Joseph Kleitsch

(1882-1931)

Still Life with Sweet Peas 18 x 22in framed 25 x 29in

Footnotes

Provenance
Estate of the artist.
David and Sons, Laguna Beach, California.
Private collection, Southern California.

Literature
Patricia Trenton, Joseph Kleitsch: A Kaleidoscope of Color, The Irvine Museum, Irvine, 2007, p. 183, illustrated.

Painted at the height of Joseph Kleitsch's career in the late 1920s, Still Life with Sweet Peas is an intimate scene from the artist's Laguna Beach home that showcases the artist's skill at depicting luminosity, transparency, light and shadow and complex color arrangements.

Joseph Kleitsch immigrated to the United States from Banat, Hungary (now Romania) in 1902 when he was 20 years old. After establishing himself as a highly sought-after portrait painter in Chicago, he moved to California in 1920 and became strongly identified with that state. Despite continuing success in California, Kleitsch traveled to Europe in 1926 where he intended to further broaden his talents and seek inspiration from the traditions of the masters and their surroundings. After two years abroad, Kleitsch returned to California and settled in the thriving artistic community of Laguna Beach, where the present work was painted.

Kleitsch was unique among his fellow California artists in terms of the diversity of subjects he painted, in his openness to various forms of creative expression, in his intensity, and in his eagerness to preserve history, particularly Old Laguna, in his works. In 1931, just before Kleitsch's sudden death, Southern California art critic Sonia Wolfson offered insight into his ever-changing moods and artistic approaches: "[He] is the most perverse person I ever met. Artistically and personally. He's the despair of the art dealers, the bane of the reviewer. He cannot be labeled, classified, pigeon-holed or otherwise definitely and securely rubber-stamped, which is to his credit...Because of his perversity, which spells diversity, he gives infinite joy." ¹ Kleitsch regularly painted commissioned portraits and was a prolific landscape and figurative painter. Still life was also an important subject for the artist.

Early in his career, Kleitsch painted still life in a distinctly trompe-l'oeil realist style with fidelity to the objects he placed in layered and complicated tabletop arrangements. Later in his career, he painted with a confidence gleaned from exposure to the European Masters and a commitment to a more purely Impressionist style. In works like the present painting and the "exuberantly baroque" still life Highlights, also painted circa 1928, Kleitsch employs "vigorous gestural brushstrokes, rapidly applied to sculpt both the three-dimensional forms and the decorative patterning." ² Dr. Patricia Trenton writes of the present work, "Kleitsch used the same table motif [as Highlights] for Sweet Peas, a smaller and much less complicated still life. The interior setting is the Kleitsch home in Laguna, with its simple furnishings of the period. The artist tilts the table forward to reveal some of the room and the simple objects on the table. The brushwork and composition similarly indicate a date close to that of Highlights. ³

At the visual center of Still Life with Sweet Peas is a clear glass bowl bursting with swirling blossoms of pinkish-red sweet peas flowers. Adding intimacy to the scene, the book or journal adjacent to the flowers is held open by a closed pair of scissors. A water jug and half-filled glass of water stand nearby. These surrounding compositional elements on the table, as well as the tablecloth itself, are painted in a more restricted palette of tones of black and white, creating a visually dramatic contrast with the bold flower blooms. Kleitsch employs energetic brushwork throughout, and the transparent tonalities of water and water reflections, and deep shadows, further enliven the scene, as does the artist's use of splashes of red and blue-green highlights on the background furnishings, and on the cloth and glass objects.

The artist's records list this painting as being titled Still Life. A sale was held April 10 - 11, 1953 to settle the estate of the late Mrs. Edna G. Kleitsch, the artist's wife. The sale was held at the Kleitsch studio at Legion and Through Streets, Laguna Beach, California, and included 124 works by Joseph Kleitsch. The present work is stamped with the artist's name and is numbered '101' on the stretcher, referencing this estate sale.

¹ Topics of the Town, April 19, 1931.
² Patricia Trenton, Joseph Kleitsch: A Kaleidoscope of Color, The Irvine Museum, Irvine, 2007, p. 183.
³ Trenton, p. 183.