In and Out of California: Travels of American Impressionists

In and Out of California: Travels of American Impressionists, published to accompany a traveling exhibition, is a revisionist study of artists working in California in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book presents an array of radiant paintings by artists identified traditionally with the history of art in California. The essays by Deborah Epstein Solon and Dr. Will South, however, establish that artists were "out" of California as much as they were "in" during this critical period in American painting. Artists living in California traveled and painted all over the world, often simultaneously maintaining studios in different areas of the country and even in Europe. Scores of artists who worked in California received the same training in academies in both Europe and the United States as those artists who settled in the East - yet their Eastern compatriots have been studied and lauded with a respect thus far denied their Western counterparts. Artists working in California often experienced a two pronged disadvantage: they were either glorified by Western critics - occasionally unjustly - or summarily dismissed by the Eastern art establishment in an equally unjust fashion.