PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY PALM SPRINGS ART MUSEUM, GIFT OF NADINE AND ROBERT HALL
Palm Springs Art Museum has acquired a painting by the early California impressionist George Brandriff (1890–1936) depicting a scene, circa 1920, from what many Palm Springs residents know as Section 14, the slice of downtown where a culturally and ethnically diverse community lived until 1962, when the city evicted and displaced the residents and razed their homes.
This history was recently revisited amid the city’s decision to relocate the statue of then-mayor Frank Bogert from in front of city hall.
Palm Springs Indian Reservation, a 24-by-28-inch canvas donated to the museum by Nadine and Robert Hall, represents Brandriff’s departure from traditional landscape painting at a time when some artists were beginning to reflect social concerns in their work. “The painting serves as an important link to the indigenous, multicultural, and colonial history of Palm Springs,” says Christine Giles, senior curator at the museum. “Brandriff has represented the makeshift homes of the inhabitants, with a figure of a woman in red in the center, with the mountains in the distant background.” While its subject matter was different for Brandriff, this painting packs the same expressive brushwork he was known to apply to his plein-air landscapes.