EDITORIAL: Museum looks to future

The history of the Laguna Art Museum is really the history of Laguna Beach.

The museum “” which is marking its 90th anniversary this year “” had its origins in the town’s early days as an art mecca, when landscape painters from around the country, and particularly Los Angeles, discovered Laguna Beach and began coming here to capture the beautiful scenery as part of the American Impressionist movement.

They gathered in the summer to paint and to give classes, and “” just like today “” the town would swell with summer art lovers during the “season.” Back then, the summer population numbered about 300.

The first full-time resident artist, Conway Griffith, moved to Laguna Beach 100 years ago, in 1908, according to “A History of the Laguna Art Museum, 1918-1993,” a tome published by the museum in 1993.

By 1918, 30 to 40 artists were practicing in Laguna Beach, and they formed the Laguna Beach Art Assn., which welcomed non-artist members as well. That’s the date by which the museum charts its beginning.

The town’s Chamber of Commerce had by then determined that Laguna would not be a cheesy beach town with dance halls, merry-go-rounds and carnival rides, like many other communities along the Southern California coastline.

Instead, Laguna would make its distinction as an art colony.

Art, and particularly the “plein air” landscape painters of the day, would become the cultural and economic backbone of the town.

The artists formed a cooperative gallery in a long-gone building next to what is now the Hotel Laguna, and in 1929 built the first permanent structure to house painting and sculpture in the region “” the remnants of which exist to this day as the core of the museum on Cliff Drive and North Coast Highway.

These artists and those who supported them laid the groundwork for the wildly successful Festival of Arts and Pageant of the Masters, which in turn spawned the Sawdust Festival and Art-A-Fair.

Laguna Beach is still at the forefront of the arts community in the region and beyond, and the museum board is looking to the future with plans for expanding and improving the facility.

The museum is still on solid ground “” ground that was laid early in the last century.