The Central Coast Community Exchange

Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s status as being one of the oldest art museums in the state with a commitment to contemporary art, along with its fortunate location within a thriving art community, have provided the organization a close relationship with many artists since its founding in 1941.  As a result, SBMA has acquired a number of self-portraits by California artists.  This exhibition of approximately 15 paintings and photographs, celebrates both the richness of the permanent collection, and of California art, over the last century.

Artists in California have explored, in their own self-images, a wide range of approaches, feelings and social stances.  So, there is no one style or typical self image that defines this presentation.  Two works by Clarence Hinkle, a local Santa Barbara artist, bracket the exhibition.  In his Self-Portrait with Bowler Hat, he plays the handsome, young art student, with a dash of bohemianism.  While in his last self-portrait, Yesterday and Today, which was painted when he was eighty, meditates on this youthful self-image and records his own decrepitude.  Helen Lundeberg, one of the first California surrealists, used her own self-image as a memory device, recalling her youthful self, but distancing herself from it by reproducing it as a portrait within a portrait.  Robert Arneson’s drawing is a world away in feeling:  the artist as a rude, boorish breaker of social conventions.  Henry Miller, better known as an author, adopts the vigorous style of the French artist Georges Rouault to convey his sense of himself as a rebel.