Nudes to machinery, and things between

Alson Clark could paint a eucalyptus with the best of them, but don't go calling him a California Impressionist. That's the plea couched in the artist's first full retrospective, at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. California Impressionists, according to the conventions of art history written on the opposite coast, are minor leaguers. \o7American\f7 Impressionists -- Childe Hassam, Mary Cassatt, et al. -- are the real thing. In the deliberately titled, "An American Impressionist: The Art and Life of Alson Skinner Clark," guest curator Deborah Epstein Solon makes a case for Clark's major league status.

Although Clark (1876-1949) lived in Southern California from 1919 until his death, his interests were more global than regional. He painted scenes not just of the requisite flower-flecked fields of Giverny but also of markets in Spain and Croatia, villages in Mexico and the rooftops of Prague. Being categorized as a regional painter may have hindered Clark's broader reputation, as Solon asserts, but even a comprehensive show of 77 paintings with a lucid and thorough catalog can't correct historical error in judgment if the paintings themselves don't merit such revision.

Gladly, there are some remarkable paintings here, but only a handful. Clark was a highly inconsistent painter whose early acuity eroded into the trite predictability of postcard views in a saccharine palette as the decades wore on. The contrast between early and later paintings is so dramatic, and unflattering to the later work, that Clark's reputation would have been better served by a show far less comprehensive.

Clark demonstrated such early promise that he was taking evening classes at the Art Institute of Chicago by age 11. He returned there to study as a young adult, then moved to New York, where he became an avid student of William Merritt Chase. One nude from this period, a sensuous column of flesh against stark studio walls, kick-starts the show. The most absorbing of Clark's work soon follows.

In 1898, he moved to Paris, a classic next step in the education of a young artist at the turn of the century. Clark eventually adopted Impressionist techniques, but first he explored, with great potency and conviction, the aesthetic of James McNeill Whistler, whose atelier he joined in Paris.