Helen Bruton’s "Beach Picnic"

Beach Picnic (ca. 1932) by Helen Bruton
From If Pictures Could Talk: Stories About California Paintings in Our Collection by James L. Coran and Walter A. Nelson-Rees (Oakland: WIM, 1989)

Helen Bruton’s work Beach Picnic aptly captures the fun and spontaneity of bohemian Monterey in the 1920s. A large oil on plywood, the painting features a relaxed gathering on the beach, complete with reclining figures, dogs, and two nude women who are just toweling off after a dip in the ocean. Like her etching The Party (see my blogpost), the work depicts Helen’s circle of friends from the Monterey Group, including her sister Margaret (wearing a blue scarf), Robert Viven Howard (reclining in Margaret’s lap), Ina Perham Story (in red dress), Clayton S. Price (head in hand), and August Gay (with pipe). Helen also reported that the remaining figures in the painting were herself, her sister Esther, and their friend and fellow artist Flora MacDonald Johnstone.¹

Although Helen never considered herself a painter (she was trained as a sculptor and eventually mastered the art of mosaic), the work is impressive in its modernist aesthetic, as well as its humorous yet accurate likenesses. When the painting was exhibited in Los Angeles, art critic Arthur Millier said it “is one of the best things here. It is both a good picture and a true comment, touched with her unfailing humor.”²

Helen eventually sold this work to the California art collectors James Coran and Walter Nelson-Rees. Like several other important works by the Brutons (including Margaret’s portraits of her parents), Beach Picnic was destroyed in the Oakland Fire of 1991.

________________________________________________

¹James L. Coran and Walter A. Nelson-Rees. If Pictures Could Talk: Stories About California Paintings in Our Collection. (Oakland: WIM, 1989), p. 263.

²Los Angeles Times, 2 Oct. 1932, p. 18.