Carmel Pine Cone art reviews, The Pat Wall Gallery, Dec. 13, 1946

While I was searching for information on the Pat Wall Modern Art Gallery in Carmel & Monterey, during the 1940s (there isn’t much), I stumbled across a treasure trove of art reviews and articles written by several writers from the Carmel Pine Cone—located in the Internet Archives. The full artist interviews are posted as separate entries, all posted on Aug. 11, 1989, to keep them together with my Pat Wall stories.

These pieces are fillers. Pieces I cleaned up to see if there was anything I could glean Because they’re form an OCR scanned newspaper archive, the text was a mess: columns were combined, chunks of text went missing, there was mysterious orphaned text, and strings of illegible clusters of consonants. And most headlines were lost. But I cleaned the pieces up as best I could and restored them to printed realm. I am posting them here along with my Pat Wall stories, for context. I have used snippets of them elsewhere in my Pat Wall stories but here they are in their archival entirety—cleaned up, of course! There were several arts articles in this issue, it was probably the last issue of the year, published on Friday the 13th!

I wonder if the Carmel Pine Cone was underwritten by Carl and Jeanne Cherry? The Cherry Foundation underwrote most of the arts events in Carmel. Carl had invented the blind rivet which revolutionized the airplane and shipbuilding industries. They were true patrons of the arts. I posted Rosalind Sharpe’s interview and about her, Jeanne D’Orge, and I constructed a biography, gleaned from several sources. 

I love the gossipyness of the columns, and the lists of names, it was a veritable who’s who about town. It is probably the first time that these articles have seen the light since 1946 (other than when they were scanned for the Internet Archives, where they are virtually unreadable). —Maureen Hurley, Vernal Equinox, 2021

Carmel Pine Cone 1946-12-13
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13, 1946
At Pat Wall Gallery

Although the crowd was smaller than usual at the Pat Wall Modern Art Gallery Tuesday night show, a lot of people flowed in for a look at the paintings and the inevitable visit to the sherry table (this time in a big bed of ice) after the Guiomar Novaez concert. Among those present during the course of a stimulating evening of conversation, dancing and music, were Mr. and Mrs. Edward Ricketts, Webster Street, Dr. Eric Berne, Muriel Rukeyser, Mr. and Mrs. Bud Foster, Gretchen Gray, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Lofton, Philip Pinner, Mr. and Mrs. James Hopper, Henry Meade Williams, Jean Varda, Mr. and Mrs. Ellwood Graham, Remo Scardigli,' John Roberts, Angus MacDougal, Mrs. Phil Nesbitt, Rosalind Sharpe, Abel Warshawsky, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Lloyd, Mr. and Mrs. William Fassett, Mrs. Hilda Duarte Brown, Joseph Shoeninger, Sally Fry, Marjorie Warren, Roger Johnson, and many others.

New group show in the Pat Wall Gallery in Monterey

By NANCY LOFTON

The new group show in the Pat Wall Gallery in Monterey is notable for color that jumps at you when you enter the door. The majority of the pictures are painted in a high, bright key which combines with the color of the gallery to produce an almost strident effect. Barbara Stevenson’s Green House is a notable exception. In this canvas, Miss Stevenson paints with solidity and seriousness, and her tones of blue and green and gray produce an effect of balance and maturity. Her canvas makes most of the other pictures in the show seem lacking in depth.

Joan Hinchman’s Boat in the back of the gallery has pleasing movement and textural quality, and Ellwood Graham’s Retrospect makes a graph-like curve into an interesting pattern.

The show includes canvases by Philip Pinner, Barbara Stevenson, Itogaway, Andre Moreau, George Harris, Ellwood Graham, Lilick Schatz, Dan Harris, Margaret Peterson, Alfred Morano, Joan Hinchman, and Jean Varda. 

The jewelry by Filippa Brooks, also on display, is original and subtle in coloring, and Pete Macchiarini’s pieces use modern lines and forms to good advantage. There’s a ring set with gold-flecked quartz that’s very beautiful. 

(It doesn’t seem to have an ending).

