LAGUNA BEACH, CA.- Laguna Art Museum is now presenting the exhibition, Joseph Kleitsch: Abroad and At Home in Old Laguna, on view since June 24 through September 24, 2023. The exhibition will showcase the work of Joseph Kleitsch, an important California Impressionist painter born in Hungary in 1882. Kleitsch's artwork vividly captures the energy and beauty of Southern California.

“We cannot wait to welcome guests to this exhibition that touches upon every period of Joseph Kleitsch’s artistic output,” said Julie Perlin Lee, Director of Laguna Art Museum when it was first announced in May. “ More than 25 individual and organizational lenders have enthusiastically come together to bring the best of Kleitsch’s artworks together in a showing of sensuous portraits, realistic still lifes and landscape paintings that document the artist’s experimentation and growth from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism. Because of the artist’s ties to Laguna Beach, there is no venue or location more perfect than Laguna Art Museum.”

Kleitsch's early works consisted of small still-life paintings, and eventually masterful portraits with which he built his name. In 1920, Kleitsch and his wife Edna settled in Laguna Beach, where he became a member of the Laguna Beach Art Association and started painting landscapes and street scenes. Notably, Kleitsch's painting, The Old Post Office, depicts a historic view of the town's first post office located near present-day Laguna Avenue and Coast Highway.

In 1924, Kleitsch painted several works at the Mission San Juan Capistrano and created two nearly identical views of "downtown" Laguna titled Laguna Road I and Laguna Road II, showing the unpaved Coast Boulevard that was finally paved in 1926. In 1926, Kleitsch sailed to Europe, where he painted in Paris, Normandie and Claude Monet's home village of Giverny, among other places. He returned to America in 1927 after being away for twenty-two months.

Despite his untimely death at the age of forty-nine, Kleitsch's art continues to live on and his role as a chronicler of old Laguna adds to his standing among the best of California's artists.

This exhibition is generously sponsored by Thomas B. Stiles, II and Barbara Alexander, Historical Collections Council of California Art, Traditional Fine Arts Organization, Inc., an Anonymous Donor, Michael, Sophia and Julia Kelley, Orange County Fine Art Storage / Display, Bonhams, Diane Nesley, Linda and Jim Freund, Joseph and Ambrose and Kevin Rowe and Irene Vlitos Rowe.

June 24 through September 24, 2023