Hello, I'm Steven Barker.
I'm the Dean of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts.
We're in Laguna Beach
where a local developer Gerald Buck
has given us his great collection of art.
Please come in.
Here we have some really remarkable
works of California art in all genres.
We begin with a work by American artist Sam Francis.
Really remarkable abstract drip technique painting.
One of the largest that Francis ever did on paper.
Very unusual in that regard in terms of its dimensions.
One of the great treasures of the collection here.
A large by American artist Richard Diebenkorn.
It's called Albuquerque, but
it's actually done in California.
Done in the '60s.
Diebenkorn turned out to be one of the truly great
American artist of the latter part of the 20th century.
Here we have a work by Roger Kuntz
who was quite famous for doing a
number of works in Southern California
including this highway series.
You look at it as something that's
simply capturing a road sign and yet
look at the way in which what Kuntz has done
is to completely change
the nature of this by having
two shadows cut diagonally across the street sign
so that it takes you right back
outdoors into the sun again.
This is one of our treasures.
It's by a former UCI faculty member Peter Alexander.
He did a whole series of L.A.
night-time cityscape scenes.
I have to say I think this is the great one.
The color of this is just remarkable
as you can clearly see.
Many of Peter Alexander's L.A. night scenes
have a horizon line that's very high in the canvas.
But clearly what he wanted to do with this
was to show this amazing evening sky
with its colors and its roiling clouds
so that the city is almost just a
kind of afterthought down below.
We're looking down over a hill, but
we're really looking at the incredible sky.
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Carlos Almaraz is famous for being
fascinated by fire and so this piece
Almaraz piece which is simply called
Car Crash on Pacific Coast Highway
literally picks that up.
The idea of this radical horizontal format for the piece
really does picks up the idea of
P.C.H. and its wonderful panorama
but with this terrible event that's
taking place on it at the same time.
Come with me into the next room
where I'll show you a couple of pieces of what is called
plein air art.
California Impressionism.
This piece by Maurice Braun
painted in the very early part of the 20th century
and you can see how the
beautiful beautiful use of colors
the tonal use of shadows.
Notice that there are no blacks in here at all.
The shadows are all blues and greens
which is the way in which our eyes sees these things
are really wonderful examples of this
very famous genre of California art.
One of the most famous genres of
California art in the 1950s is called
hard-edge abstraction.
Here we have an example of that by a man
named Lorser Feitelson a San Francisco artist.
Really a wonderful balance of colors
all the way through the spectrum.
From the orange, all the way up through
blues and greens to the 5 or 6 areas of black.
Hard-edge abstraction was a very popular genre of art
at the same time as Jackson Pollok was
doing drip paintings and Sam Francis as well.
So there were many many things 
going on in American art in the 1950s.
To pickup a different side of the
collection that Gerald Buck put together
These are all representational works.
Joe Weisman's cityscape
showing just a glimpse of kind of snapshot
of downtown L.A. in the earlier to mid 1930s
and then this piece is by a man named Ben Messick.
It's one of his really really masterful
depictions of L.A. street scene art
with all kinds of things at work.
You could study this piece for an hour to
see the various kinds of activity going on.
Just full of life with these wonderfully full-figures.
Done by the way in the 1930s.
The Buck Collection is a little over 3,200 works of art.
Over time it's going to be really fun for us
to be able to switch out and rotate works
so that we can bring some of the amazing works that
Gerald Buck assembled
out for public view.