Pat Wall, modern art dealer: Dali, Miller, & Varda 3.5, envoy; folklore & fragments from The Pat Wall Gallery

(Much of this page was gleaned from orphan newspaper clippings—both fragments and articles often without dates or provenance—this is a pastiche of reportage and paraphrase, my own journal fragments—as well as some of my memories of Pat telling the stories of the artist colony that made Big Sur famous. Journal entry notes were collected from various sources, Pat Wall, his daughter Micaela, and other friends of Pat’s over the years.)

In the late 1970s, early 1980s, I also edited several of Rosalind Sharpe Wall’s manuscripts, one eventually became a book. When the Coast was Wild and Lonely: Early Settlers of the Sur  1987. The manuscript was a right mess as I recall, so her son, Chris, must’ve worked on it too, as it was reprinted. As we went over the manuscript, Rosalind would fly off into tangents on Egyptian scarabs, living Mexico, Henry Miller, the Tarot and John Cooke—scraps of stories with lots of middles, with no beginning, and no ending in sight. Only later, long after Roz died, was I able to make any sense of her stories.

 

Many of these orphan fragments came from old newspaper articles. I grew fatigued, and abandoned the project, as I had never properly recorded, or lost the sources. Someday I’ll get back to it. Micaela and I were hellbent on recording Pat’s oral history before it was too late. Then it was too late. So these are mostly from Micaela’s scrapbook collection. I was going to shape these notes into a fourth piece on Pat, but too much time had passed, so I can’t reconstruct it from these rough fragments—that strangely create their own story. So it’s a pastiche, a collage of sorts.

In the early 1970s, I also revisited many of the places Pat and Rosalind mentioned, including Doc Rickett’s lab on Cannery Row, when you could still go inside and see the empty aquariums, and the ranch that Henry Miller was living on. These were stories we grew up on. We used to stay at Deetjin’s cabins in Castro Canyon when we were flush, but more often than not, we slept in pullouts along Highway One. We met up with a bunch of hippies, who saw that we were reading Tropic. A party ensued. My boyfriend Bob Hamilton and I wound up sleeping in the VW van on a hill so steep, it was a miracle the van didn’t roll down the mountain into the sea. Oh, but the morning was stellar as we were above the fog line, afloat in our own cloud kingdom. Magic was afoot on the Big Sur coast. 

Pat Wall, Modern Art Dealer: Ellwood Graham (journal)

Patrick Wall, founder of The Pat Wall Gallery, Carmel/Monterey, ca. 1973

When I was a child, my eyes feasted on the paintings collected by my best friend's father, Patrick Wall, when he was an art dealer in Monterey during the 1940s. Pat's gallery was on Olivier Street, we never did collect his oral history, so this is a placeholder for what we collectively remember. We also didn't realize that Pat singlehandedly changed the face of West Coast art with his controversial unorthodox exhibits. 

Pat, who was from Jersey, the Channel Islands, UK, came to California ca. 1940, with his inheritance and a dream of art. He took a chance on the local "moderns" and created The Pat Wall Modern Art Gallery, and through this connection is how I got to know the work of Ellwood Graham who "painted out loud" with lots of hot colors. His abstract portrait of John Steinbeck was controversial at the time—circa the 1940s.

What I loved were how Graham's personal hieroglyphics, or pictogram paintings which were almost quilt-like in nature, I loved the way the heavy dark colors were a combination of thick impasto, a drawing, and transparent glaze. A doodle, a half a whale (the tail end) captivated my attention. He compared his work to a composer working on a "musical canvas." Graham painted an egg tempera mural in the Ventura Post Office. Is it still there?

So much history attached to those old paintings of Pat's. There was John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, known as Doc Ricketts— they too were juxtaposed in Graham's work. It was John Steinbeck who told the artist to paint out loud imagine that—paint out loud. Graham moved to Monterey because of John Steinbeck.

Steinbeck also created in Graham's [Monterey] studio. He wrote Sea of Cortez while Graham rendered his portrait. Of course he sold the painting to Steinbeck, but "I kept some studies and sketches." 'Where is that portrait now? "People have been calling me for years... I don't know." he says, "I haven't seen it in over 50 years."

Then he adds, "That portrait was very good... I hear it was bought by Burgess Meredith but I also heard it belonged to John Huston. —from Alta Vista Magazine, 1992 "Ellwood Graham: Never Say Die," —Susan Lea Hubbard (see bottom of this post for more stories).