Highways and high art converge

Alicia Robinson

A new exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art may be made up of

paintings, but it serves as a series of snapshots of Southern

California’s architecture and car culture from the 1930s to the

present.

“Cities of Promise: Imaging Urban California” opened Friday at the

museum in Newport Beach. The exhibit was a partnership between the

museum and the Automobile Club of Southern California, which provided

several paintings from its archives.

Museum curator Sarah Vure selected the paintings for the exhibit.

She focused on portrayals of the urban environment showing

architecture and transportation.

One painting depicts the beginning stages of freeway construction,

and another shows an artistic version of a familiar Southern

California roadway sight -- a long line of taillights stretching

toward buildings silhouetted against a darkened sky.

“I had this idea that the built environment, as it’s called in

academia, really gives us a good sense of American aspirations and

ideals and opportunities,” Vure said.

Some of the works are by painters now well-known on the California

art scene, such as Wayne Thiebaud and Peter Alexander.

Six of the paintings in the exhibit are watercolors from the Auto

Club archives that were created as covers for the club’s Westways

magazine.

Since it was first published in 1909, Westways has focused on

places to go in the car, club historian Matthew Roth said.

The paintings displayed at the art museum represent a period of

California impressionism in the 1930s and ‘40s, when artists started

to look at the city around them.

“The reason that they fit into this show is they kind of depict a

landscape that is being formed and transformed before our eyes,” Roth

said.

The Auto Club paintings include one of a San Francisco cable car,

another of boats at Fisherman’s Wharf and a third of the Golden Gate

Bridge.

“I’m very pleased with how the exhibit came together,” Vure said.

“I think there are a lot more paintings of this subject than I could

have possibly included, and this was a very small, focused exhibition

that I hope people will relate to because it has a lot of images of

our community.”

The exhibit will be at the Orange County Museum of Art, at 850 San

Clemente Drive, through April 25.