‘Sceneographer’ Draws Keith Into the Spotlight

These days California nature lovers sometimes trek to the wild only to find a panorama of RVs. Back at the turn of the century, when William Keith painted our magnificent mountains, the land was virginal. Now his work is on view in a revelatory traveling exhibition titled “William Keith: Sceneographer of the Sierra Nevada,” at Loyola Marymount’s Laband Art Gallery.

Keith was a Scottish-born, pioneering Golden State landscape painter of unquestionable historical and aesthetic importance. He moved to San Francisco in 1859, where he evolved from a wood engraver to a painter. Traveling to art centers in Germany, France and on the East Coast of the United States, he became an ever-more-sophisticated practitioner of his craft. He felt comfortable criticizing better-known contemporaries like Frederick Edwin Church as “mock heroic” and Albert Bierstadt as “theatrical and false.”

Back home he held the unofficial position of San Francisco’s leading landscape painter for three decades. He became fast friends with naturalist John Muir. After Keith’s wife died in 1882, the painter revived early leanings to spiritual solace by joining the Swedenborgian movement. Thus he formed an early link between California art and transcendental thought that continued through the Zen leanings of the Beat generation.

Despite all this, Keith became a forgotten man after his death in 1911. According to scholar Alfred C. Harrison Jr., who organized the show from the collection of Saint Mary’s College of California, no San Francisco museum had a work by Keith on view for at least a decade before this survey.

At first glance Keith’s art looks as if it may have earned its obscurity. “Pulgas Ranch Gate” of 1869 is marked by feathery brushwork and sweet, doll-like figures. It looks like an effort by a provincial amateur who thinks he can achieve the look of accuracy as the sum total of myriad mistakes.

Ten years later it’s clear Keith recognized his shortfalls and fixed them. In “Kings River Canyon” he even corrected the qualities he disliked in Church and Bierstadt. A 6-by-10-foot panorama very much in the heroic accents of Manifest Destiny painting, the work does an impressive job of combining the magisterial awesomeness of towering peaks with the pastoral calm of an American Indian camp in the valley.

It’s a grand demonstration by an artist now clearly in command of his means. It’s also a trifle too much of a self-conscious show-stopper, a quaint period piece.

More persuasive of Keith’s new maturity is ample evidence he learned a lesson fundamental to painting, traditional or modern--Keith had clearly figured out that at the same time he was depicting a scene he was also making a painting.

A small work, “Alaska, Inland Passage,” gives us the picture all right, but it does more. It captures the atmospheric iciness of the scene so well that, for a moment, you don’t need the air-conditioning in the gallery. The picture recalls some justly famous glaciers by Church, but to a contemporary viewer, modestly surpasses them. Church squeezed something metaphysical out of the facts; Keith painted the abstract spirit of the thing.

*

Keith might be seen as a kind of closet modernist sympathizer, although he probably would have resented that. His firmly traditional work was quietly absorbing the advanced temper of the time. In a restrained way, Keith joins those realists who make you think forward in time rather than back to the old masters. It’s something of a stretch to link Keith’s Alaska scene to, say, Mark Tobey. The hint of Cezanne or Edward Hopper detectable in “Mountain House, Strong Shadows” is equally subtle. Easier to see is Keith’s tilt to a Winslow Homer-like directness in “Beach Scene.”

Yet the artist’s attraction to structural modernity is joined by an expressionist twist that appears in his work after he became aligned with the Swedenborgians. Pictures like “Evening Glow,” from 1891, or “Burst of Light in the Sky” from 1905, are based in the older French Barbizon school, but they’re decidedly hotter. Both depict flocks of sheep in the afterglow of almost apocalyptic sunsets. It’s as if Keith were feeling the same millennial jitters that disturbed Alfred Pinkham Ryder or the French Symbolists, artists also inclined to occult metaphysical systems.

Any way you slice William Keith’s art, it should not remain in the shadows.

* Loyola Marymount University, Laband Art Gallery; through Oct. 5, closed Sunday through Tuesday, (310) 338-2880.