Mabel Alvarez

American artist

• Born: November 28, 1891
• Birthplace: Oahu, Hawaii
• Died: March 13, 1985
• Place of death: Los Angeles. California

In a career defined as much by its longevity as by its productivity, painter Alvarez pioneered the use of revolutionary avant-garde theories about the harmonic relationship between color and form to pursue a restless metaphysical inquiry into the spiritual dimension of the material world.

Early Life

Mabel Alvarez (MAY-buhl AHL-vah-rehs) was born to privilege. Her father, Luis Alvarez, was a respected Spanish-born Californiaphysician who had come to the Hawaiian Islands to assist in the groundbreaking research work at the world-renowned leper colony started in 1866 on the island of Molokai by Catholic missionary Saint Damien. In addition, he pursued lucrative real estate opportunities on the islands to accrue a significant fortune. The family returned to California in 1906, eventually settling in the Los Angeles area. By then Mabel, the youngest of their five children, had already evidenced remarkable proficiency in both drawing and painting. Her high school art teacher, James Edwin McBurney, mentored her to develop her understanding of design and color, line and shape. Early on, Alvarez thought of pursuing a career as a fashion illustrator, a conventional career for a woman with artistic gifts. Through McBurney, however, Alvarez received her first recognition as an artist: She helped McBurney design and execute a lavish Art Nouveau-styled mural depicting springtime in California for the 1915 Panama-California Exhibition in San Diego commemorating the opening of the Panama Canal. The mural, which was awarded a Gold Medal, was heavily allegorical, using springtime to suggest San Diego’s new prominence as an international port.

Alvarez was intrigued by the bold theories and vivid canvasses of the new movement dubbed California Impressionism, founded by Los Angeles painter William Vincent Cahill. His internationally respected School for Illustrating and Painting was quickly becoming the epicenter for new artists, including Alvarez, who was engaged by the audacious bright colors and revolutionary rough brushwork of the new school and its interest in capturing the natural landscapes of Southern California. She quickly emerged as one of the school’s most promising artists.

Life’s Work

However, Alvarez became restless. Her free-spirited intellectual curiosity led her in the late 1910’s to become involved in a neospiritual retreat founded outside Hollywood by Will Levington Comfort, who, before pioneering a philosophical movement that stressed interior exploration in the pursuit of transcendent harmony, had made his name as the author of pulp Westerns. Alvarez relished the mystical elements of the colony experience and its sense that the physical world was a manifestation of spiritual emanations. Her paintings during this period reflected her embrace of vivid colors and playful technique, as clear lines and set forms began to blur into swirls of hue and shade.

However, it was her 1919 encounter with avant-garde painter and art theorist Stanton Macdonald-Wright that set Alvarez into a bold new direction. For the next decade, under Macdonald-Wright’s tutelage, Alvarez produced some of her most accomplished and revolutionary canvasses. Macdonald-Wright, and later his protégé Morgan Russell, had begun to push art away from the long tradition of representation by suggesting that colors maintain the same kind of integrity and interpretative value as notes in the musical scale, and that painters, like composers, could create harmonic canvasses, or composition, by manipulating colors with and even against each other in subtle and complex arrangements rather than by imitating recognizable objects; such paintings would in theory by “heard” by the perceptive, receptive visual imagination. Painting became more about feeling than about composition and aesthetic design. The movement, which came to be known as synchromism, intrigued Alvarez, who matriculated in Macdonald-Wright’s studio in 1924. His uncompromising vision of the radical possibility of art appealed to her mystical investigations into reality.

During the next decade, her paintings renegotiated real-world representation and became increasingly dreamlike, even allegorical, drawing on archetypal figures, such as the Child or Innocence or the Earth Spirit, using such abstract concepts to experiment with visual harmony. In these paintings, vivid arrangements of broad, flat applications of colors were expressive of potent emotion, including green as newness, red as passion, and blue as nature’s power. Alvarez’s work became prominent in the Los Angeles area, where she emerged as one of the most accomplished and prolific of the regional avant-garde painters known collectively as the Group of Eight.

Alvarez, however, never entirely abandoned her fascination with the objects in the real world even as the more extreme of her colleagues did. By the 1930’s, Alvarez had returned to her interest in the human form and the natural world, with her investigation inevitably informed by her long study of the emotional impact of color and the harmony of shapes. Although Alvarez was never a social activist, despite a decade in which the work of most artists of her generation became increasingly political, with the advent of World War II she virtually set aside her career to assist in a variety of home front volunteer organizations, perhaps most notably giving painting lessons as therapy to the wounded soldiers in Los Angeles area veterans hospitals.

After the war, when she was approaching sixty, Alvarez with typical vigor moved in a new direction. She returned her attention to recording the vivid images of the real world, specifically the primitive cultures she observed during extensive travels in the Caribbean Basin and Mexico. Her paintings from the 1950’s captured lively scenes of the tropics—churches decorated for the high holy days, town squares alive at festival time, cafés crowded with locals, fruit stands animated by vendors—in a bold style of uncharacteristically layered colors applied with lush sweeping strokes. These canvasses are among the most vivid—and personal—of Alvarez’s long career.

Although interest in her work flagged during the heyday of trendy postmodern experimentation in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Alvarez continued to paint well into her eighties, her canvasses regularly showcased in regional shows. In the early 1980’s, she became increasingly dependent on assisted care and died in a convalescent home in Los Angeles in 1985. She was ninety-three years old.

Significance

Across nearly seven decades of rich productivity, the only constant in the work of Mabel Alvarez was her restless dedication to the principle of artistic change and her remarkable evolution, specifically, her achievement in three of the dominant genres that defined twentieth century art: impressionism, modernism, and realism. Given the widely differing artistic visions of each of the genres, few artists of her generation managed to work successfully in each. That she achieved international reputation in each genre testifies both to her intellectual vigor and to her evolution as an artist. Apart from such an academic distinction is Alvarez’s work itself, a stunning legacy of hundreds of canvasses that, whatever their subject, delight the eye by invigorating her representations of the real world, from bowls of fruit to the human form itself, with her transcendent mysticism and her exuberant, intuitive sense of color and the play of forms.

Bibliography

Gerdts, William H., and Will South. California Impressionism. New York: Abbeville, 1998. Handsomely illustrated period study of the genre most associated with Alvarez. Explains the context of European Impressionism and its adaptation to the California school.

South, Will. Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism. Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2001. Seminal study by an authoritative figure in the genre, with helpful explication of Macdonald-Wright’s complex religious vision. Includes a generous account of Alvarez.

Trenton, Patricia. Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Still considered the definitive study of the generation of women painters that includes Alvarez. Sees the influence of the cultural diversity and rugged geography of the West as critical in defining the era.