LAGUNA BEACH, CA.- Laguna Art Museum opened Ben Messick: Memories of Los Angeles with a selection of works on paper and paintings. Ben Messick (1891-1981) is celebrated for his images of daily life in Los Angeles during the years of the Great Depression and World War II.

He grew up in the Missouri Ozarks, served in France in World War I, studied at the Chouinard School of Art in Los Angeles from 1925 to 1930, and later taught there. Through most of the 1930s and 1940s Messick lived in an apartment at 2600 West 8th Street in Los Angeles, and everyday scenes in the nearby MacArthur Park (originally Westlake Park) were among his favorite subjects. Other happy hunting-grounds were Pershing Square and Olvera Street.

The foundation of Messick’s art was drawing. He was a superb draftsman who could work either from direct observation or from memory. For the expression and humor he brought to his paintings, drawings, and lithographs of ordinary Angelenos, he has been compared to Honoré Daumier, the keen-eyed chronicler of life in nineteenth-century Paris.

Messick was encouraged to take up lithography, the print technique most suited to his draftsmanship, by the art critic Arthur H. Millier. Beginning in 1939, he made thirty-eight lithographs, mostly with the Los Angeles printer Carl J. Winter.

The museum owns a number of Messick’s drawings and lithographs, supplemented in this exhibition with works on loan from other Southern California collections, including three of his finest paintings.