Charles Reiffel

Charles Reiffel

Charles Reiffel

Charles Reiffel

Charles Reiffel

Charles Reiffel

Charles Reiffel

In the history of American art, Charles Reiffel is probably the best early Modernist painter you've never heard of.

Celebrated in his own day for Expressionist landscapes of remarkable verve and complexity, he quickly fell off the national radar screen after his death in 1942, just before turning 80. 

Now, however, the artist is back, thanks to an eye-opening museum retrospective. "Charles Reiffel: An American Post-Impressionist" is divided almost evenly between the San Diego Museum of Art and the nearby San Diego History Center, both in the city's Balboa Park. Together there are 55 paintings, 31 works on paper and four large-scale murals, plus archival material (photographs, letters, pamphlets, a scrapbook, etc.). The venues each show works that span a career lasting half a century.

As an artist Reiffel was a late bloomer — already in his early 50s when his work began to come together around 1915. No one knows for sure, but he was likely introduced to the European avant-garde in depth at the noisy 1913 Armory Show in New York.

His landscape paintings typically unite the flat stylization familiar from lithography with the tactile paint-handling of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists like Claude Monet, Childe Hassam, and Van Gogh, plus the shallow, vertically stacked zones of sinuous space familiar in Japanese prints, which were popular among advanced European and American artists. The Expressionist current is all his own.

He usually painted outdoors, a practice common to generations of European and American artists, but in Southern California Reiffel has always been corralled among the large (and often amateur) roster of plein air painters. That bland association is one likely reason his star faded fast after World War II, even though his work blows away routine plein air painting.

To be sure, Reiffel's art is not inventive in the audacious manner of contemporaneous abstract painting. He's no Arthur Dove.

Instead, his Expressionist visual language applies the momentum of raw emotion to an orderly process of making pictures. They're an elegiac corollary to inhabiting the natural world, with all the rhapsodic pleasure and unsettling pain that such a fundamental endeavor entails.

And they are erratic, showing the difficulty of maintaining an artistic practice in the wake of economic collapse. During the grinding Great Depression he turned with frequency to conventional land -- and seascape views, in what may have been an effort to appeal to a conservative audience that might buy a pleasant picture of the lovely La Jolla shore. Reiffel's work of the period often feels restrained. But sometimes, as in a mid-1930s scene of stark houses tightly clustered against the backcountry elements beneath a threatening sky, the power is intact.