Dijkstras Celebrate the San Diego School

Ed Garman, Renewal #1, 1971. Sandra and Bram Dijkstra collection

Southern California museum goers know Sandra and Bram Dijkstra as astute collectors of early San Diego and L.A. modernism. The Dijkstras have lent and donated works to the Huntington, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Timken. Now Balboa Park's San Diego History Center is presenting "Collecting San Diego: Selections from the Dijkstra Fine Art Collection." It's a extensive sample of the collection focusing on artists active in the San Diego area.

In the early 20th century, San Diego was even further off the art grid than L.A. Many of the artists here first made their reputation somewhere further east, such as Taos Transcendentalist Ed Garman and Charles Reiffel, an early adopter of modernism on the East Coast. 

In 2016 the Dijkstras gave a pivotal Reiffel Connecticut landscape to the Huntington's Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. The SDHC show features a later view of San Diego County's high desert. It's an unromantic rebuttal to the real estate boosterism of California plein-air painting.

Charles Reiffel, In the Banner Valley, 1926. Dijkstra collection