Santa Barbara and the adjacent township of Montecito are part of the American dream, a touch of heaven beside the Pacific Ocean with a backdrop of the Sierra's snow-capped peaks: a mecca for lotus-eaters and a haven for well-heeled dropouts. When I last visited, the local glossy magazine was largely devoted to an article on 'Haute Hippie Fashions'. This is altogether an unlikely venue for one of America's more distinguished museum collections of 20th-century British art, including works by Wyndham Lewis, Walter Sickert, Gaudier-Brzeska, C.R.W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Leon Kossoff and Bridget Riley.
How did this Pacific-coast Nirvana come to have such a collection? The answer lies in essence with five people: a museum director, a curator and three benefactors, respectively Ala Storey, Robert Henning, Wright Ludington and Will and Mary Richeson, although others have also contributed.
While many residents succumbed to the hedonistic life, some, such as Wright Ludington (1900-92), were prepared to work towards making Santa Barbara a centre of European culture. The Ludingtons, a family with roots going back to the Mayflower, were unusual among west coast pioneers. Wright's father, an investment banker from Maine, had connections with the Curtis Publishing Company of Philadelphia. During the early years of the 20th century, when most well-to-do east coasters went south for the winter to Florida, the Ludingtons began spending their winters in Santa Barbara; Wright even went to school there, before going to Yale and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. On his father's death in 1927 he inherited a substantial Italianate home and a 10-acre estate at Montecito, while his brothers received the east-coast properties. Although, over the years, this estate was succeeded by other less grand houses, built to his own requirements (including one decorated by Oliver Messel), Santa Barbara was to be his home for the rest of his long life. Europe had played an important role in Wright's education as, thanks to his father's business commitments, the family had always travelled extensively, and with the small inheritance that he received from his mother in 1922 he purchased Picasso's Woman with a Turban, a Braque Nude and a Detain. He also bought classical sculpture, including a 2nd-century Hermes from Hadrian's Villa and a figure of Aphrodite from the island of Samos, both of which were in the Lansdowne House sale and now adorn the museum's classical court.
The Santa Barbara Museum of Art opened in 1940 under the directorship of Donald Jeffries Bear, and during the dozen years of his tenure Ludington gave many works of art, British and French, including James Pryde's The Deserted Gallery, Paul Nash's Nocturnal Flowers and Flight of the Magnolia and Wyndham Lewis's Portrait of Ezra Pound. Apart from pre-war visits to Britain, it appears that Ludington was stationed in London towards the end of World War II, with time to haunt the Bond and Cork Street galleries; many of the works that he gave to the museum in 1947, notably watercolours, date from the mid 1940s.
It is probable that Ludington had met Ala Storey (1907-72), who succeeded Donald Bear as director of the museum in 1952, on one of his earlier visits to London, and it may be thanks to their friendship that Storey and her partner, Margaret Mallory, settled in Santa Barbara. Ala Storey (nee Emilie Anna Maria Heyszl von Heyszenau) had trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but claimed that the impact of the Van Gogh exhibition at the 1928 Vienna Secession shattered her dreams of becoming a painter. Instead she moved to London to study English and got a job at the Beaux Arts Gallery, where she organised the first London exhibition of the Wiener Werkstatte; later, in a whirl of gallery connections, she worked as secretary to the Redfern Gallery, became manager of the Wertheim Gallery and, at the age of 25, was made a partner in the Storran Gallery. She later became a director of the Redfern and then, in 1938, revived the Stafford Gallery, which, with the approach of war, she turned into the British Art Centre, a non-profit membership organisation supported by such figures as Hugh Walpole, Augustus John, J.B. Priestley, H.G. Wells and Kenneth Clark.
By 1940 Storey was in Washington, PC, where she organised a large British art exhibition at the Phillips Collection, before moving to New York and establishing the American British Art Centre. Here she not only exhibited work by those British artists who form the core of the Santa Barbara collection--Moore, Piper, Nicholson, Sutherland and Nash--but also avant-garde American artists such as Motherwell, Kline and Rothko. Surprisingly, apart from Christopher Wood's Breton Harbour and Nevinson's early Self-Portrait, few British works were acquired by the museum during her five-year tenure. However, her retirement was marked by a substantial aft that included Gaudier-Brzeska's Seated Female Nude of 1912-13, a 1950 Henry Moore watercolour, Studies for Sculpture, and Gilbert Spencer's Grasmere under Snow, as well as prints by Paul Nash, Stanley William Hayter, Rodrigo Moynihan and William Scott, among others.
