Luminous, gorgeously realized landscape paintings made en plein air by members of the California Art Club over the past 100 years. This volume showcases 200 works by California Art Club artists who have focused on the evocative seascapes, charming seaside towns, and beach communities from San Diego to San Francisco, demonstrating a breathtaking range of natural settings suffused with atmosphere, drama, and light. Since the dawn of the twentieth century, California has been home to artists from all over America and Europe who aspired to depict the state’s compelling natural landscapes on canvas. In 1909, these artists founded the California Art Club, which stands today as one of the most esteemed painting societies in the United States. This volume, which follows Skira Rizzoli’s luminous California Light: A Century of Landscapes, presents more of the club’s distinctive and lush plein air painting, an impressionistic style in which painters work outdoors in order to capture the ephemeral moment when the natural lighting of a landscape elevates an already beautiful scene into something sublime. As observed by W.H. Auden, “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” We as a species are drawn to the sea—artists perhaps even more so than others, as beautifully evidenced in this book.

The extraordinary story of the artists who propelled themselves to international fame in 1960s Los Angeles Los Angeles, 1960: There was no modern art museum and there were few galleries, which is exactly what a number of daring young artists liked about it, among them Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, Robert Irwin, Bruce Nauman, Judy Chicago and John Baldessari. Freedom from an established way of seeing, making, and marketing art fueled their creativity, which in turn inspired the city. Today Los Angeles has four museums dedicated to contemporary art, around one hundred galleries, and thousands of artists. Here, at last, is the book that tells the saga of how the scene came into being, why a prevailing Los Angeles permissiveness, 1960s-style, spawned countless innovations, including Andy Warhol's first exhibition, Marcel Duchamp's first retrospective, Frank Gehry's mind-bending architecture, Rudi Gernreich's topless bathing suit, Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, even the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Doors, and other purveyors of a California style. In the 1960s, Los Angeles was the epicenter of cool.