannes, and the painter/printer/tastemaker, James Abbott McNeill Whistler) all placed in a California setting.
Arthur Mathews (1860-1945) was born in Wisconsin, but moved with his family to San Francisco when he was a teenager. Lucia Mathews (1870-1955) was a native San Franciscan. They met in 1893 at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in San Francisco, where Arthur served as director and teacher and Lucia was one of his students. They married in 1894.
They dreamed of transforming their hometown of San Francisco into a new Utopia combining the luminosity of the California landscape, the harmony of classical art, the grace of art nouveau and the populist ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement.
The 1906 earthquake in San Francisco was a disaster for most, but the Mathewses saw past the immediate views of destruction to the possibility of rebuilding the city by incorporating these aesthetic standards in the design and production of practical necessities.
Gathering artisans, architects, developers and city planners, the Mathewses reimagined San Francisco, and with a local entrepreneur they established Furniture Shop, a business enterprise that combined art with commerce by creating beautifully designed and decorated products for commercial and residential interiors.
With their help, Californians at the turn of the 20th century celebrated a classical revival in art and cultural pursuits that compared their state to the Arcadian models of ancient Greece and Rome, their Pacific coast climate with the temperate Mediterranean and the pastoral ideals of a life of peace and harmony with the San Francisco Bay Area, its rolling hills and lush landscapes.
When he was in California in the 1970s, Akron Art Museum Director Mitchell Kahan came upon the Mathewses' work and said he ''could not understand why such extraordinary artists were virtually unknown east of the Mississippi.''
Kahan said he's wanted a place to show their work for 30 years, ''and finally the opportunity has come to showcase these gorgeous pieces.''
The exhibit, organized by the Oakland Museum of California, contains 67 works by the Mathewses, including elaborately carved frames, furniture and decorative pieces produced by the Furniture Shop as well as luscious paintings and drawings made in their private studios.
''Because most of their work is from the Oakland Museum, they have been neglected by the East Coast establishment,'' said Barbara Tannenbaum, AAM director of curatorial affairs. ''Their work hasn't traveled east of the Mississippi. . . . Now, it's been rediscovered, with the show and the catalog, which is the first major study of their work.
''They were major figures in the cultural scene in San Francisco. He was a major muralist and a major theoretician. They may have been the first husband-wife team in this country to work together on an artistic endeavor.''
The show contains two beautifully decorated Drop Leaf Writing Desks, several lamps, lidded jars, painted chests, chairs, boxes, clocks, candlesticks, a gorgeous Four-paneled Screen and a knock-your-socks-off Octagonal Dining Table that is so pristine and gorgeous it's hard to imagine either covering it with a tablecloth or putting a dish or glass upon it.
This is all in addition to the mouth-watering paintings framed in the Mathewses' hand-carved and painted frames.
Arthur Mathews, with his prodigious talent and thorough artistic training, was a true renaissance man of the arts and utterly dominated this transitional artistic milieu.
Using the high art of the classical period to form the foundation for his refined and modernist approach, he fused the tonal harmonies of art nouveau with the classical garb favored by the likes of Isadora Duncan, the flatness of the picture plane with the distinctive painted vistas of the Monterey Peninsula, and the Asian influences of San Francisco filtered through both art nouveau and Whistler.
Arthur's allegorical figurative compositions were always set before a typical California environment, in a landscape suffused by golden grasslands and tastefully punctuated with the familiar live oak, cypress or pine trees of the Monterey Peninsula, with perhaps an occasional glimpse of the blue Pacific beyond.
Lucia specialized in superb watercolor treatments of the Monterey landscape, as well as delicate botanical studies of such California favorites as magnolias, chrysanthemums and poppies, as well as smaller, more intimate portraits of children and babies.
After looking at the many paintings and murals painted by Arthur Mathews in a book that accompanies the exhibit, The Art of Arthur and Lucia Mathews (2006), one can't help but wonder if his aesthetic may have had a bit of influence on the garb favored during the Haight-Ashbury hippie era. Those flowing gowns, the long-haired satyr playing his pan pipes in a California meadow, the whole Scarborough Fair-ness of it all seems to find a recognizable echo in the 1960s lifestyle.
Visitors to this show will be astounded by the sumptuous beauty of the Mathewses' work.
After the earthquake, Arthur resigned his position as director of the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art and entered into a partnership with John Zeile to form Furniture Shop. Arthur designed its Craftsman-style building that also served as the first professional artist's studio built after the disaster.
Furniture Shop employed as many as 50 carpenters and cabinet-makers between 1906 and 1920. Arthur was the chief designer of many of its distinctive hand-crafted furnishings, and Lucia designed and executed much of the decoration while she also supervised the woodcarvers.
Their custom-designed picture frames are carved and painted, many of them custom-made for specific paintings.
They also began Philopolis Press, a printing and binding service for books by independent authors writing on a variety of subjects.
Associated with these two enterprises was Philopolis, a monthly magazine devoted to good civic design and architecture, to which Arthur contributed many articles, as well as serving as graphic designer and illustrator.
His paintings are found mostly at the Oakland Museum of Art, but his murals are in many important buildings, such as the Mechanics' Institute in San Francisco and the State Capitol in Sacramento.
Needless to say, Arthur Mathews strode the San Francisco art scene like a colossus, spreading his influence far and wide, and Lucia strode right along with him.
''He actually used to say she was a better painter than he was,'' Tannenbaum recalled. ''He was not without ego, so it was a serious admission.''
Dorothy Shinn writes about art and architecture for the Akron Beacon Journal. Send information to her at the Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640 or dtgshinn@neo.rr.com.
The dream of life informed, surrounded and furnished by art effectively ended with the Great Depression. Suddenly, there were more pressing concerns than the ideals of eternal truth and beauty.
Get the full article here.
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