Given this strong foundation, the museum was again lucky in the 1980s to have a curator of paintings, Robert Henning, and two benefactors, Will and Mary Richeson, who had a serious interest in British 20th-century art and were prepared to build the collection through gift and purchase. Several of the works given by the Richesons--Mary now lives in Los Angeles--were acquired through the Fine Art Society, London, while others were purchased from Roland, Browse & Delbanco. Will Richeson, a merchant banker and a graduate of the California Institute of Technology, had an enormous zest for life which he shared with his wife, and through their generosity, and with Henning's encouragement, the collection was further enriched with works by Wilson Steer, including a Whistlerian canvas, Yachts Lying off Cowes: Evening, of 1892; two Dieppe Sickerts and La Carolina Wearing a Scottish Shawl; a mid-1880s Brangwyn, Timber-Brig, Sandwich; six paintings by Adrian Allinson; two Ethel Walkers; a still-life of dahlias by Roderic O'Connor; and an early Ethelbert White.
I would like to thank Bruce Robertson and Heather Thorpe for their unstinting help during my visit to Santa Barbara, and to Leon Kossoff for permission to reproduce 'Dalston Junction with Ridley Road Street Market'.
For information on visiting the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, telephone + 1 805 9634364 or visit www.sbma.net Peyton Skipwith's latest book, written with Brian Webb, Design: Harold Curwen and Oliver Simon is published this month by the Antique Collectors' Club.
Self-Portrait by C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946), 1915. Oil on canvas, 61 x 45.7 cm. Gift of Mrs Sam Lewisohn, 1953
In 1908 Nevinson joined the Slade, where he was part of the gilded generation that included Adrian Allinson, David Bomherg, Stanley Spencer and Mark Gertler, among others. Cocky and self-opinionated, he did not get on with Professor Tonks, and left to continue his studies in Paris. On his return to London he teamed up with Wyndham Lewis and the Italian painter Marinetti, with whom be published the English Futurist Manifesto. In 1913 one of his paintings was chosen as the poster for the Post-Impressionist and Futurist exhibition at the Dore Galleries. The outbreak of hostilities in 1914 gave him his greatest opportunity, as Futurism lauded the machine and hailed war as a purgative. Although his experiences as an ambulance orderly were to disillusion him, he painted and etched some of the most enduring images of World War i. This self-portrait shows him at just that moment; arrogance tinged with self-doubt.
Weariness by Ethelbert White (1891-1972), c. 1918. Oil on canvas, 61 x 50.8 cm. Gift of Will and Mary Richeson, 1997
Ethelbert White and his wife, Betty, were two of the last true bohemians. They roamed the English countryside in a horse-drawn gypsy caravan and until their deaths in the 1970s their cottage in Hampstead had only the most basic amenities. As well as being a painter and printmaker, White was a fine musician: he played the guitar, accompanied by Betty on the castanets. They had an extensive repertoire of folk-songs and sea-shanties and were much in demand at artists' parties. In about 1913 White and Nevinson combined to paint a large Futurist canvas, Tum-Tiddlyum-Tumtum-Tom-Tom, depicting Hampstead Heath on Fair Day, now only known from press photographs, as Nevinson destroyed it some years later. Although essentially a painter of the English pastoral landscape, White spent a considerable amount of time in France, Spain and Cyprus. Weariness, a secular pieta, reflects both his Roman Catholic faith as well as his innate sympathy for the grinding poverty of peasants and fieldworkers, whose lives he and Betty shared on their travels.
Topaze by Ben Nicholson (1894-1982), 1951. Oil and pencil on canvas, 96.5 x 124.5 cm. Bequest of Suzette Morton Davidson, 2002
Nicholson said that 'the kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but is both musical and architectural.' Topaze, which suggests his early admiration for the Cubist still-lifes of Picasso and Braque, has the qualities of space and architecture. Its simplification and layering of forms recall the way his earlier, abstract white reliefs play with the visual ambiguities of two- or three-dimensional space.
