Mabel Alvarez


    In 1913, at the age of twenty-two, Mabel Alvarez (1891-1985) received recognition for mural designs that were termed “half realistic and half idealistic and wholly out of the ordinary.”¹  Here was, as perceptive critic Alma May Cook noted (Los Angeles Express, September 13, 1913), a “promising young artist” from whom the community could expect “something 'different' - tall and slim, she is of the pronounced brunette type with dreaming eyes, just the type of artist to enter into all myths and legends that are so dear to the mural painter.”

    Mabel Alvarez exceeded expectations.  For the next six decades, she remained a provocative and productive painter - more adventurous than the Impressionist-oriented instruction that  formed her and less radical than most emerging Modernist trends around her - but always sensitive, seductive, and searching.

    She was born on November 28, 1891, on the Island of Oahu, Hawaii, the youngest of five children (fig.1). Her father, Luis, was a Spanish-born physician; her mother, Clementine Setza, came from a prominent St. Paul, Minnesota, family. Luis and Clementine Alvarez relocated to Berkeley, California, in 1906, and then in 1909 to Los Angeles, where their daughter was a star pupil at the Los Angeles High School. Her art teacher there, James Edwin McBurney, was responsible for her early mural work: he had received a commission to create murals for the Panama-California Exposition to be held in San Diego in 1915, and engaged his former student to work for him. Alma May Cook wrote that “demure, little Miss Mabel Alvarez” had created a mural in which “every stroke spells the poetry of springtime in California.”² Indeed, Alvarez’s work at that time was marked by both an interest in Symbolism and Art Nouveau and in the high-key color and atmospheric effects derived from Impressionist painting, a style then highly influential in Southern California that she learned directly from her second important teacher, William Cahill (1878-1924).

    Cahill had moved to Los Angeles in 1914 with fellow- Bostonian John Hubbard Rich (1876-1954), and the pair founded the School for Illustration and Painting. Here, Alvarez again found herself in the role of outstanding student: a drawing of hers reproduced in the school’s 1916 brochure shows extraordinary skill in academic rendering (fig.2). The ability to draw well, to represent the illusion of three dimensions accurately, was prized by American artists and was retained even by those who, like Cahill and Rich, gradually adopted the surface techniques of French Impressionism, such as bright, outdoor color applied with loose, broken brushstrokes.³  American Impressionists rarely sought to dissolve form the way the French had done, and Alvarez’s youthful mix of careful rendering with an Impressionist-inspired palette is typical of plein-air methods practiced in California early in the century.

    This mix is clearly seen in Alvarez’s 1919 Portrait of Mrs. H. McGee Bernhart (fig.3), first shown at the Tenth Annual Exhibition of the California Art Club.⁴ The sitter’s features are definite and solid, while light and color flicker around and on her in a manner derived from Cahill’s well-known 1919 painting Thoughts of the Sea, featured in the same California Club show.⁵ Had Alvarez focused on the development of a personal style of California Impressionism, she might have become one of the movement’s premier practitioners. Los Angeles Times critic Antony Anderson wrote in his review of this show that “This young artist, always an earnest student, is advancing with much rapidity, doing better and more distinguished work from year to year.”⁶

    However, her temperamental openness to new ideas and her willingness to experiment kept her from fixating on one style or one teacher; Alvarez was moving in different directions even as she embraced aspects of popular regional painting.

    While a student of Cahill’s, Alvarez was also taking singing lessons, attending concerts and local exhibitions, meeting fellow artists (including those with experimental tendencies like her own, such as Henrietta Shore), and discovering the writings of Will Levington Comfort (1878-1932), which would prove to be hugely influential on her thinking. Comfort was at the center of a spiritualist colony in the Hollywood Hills, where he lectured and monitored group meetings. There was a temple and a lotus pond on the grounds, as well as a Greek theater. Alvarez attended many meetings at the colony, as well as events in Comfort’s home in Highland Park.

   Comfort advocated meditation as a way of beginning an inner journey leading ultimately to a sense of harmony.⁷ His ideas were essentially Theosophical in content, blending aspects of different world religions and taking the concept of karma as a central principle, that is, that one’s future depends on events and attitudes in his or her past. Linked to the belief in karma was the belief in “world teachers” who come to earth in order to preach divine messages. Alvarez found Comfort’s message “so much more practical than most church sermons.”

