From a one-room gallery

It’s been 90 years since the Laguna Beach Art Assn. opened its first art gallery in a former one-room town hall on an oceanfront dirt road that wouldn’t become Coast Highway for another 10 to 12 years.

That gallery would one day become the Laguna Art Museum (at another location), and museum board members were treated to a historic slide show and appearances by descendants of early families on Tuesday during the museum’s annual membership meeting.

Janet Blake, curator of collections at the museum, discussed in detail the history of the association and the museum, which was founded by a group of early American Impressionists who focused on California landscape painting and became known collectively as “plein air” painters for their practice of painting outdoors.

Many of the painters who gathered in tiny Laguna Beach in the summers were successful artists, and the association boasted that 50% of its artist membership lived in Los Angeles. Many locals were also members of the art association, which included all the arts — music and performance, Blake said.

That first board-and-batten building was modified for gallery use by removing the windows and putting them on the roof to create skylights — an innovation that would become the hallmark of the museum that would follow in those early footsteps. The renovations cost the association $300.

The one-room gallery — which had a piano in the middle that famed plein air painter Frank Cuprien was fond of playing — was the center of the town’s activities, and stories abound about how the townsfolk made sure it stayed open every day, even bringing their own lanterns and heaters on cold, rainy nights in case someone showed up to look at paintings, Blake said.

“The gallery was the cultural center of the community, with open houses held every Saturday night,” she said. Member artists were permitted to show and sell in the gallery, but their work had to be approved by a “jury” to assure it was of the highest quality.

The gallery flourished and was soon followed by private art galleries and stores that sold art supplies, as the artists’ colony grew.

Laguna Beach, Blake said, had early on been seen as primarily an artists’ community, with the Chamber of Commerce — which predates the founding of the city — deciding that no Ferris wheel or other roadside attraction would be built in Laguna, as was common in other coastal towns. Instead, the artists would be an attraction in themselves, in addition to Laguna’s beautiful beaches.

In 1929, the association opened a specially designed, expanded museum at the site of the current museum at Cliff Drive and North Coast Highway, having bought the land from early landowner H.G. Heisler for $4,000 — which went down to $2,000 after Heisler “donated” the remainder back to the group.

That museum has been expanded over the years, but the main gallery of the current museum — with its wall-to-wall skylighted ceiling — is the same one that was built in 1929 by the association, Blake said. The basement — sometimes called the “first floor” — was also part of the original museum.

One thing the original museum had that is sorely missed today is a large parking lot, Blake noted.

Special guests also were asked for their stories from the old days.

Barbara Bing, 89, granddaughter of one of the early artists, William Swift Daniel, said her grandmother had originated the museum’s permanent collection by writing to all the original artists in the association asking for works for the collection.

James Irvine Swinden, of the ranching Irvine family which owned much of the area at the time, said his family “was great friends” with Cuprien and supported the arts from the early days on.

Swinden now directs the Irvine Museum, which is assisting Laguna Art Museum in its upcoming exhibition on William Wendt, another early and seminal Laguna Beach plein air artist.

As part of the 90th anniversary, Museum Executive Director Bolton Colburn presented commemorative plaques to Bing and Swinden, as well as to members of the Festival of Arts board and Laguna Playhouse.

CINDY FRAZIER is city editor of the Coastline Pilot. She can be contacted at (949) 494-2087 or cindy.frazier@latimes.com.