Untitled by Eileen Agar (1904-91), 1938. Watercolour and collage on pressed board, 33.1 x 25.1 cm. Museum purchase, 1987
Born in Argentina of Scottish-American parents, Eileen Agar had a privileged childhood against which she was later to rebel. Recalling a youthful visit to the studio of the painter Charles Sims, she remembered being struck with wonder at what could be achieved by the simple act of making marks with a stick of bristles on a blank canvas. This was her initiation into the mystery of painting. Later, in 1936, Roland Penrose and Herbert Read selected three paintings and five objects by her for inclusion in the International Surrealist Exhibition. In her autobiography, A Look at My Life, published in 1988, she recorded: 'Abstract art and Surrealism were the two movements that interested me most ... we all walk on two legs, and for me, one is abstract, the other is surreal--it is point and counterpoint. Surrealism, for me, draws its inspiration from nature.'
Flight of the Magnolia by Paul Nash (1889-1946), 1944. Pencil, pen and ink, charcoal and watercolour on paper, 28 x 38.1 cm. Gift of Wright Ludington, 1947
In 1940 Nash was attached to the Air Ministry as an official war artist but because of his acute asthma, a legacy from his time in the trenches during World War I, he was not permitted to fly. Despite lack of first-hand experience, he allowed his imagination to take wing, with surprising results. Over the next two years he produced not only such masterpieces as Battle of Britain and Battle of Germany (both Imperial War Museum, London) but also a series of watercolours of anthropomorphic bombers--'aerial creatures' as he called them. This stimulated a further series of dream-related images and he wrote to a friend saying he was 'doing some strange new pictures. Giant flowers blooming among the clouds or sailing down the night skies like falling stars.' Flight of the Magnolia is one of the most exuberant examples from this group.
Ruth by Adrian Allinson (1890-1959), c. 1912. Oil on panel, 31.7 x 23.8 cm. Gift of Will and Mary Richeson, 1997
Of Anglo-Polish parentage, Allinson had an exotic streak that led him to spread his talents widely as a caricaturist, stage designer, stone carver, potter and musician; he also skied for England. Entering the Slade after a brief spell studying medicine at Middlesex Hospital, Allinson immediately teamed up with Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Edward Wadsworth and David Sassoon. His early portrait studies, such as Ruth, with their hard-edged quattrocento realism, have a strong affinity with Gerder's work of the period. This is the earliest of the six paintings by Allinson at Santa Barbara and the only one that shows his affinity with the 'neo-primitives', as they were dubbed.
Nude Before a Stove by Eric Gill (1882-1940), 1928. Pencil on paper, 22.8 x 30.5 cm. Museum purchase, 1982
A sculptor, letter-cutter, printmaker, draughtsman, architect, typeface-designer and polemicist, Eric Gill was divided between his commitment to Roman Catholicism and his obsession with both the richness and variety of sex. As a draughtsman he developed a fine, clear and incisive line, using the minimum of shading--a technique not dissimilar to that employed in his wood-engravings, but to the opposite effect. His drawings are dark pencil line on white paper, while the engravings are white outline against black. Nude Before a Stove is unusual in that Gill has defined a complete context for the nude rather than just making a figure study.
Three Figures in a Setting by Henry Moore (1898-1986), 1942. Pen and ink and waxed crayon on grey paper, 45.7 x 43.2 cm. Gift of Wright Ludington, 1945
As the war was not conducive to producing sculpture, Moore turned his formidable creative energy to drawing, a genre he interpreted in its widest form. As well as pencil and pen and ink, monochrome washes and watercolour, he employed a range of wax crayons, which are resistant to water-based media, thus giving a rich textural quality to his work. 1942 was a particularly productive year; he produced over 100 studies of working coal miners, together with many ideas for sculpture, particularly of reclining figures, as well as a series of large-format studies such as this, in which he depicted groups of figures in stark, Kafkaesque interiors, which are redolent of prison cells or Gordon Craig's most avant-garde stage sets.