    Indeed, for Mabel Alvarez, even something as mystical and mysterious as Theosophical thought had to have a “practical” appeal. Her father was not only an esteemed doctor, but a shrewd businessman as well. Her elder brother, Walter, became a well-known physician like his father, one of many in the Alvarez clan to distinguish themselves in the sciences. Mabel was not immune to the strong humanist inclinations of her family, and seems to have balanced throughout her life a desire for the transcendental with an unshakable conservatism that kept her rooted in the realities of time and place. Her later retreat from Theosophy (though not from spirituality) may have been linked to the scientific revelations of this century, well-known to Alvarez through her father and brother, that directly contradicted the more esoteric beliefs embraced by Theosophists.⁸

    From 1917 to 1920, many influences crowded into Alvarez’s life in addition to the teachings of Cahill and Comfort. She kept meticulous diaries from 1909 until her death, and recorded that in 1917 she read forty books, including poetry by William Butler Yeats and short stories by August Strindberg. Her first exhibition as a professional artist occurred at the San Francisco Art Institute’s annual show in 1918;⁹ she joined the ranks of the powerful California Art Club (an unabashed promotional vehicle for California Impressionist painting) the same year, winning an honorable mention in her debut exhibit with that organization;¹⁰and she received regular positive press for her painting (critic Pauline Payne likened her color work to “mosaic”).¹¹ In 1919 she saw the canvases of modernist painter Birger Sandzén, whose brilliant color so thrilled her that she wrote him a letter; she declined membership in Henrietta Shore’s Modern Art Society; she saw the paintings of one of California’s most visionary painters, Rex Slinkard, which she called “dream worlds”; and, in 1920, at the age of twenty-nine, she was part of a three-person (with Loren R. Barton and Paul Lauritz) exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art. Of this last achievement, an unidentified critic for the Los Angeles Evening Express noted:

Women are honored with ‘one-man exhibitions’ - and you never heard of a ‘one-woman’ exhibition. However, the work doesn't suffer and both Mabel Alvarez and Loren R. Barton are winning new laurels in these exhibitions. Miss Alvarez, although a young woman, has been known in the art exhibitions of Los Angeles for several years. She has been doing some conscientious , as well as stunning work, and her canvases hung on the end wall are all interesting.12

   In 1919 Mabel Alvarez met the man who would have a profound influence on early Modernist art in California, Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890-1973). She became his student, and her own words from 1928 describe the effect of his teaching:

My idea of painting is so different now from the formless idea of it I had when I started. Then so much of our strength was just used up in learning to handle this medium with all its difficulties. With Bill [Cahill] we learned to paint in the Impressionistic manner with broken color. We were never allowed to use black. As I remember he limited us at that time to red, yellow and blue. I struggled for months with the “direct” method - a most difficult process. I suppose it was a good thing and gave us a certain foundation and a certain amount of fluency. When I started painting for myself alone, I gradually forgot all “methods” in my interest in getting the feeling of things I wanted to do....Then came the study in color and drawing with Macdonald-Wright. That opened up a whole new world. I haven’t come to the end of it yet.13

   Macdonald-Wright had left Los Angeles for Paris in 1909, and it was there in 1913 that he and Morgan Russell (1886-1953) founded Synchromism. The first avant-garde art movement started by Americans in Europe. He returned to New York to exhibit at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery and in the Forum Exhibition of 1916, but, tired of “chasing art up back alleys” in the city, he went back to California in the fall of 1918. He began lecturing and plotting the promotion of Modern art almost instantly - by 1920 he had engineered the first exhibition ever of avant-garde painting in Southern California, an event that paralleled (in a more modest way) the furor of New York’s Armory show in 1913. Macdonald-Wright’s fiery rhetoric, aggressive intellectual probing, and sheer artistic talent inspired students such as Alvarez not to mimic him, but to find their own voice by way of being introduced to a larger world of ideas and approaches than regional Impressionism embraced.

    In 1922 Macdonald-Wright took over the Los Angeles Art Students League, where in 1924 Alvarez took notes and typed verbatim his rambling lectures on aesthetics, which included ideas on ancient and oriental art.¹⁴ One of the first things students were told was that imitation by itself did not make art: “Imitation thus approximates but one world - that of objectivity, and if we consider the work of art to be the entire expression of the man, it must be an equally balanced manifestation of man’s existence in this dual world."¹⁵ In short, art needed the world of feeling, subjectivity.

