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).

Jeanne D’Orge, painter, exhibit at the Pat Wall Modern Art Gallery “Paintings Not for Sale“

While trolling through Google looking for articles on my friend Micaela’s father’s art gallery, the Pat Wall Modern Art Gallery in Carmel, and Monterey, during the 1940s to 1960, I stumbled across one of Micaela’s mother’s article from the Carmel Pine Cone in the Internet Archives. Because it’s an OCR scanned newspaper archive, it was a mess. But I cleaned it up and restored it and then I realized it was something of interest. It fleshed out the stories I was working on about Pat Wall. And then it becomes a gift to my friend Micaela, a Memento Mori, words written by her mother so long ago. It’s safe to say this Jeanne D’Orge interview of Rosalind Sharpe Wall hasn’t seen the light of day since 1946. Obviously this blogpost was written much later than 1998, but since these are themed pieces, I am posting it here. 

During the 1970s, my boyfriend Bob Hamilton, and I spend most weekends in Monterey County. We camped in the VW Bus and explored the Big Sur area. We were interested in the bohemian artists of the 1940s. I have a vague memory of visiting the Jeanne D’Orge gallery and spending an evening looking through her work. In retrospect, I realized the kindly gallery sitter was probably Jane Wilgress (see below). Because I was not yet a writer, I don’t have specific images to share, perhaps visiting all of this is a way to regain memories from that time when I did not write. —Maureen Hurley, Spring Equinox, 2021.

Cherry Center for the Arts

Jeanne D’Orge, neé Lena Yates, was born in Cheshire, England in 1877. When her father, a seed merchant, deserted the family, she and her mother moved to the outskirts of Edinburgh. Lena published her first poems at 20, and wrote a series of children's books on animal fables under the pen name of Lena Dalkeith—playing on a combination of her birthname, Lena, and the quaint Midlothian village of Dalkeith, near Edinburgh, where she was raised. Thus was the beginning of a woman of many identities.

While on a walking holiday in France in 1906, Lena was swept off her feet by geographer and engineer, widower Alfred Burton (dean of M.I.T.).  Lena and her mother joined Burton and his two sons in Newton Grange, Massachusetts where she and Alfred were married. A pioneering modernist poet, Lena became involved with the Others, a poetry group that included Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens, and she began publishing her work in literary magazines, Others: A magazine of the new verse, and Poetry. Some of her prose poems were published under the name Lena Dalkeith Burton.

Suffering from poor health, and a profound dislike of east coast weather and New England mores, Lena moved to Carmel in 1920 with her 3 children in tow—where she built a Craftsman style house. Her husband retired from M.I.T, and joined her a year later. They became involved in community theater, with Dr. Burton building sets and acting in Forest Theater productions; Lena wrote and produced a series of Commedia dell’ Arte styled plays, including Crazy Ann, under the penname of Lena Burton.

In 1928 Lena created a scandal when she left husband and children to live with the Forest Theater lighting technician, and M.I.T. graduate, Carl Cherry, some 20 years her junior. They converted his mother’s old Queen Anne cottage, a wedding gift (they were married in 1930), into an art studio for Lena, and a workshop for Cherry. During the lean years, they lived off canned tuna and coffee. She began painting in earnest in 1937, and Carl Cherry struck paydirt when one of his inventions, the one-sided blind rivet, revolutionized airplane and shipbuilding construction during the war years. Lena took up her painting name Jeanne D'Orge, after a river in France, having shed all vestiges of her past lives. For D'Orge painting embodied the intangible moods of form, color, and feelings that cannot be expressed in poetry or music.

The Cherrys carried on as before, living a simple lifestyle, but used their newfound fortune to establish the philanthropic Cherry Foundation to "further the culture of America by sponsoring experimental fine arts, sciences and education." The foundation underwrote arts events, concerts, plays, lectures and seminars featuring world class lecturers and performers. She became friends with Robinson Jeffers and Edward Weston, and wrote plays under the pseudonym of Juniper Green, after a neighboring village near Edinburgh. After her husband Carl Cherry died of cancer in 1947, D'Orge continued to run the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts, and "often appeared on the streets of Carmel wearing a big pink hat, ankle length Chinese robes and paint-stained tennis shoes." She died in 1964. Her former home, now an art center, houses over 1200 pieces of her art, plus letters, books, manuscripts, photos and memorabilia, as well as an extensive library.

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.