Flight by John Tunnard (1900-71), 1944. Pencil, pastel, gouache and pen and ink on paper, 38.1 x 55.9 cm. Gift of Wright Ludington, 1947
Tunnard studied design at the Royal College of Art, before working for a few years in the textile trade. From 1928 he concentrated on painting, and had his first exhibition of landscapes and seascapes at the Redfem Gallery in 1932. The following year he moved to Cornwall, where, gradually, his work became less overfly representational. This was partly stimulated by his admiration for Paul Klee, combined with his knowledge of textiles, but owed most to the wide horizons of his new environment. For the next 40 years, although his work was basically non-figurative, a sense of space and aerial movement was ever-present.
Brittany Harbour by Christopher Wood (1901-30), c. 1929. Oil on canvas, 45.7 x 61 cm. Girl of James H. Whyte, 1953
Wood had little formal art training, although he studied briefly in Paris at the Academic Julian and the Atelier de la Grand Chaumiere. His life was short, and in many ways charmed, before he ended it by jumping under a railway train. A series of rich lovers gave him entree to the gilded, high bohemian social life of London and Paris as well as, unfortunately, ready access to cocaine. His friendship with Ben and Winifred Nicholson, and membership of the Seven and Five Society, placed him in the forefront of the English avantgarde. It was in their company, while staying in St Ives, that he came across the Cornish primitive artist Alfred Wallis. Wallis's naive style strongly influenced Wood's final series of 46 paintings--including, most likely, the canvas shown above--produced in six weeks at Douarnenez and Treboul in Brittany for an exhibition at the Burlington Gallery.
Orchard at Trottiscliffe by Graham Sutherland (1903-80), 1943. Pen and ink, pencil and gouache on paper, 20 x 15.5 cm. Gift of the Bucholz Gallery, 1948
Sutherland studied etching at Goldsmiths' College of Art under Malcolm Osborne and Stanley Anderson. There he discovered the work of Samuel Palmer and later met F.L. Griggs, who stimulated his preoccupation with contrasts of dark and light. With the collapse of the etching market in 1929, Sutherland turned to commercial work and to painting. A visit to Pembrokeshire in the spring of 1934 was a revelation, and its ancient landscape became his equivalent of Palmer's Shoreham. Light and dark were no longer just tonal juxtapositions, as they had been in his etchings, but evolved into the life-giving contrasts of fertility and decay. In 1937 he and his wife moved to Trotriscliffe in Kent, where the old apple trees in their orchard provided a further harvest for his imagination, juxtaposing not only life and death, but also organic forms with human figures.
Portrait of Ezra Pound by Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), c. 1919. Charcoal and black grease pencil on paper, 27.9 x 22.8 cm. Gift of Wright Ludington, 1941
Lewis's friendship with Pound endured for over 40 years, although it was at its closest during the Vorticist period. From about 1920, with Pound's removal to Italy, their contact was almost entirely epistolary. Out of the many portrait studies that Lewis made of 'that lonely old volcano of the Right', this one, showing him at ease, quizzically looking over his shoulder, is among the most sympathetic.
Double Nude by William Coldstream (1908-87), 1979. Oil on canvas, 137.2 x 106.7 cm. Museum purchase, 1982
After a brief flirtation with 'objective abstraction' in the 1930s, Coldstream became one of the most painstaking 20th-century realist painters in Britain. He was obsessed with spatial relationships, visual accuracy and precise measurements. Double Nude is an unusually ambitious work and, given that arranging sittings over the prolonged period that he required was not easy, he seldom attempted compositions with more than one figure. As a long-serving Slade Professor (1949-75) he had a profound influence on a younger generation of artists, notably Euan Uglow, Michael Andrews and Patrick George.
Dalston Junction with Ridley Road Street Market by Leon Kossoff (b. 1926), 1972. Gouache on paper, 76.5 x 109.5 cm. Gift of Margaret Mallory, 1991
Born of Russian Jewish parents in London's East End, Kossoff has an extraordinary affinity with the crowded, run-down, but vital parts of the capital: they inspire a sensation that he describes as 'the shuddering feel of the sprawling city.' He likes to work from myriad notational sketches made on the spot that, by various methods--spontaneous or gestatory--evolve in the studio into his great, highly wrought canvases. The use of gouache is one of many intermediary stages in this process, allowing him to immerse himself in the very fabric of his motif.