Early Artists of the Bohemian Club

San Francisco as the Center of West Coast Art

August 17 through October 13, 2002, the Hearst Art Gallery takes us back a hundred and thirty years, to a time when post-Gold Rush California was developing its culture. At the center of this still rough-and-tumble Athens was the Bohemian Club, chartered in 1872. Its founding members included newspapermen, a vintner, a printer, artists, an actor-manager, a poet, and a few men of business. Among them were such names as Ambrose Bierce, Daniel O'Connell, Joaquin Miller, and Henry George. Mark Twain and Bret Harte were honorary members, and in the next generation Jack London and Frank Norris also joined. But the club's most notable creativity was among its members who worked in the visual arts.

The works on display date from the Bohemian Club's strongest period, from the 1870s to about 1915. Artists exhibited include Samuel Marsden Brookes, Norton Bush, Giuseppe Cadenasso, Maynard Dixon, Paul Frenzeny, Percy Grey, Thomas Hill, Christian Jorgensen, William Keith, Lorenzo Latimer, Xavier Martinez, Gottardo Piazzoni, Granville Redman, William Ritschel, Julian Rix, H. E. Smith, Jules Tavernier, Frank van Sloun, Virgil Williams, and Theodore Wores.

The highlight of the Gallery's new exhibition, "Early Artists of the Bohemian Club," is a lecture by Dr. Kevin Starr, who will speak on "The Golden Age of Bohemian Artists," Saturday, September 28, at 7 p.m., in LeFevre Theatre. Please call 925.631-4379 for reservations. Lecture fee $8 general, free to Saint Mary's College faculty, staff and students.