Margaret Bruton

Barns on Cass Street, 1925, Monterey Museum of Art

File this story under the archaeology of art history—the rediscovery of an artist celebrated in her day who faded from view as tastes changed. This lovely work, Barns on Cass St, was painted by Margaret Bruton, a woman at the center of the NorCal interwar art world. She knew Frida and Diego, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and met Henri Matisse when he visited San Francisco in 1930. And she had two equally talented siblings—they were known around town as the amazing Bruton sisters. Margaret was a painter, Helen primarily a mosaicist, and Esther a muralist. They experimented with modernism in a wide variety of styles and media, won countless art prizes, and completed many WPA projects. They often worked together, including on a massive Masonite mural called The Peacemakers for the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939-40. Unlike Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity, also painted at the Exposition, the Brutons’ mural was demolished after the fair. The last time they exhibited together was at the Neiman Marcus store in Dallas in 1954. That is, until a miracle happened.

Captivated by a terrazzo-topped end table in an interior design book, Monterey librarian Wendy Van Wyck Good discovered Margaret Bruton (Bruton had given up painting in the 1940s), and eventually uncovered a huge archive of the Brutons’ work. Good’s efforts resulted in a book, an exhibit at UCI, and renewed interest in the sisters’ totally Midcentury work. 

The Bruton sisters grew up in comfort in the biggest house in Alameda. All three were encouraged artistically and studied art locally, in New York, and in Paris. They painted in Taos, New Mexico, when Georgia O’Keeffe and Henrietta Shore were also there. Margaret and Helen lived in the family’s summer house on Cass Street in Monterey, site of the low-slung barns in Margaret’s 1925 painting. She was one of the exciting colorists that burst onto the NorCal scene as the Tonalist tradition waned. With attention to basic shapes, bright, saturated colors, and a brushy hand, Bruton makes a modern contribution to the California landscape tradition.

But in the post-war world, abstraction—specifically, the New York School of Abstract Expressionism—was in the ascendent. Women like the Bruton sisters, who had received so many WPA mural contacts, were largely marginalized in the macho world of agonized paint-throwing. It didn’t help that the home of a prominent collector burned in the 1991 Oakland fire. For a taste of what was, check out Esther’s murals in the Cirque Room at SF’s Fairmont Hotel, Helen’s mosaics at the San Francisco Zoo, and Margaret’s murals on the John Galen Howard-designed power station (once the Art Gallery) at UC Berkeley.