    It was in 1922 that Alvarez became a part of the “Group of Eight,” painters who banded together to promote their art which was veering further and further away from the predictable standards of the California Art club. The Eight included Alvarez, her former teacher John Hubbard Rich, Henri de Kruif, Luvena and Edouard Vysekal, Donna Schuster, Roscoe Schrader, and Clarence Hinkle. Critic Antony Anderson observed that the group had “some decidedly modern tendencies,” and they did in relation to standard California Impressionist fare. Just how “Modern” Mabel Alvarez was at this time is best revealed by one of the major paintings of her career, her Self-Portrait of 1923 (fig.4).

   Alvarez’s image of herself is defined by broad areas of flat paint. The composition is simple, symmetrical, and focused - a lean description of her face in basic terms. The black line around the rim of her hat, which also appears on her shoulder, is a device to frame color, picked up in Macdonald-Wright’s class (one he himself adapted from Cézanne). The psychological presence of the self-portrait declares itself in large measure by what it is not - clever, formulaic, prettified, or imitative. It arrests the viewer’s imagination by virtue of its relentlessly honest transcription. For Alvarez, and her audience, this was Modernism in the tradition of Robert Henri’s economical, but deftly painted, realism. This was not academic art or Impressionism as locally practiced, with its careful drawing, pasted palette, and routinely picturesque compositions - this was focused, abbreviated, enigmatic.

    Alvarez’s self-portrait won the Women’s Federation Prize that year, and was much reproduced in magazines and journals. In 1995 it graced the cover of Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, (1890-1945).¹⁶

    Alvarez went to New York in 1924 and when she saw some of the more experimental painting, she wrote in her journal (without naming names), “Queer modern stuff.” The pragmatic side to Alvarez resisted extremes - she never attempted Cubist, Surrealist, or nonobjective painting. Nonetheless, true to her experimental impulses, she created her own “queer modern stuff”the very next year, a series of Symbolist canvases. She even joined the most radical of art groups extant in Los Angeles at that time, the Modern Art Workers. Macdonald-Wright wrote the group’s manifesto, which declared in part: “We feel the time is ripe to get a more cosmopolitan atmosphere into the art life here, build up some real vitalizing competition, and tear down a few “taboos.”¹⁷

    Alvarez’s large-scale 1925 painting Dream of Youth (fig. 5) is a fusion of the teachings of Will Levington Comfort, Theosophy, Macdonald-Wright, with her own impulses toward the transcendent. It is an arcadian vision where a Madonna-like woman blue hair and yellow halo occupies the center, where an angel and two doves fly overhead, and where two lovers touch in the upper right corner. It is at once an image of peace and of desire, of attainment and longing. Just prior to painting Dream of Youth, she copied the following passage from author D. H. Lawrence into her diary:

That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.”18

    Color plays an important role in Alvarez’s symbolic paintings. Green tinged with blue is the pervasive hue of Dream of Youth, an image of stillness and stability stemming from the central figure’s columnar saintliness. In 1924 Macdonald-Wright had privately published his Treatise on Color, distributing copies mainly to his students. Alvarez owned one. In his Treatise, he discussed the emotional meaning of each color in the spectrum and called green “a disciple of non-action, of calm and of quiet.”

    In addition to her knowledge of Macdonald-Wright’s Treatise, Alvarez no doubt knew the work of German artist and spiritualist Wassily Kandinsky, who called green “the most restful color that exists.”¹⁹ And of course her own studies in Theosophy that had begun years before taught about color as symbol: noted Theosophists Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater published Thought-Forms in 1902, which described blue-greens as showing “some of the grandest qualities of human nature, the deepest sympathy and compassion, with the power of perfect adaptability which only they can give.”²⁰

    Green is the color of growth, of spring and of newness as well as of calm and stability. Alvarez’s Dream of Youth may be an expression of her own feeling of newness and growth. She may be the Madonna in the center of the canvas, ready to accept change and to be a receptacle for new life or perhaps a new way of living, as the Annunciation scene in the painting’s lower right suggests.