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Considering unusual places to see fine art in Berkeley?  

Maybe it’s time to visit the Faculty Club on the university campus.  

While it’s not a formal art gallery or museum, the club contains a growing display of permanent and historic art works, and also features intriguing temporary exhibits of art. 

In recent years, the main corridor has been used as a small gallery for changing art exhibits. The displays include paintings in oil or other media, watercolors, photographs, or other forms of visual art. All the exhibitors are associated with the Club as members or affiliates. 

The art displays change monthly and are generally very accomplished, although there’s an occasional exhibit demonstrating more enthusiasm than talent. Styles range from traditional to quite contemporary and avant garde. Many of the artists are also noted scholars. 

Elsewhere in the Club, several pieces of permanent art—some of them incorporated into the architecture—are on display.  

For example, in the O’Neill Room there’s a wonderful 1929 fresco by faculty member Ray Boynton showing a stylized view up Campanile Way, the Berkeley Hills beyond, and two golden allegorical nudes holding the sun and moon, respectively. 

In the Howard Lounge a relief sculpture of the Greek Theatre honors the university’s supervising architect, John Galen Howard. The artwork was created in 1955 by Jacques Schnier, who also did the monumental “St. George and the Dragon” sculpture on the northwest corner of Berkeley High School. 

In the Club’s Great Hall stained glass panels depict emblems of major universities with which Cal faculty have felt particular affinity, including Stanford, represented by a redwood tree on a vivid red and white background. Bernard Maybeck’s carved animal-head beams, constructed a century ago, flank the glass panels. 

The Club also has on display a number of prints and commemorative portraits by various artists, as well as several intriguing paintings by early 20th century professor Perham Nahl. In the words of the Club’s art historian, Phyllis Brooks, “Isadora-style young women dance and toss billiard balls to each other in a woodsy setting” across two murals Nahl did in the Heyns Room. Although no clear explanation of the paintings survives in Club records, it is known that billiards was a popular activity amongst early members. 

The permanent art collection at the Faculty Club was significantly expanded this fall with several important paintings by Berkeley faculty. Collectively called “The Berkeley School Collection, 1930-1950,” the paintings are gifts of several donors brought together by Professor of Art Emeritus Karl Kasten. 

“With Karl’s help we amassed a wonderful group of pictures,” says Brooks. The paintings are now all hung together in the Club’s O’Neill Room, creating a mini-gallery in the midst of the campus. 

Visual art has a long but somewhat unsettled heritage at Berkeley. Drawing was taught from the university’s early years, but typically as a skill necessary for practical subjects such as mechanical engineering, architecture, and even agriculture and military training. 

Three local notables—architect Bernard Maybeck, artist and writer Gelett Burgess, later famous for his “Purple Cow” rhyming, and Ross Brower, father of environmentalist David Brower—were UC drawing instructors at various points in those early years. 

The arrival of German-born painter Eugene Neuhaus finally began to establish a precarious formal foothold for the practice and teaching of fine art on the campus. Neuhaus would also later serve as a Faculty Club president. 

In 1923, he convinced the university administration to establish an art department. By that decade, according to Kasten, “California had to assert itself as not only a producer but a trainer of artists.” 

A decade later Neuhaus made another pivotal contribution to Berkeley when he suggested that the obsolete brick powerhouse on campus just east of Sather Gate be turned into an art venue. The resulting University Art Gallery conceived and hosted small scale but notable exhibits for more than 30 years. 

As inevitably happens in the art world, however, Neuhaus and his colleagues were ultimately displaced by a younger group of artists who viewed the established faculty as outdated traditionalists and took over leadership of the Berkeley painting scene from the 1930s through the 1950s. 

The accomplishments of that period drew the attention of a banquet hall full of alumni, faculty, and friends going nearly back to the beginning—the mid-1930s, in some cases—who gathered at the Faculty Club on Thursday, Oct. 23, to honor the donation of the artworks and the 80th anniversary of the department. 

Wine glasses in hand, guests admired the small exhibit of paintings then sat down to dinner in Maybeck’s Great Hall accompanied by a slideshow by Kasten, recalling his graduate school and early faculty days at Berkeley. 

In a three-decade period, Kasten said, beginning in the late 1920s when Worth Ryder joined the faculty, the Department of Art struck out in new directions, eventually cohering into what became known as the Berkeley School of painting. 

“Time is constantly modifying the views we have of artists,” Kasten observes. “The Berkeley School became less immediately important to a later generation moving more and more to abstraction and expressionism. But time also brings reassessment and the reputation of the Berkeley School and its followers is once again rising.” 

One of Ryder’s pivotal actions was bringing modernist German painter Hans Hoffman—with whom he’d studied in Germany—to the Berkeley campus as a guest instructor.  

Hoffman had two important impacts. First, he inspired several local painters. Later, in the 1960s, Hoffman, grateful for the opportunity the University extended to him in the 30s to work outside Nazi Germany, willed the university a large number of his paintings that became the nucleus of the university’s modern Berkeley Art Museum. 

In the art department’s early days, Kasten said, the “Berkeley School” was facetiously called the “One Hair School” by some San Francisco artists because of the delicate lines many of the Berkeley painters incorporated in their work with fine hair brushes.  

In friendly retaliation “the Berkeley people referred to the San Francisco crowd as the ‘Big Feet School’ because they were following Diego Rivera,” whose paintings and murals often featured figures with oversized appendages. 

Among the Berkeley faculty at the time was Professor Chiura Obata “a great teacher with real sensitivity,” Kasten said. One of the first non-white members of the Berkeley faculty, the Japanese-born Obata was interned by the government during World War II, but later returned to Berkeley.  

One of Obata’s paintings, a delicate filigree of peach-colored rhododendron blossoms, is now included in the Faculty Club collection. Other painters featured in the permanent exhibit are faculty members James McCray, Erle Loran, John Haley, Kasten himself, and graduate student Mary Dumas.  

Several of their paintings show Berkeley scenes, such as Haley’s 1932 view of the Church of the Good Shepherd in West Berkeley and Loran’s “The Berkeley Campus,” a lush view of the 1940s landscape north of the Life Sciences Building. All the artworks now adorn the walls of the O’Neill Room. 

“The Faculty Club is one of the jewels of the campus and another jewel is now the room in which the paintings reside”, says Brooks. 

In one corner of the room a vivid red and black Cubist-inspired portrait by Margaret Peterson stands out. Peterson, like Obata, had a bittersweet connection to the Berkeley campus; in 1949-50, she left her teaching job as one of those who refused on principle to sign the University’s McCarthy-era anti-Communist Loyalty Oath. 

But now, as with the other artists, one of her artworks has a permanent home on the campus. 

(SIDEBAR – INFORMATION ON VISITING THE FACULTY CLUB) 

Although the very name “Faculty Club” perhaps conjures images of aloof inaccessibility, the 101-year-old Berkeley campus institution is anything but.  

You don’t need to be a Club member to eat there and the meals are remarkably affordable. 

You can purchase a sandwich or generous buffet lunch on a weekday and eat informally on an outdoor terrace or at one of the sturdy wooden tables in Maybeck’s Great Hall, since 1903 a gathering place for the intellectual giants of the university (they eat sandwiches, too). Or you can have lunch or dinner in the elegant, white tablecloth Kerr Dining Room, overlooking Faculty Glade. There’s also a cozy bar. 

Guests referred by members or campus departments can stay in the hotel rooms upstairs at the Club, and the Club’s rooms are also available for rental for meetings and special events. The Club has become a popular place for weekend weddings. 

For information on hours, policies and meal service, call the Club’s front desk at 540-5678 or visit its website at http://berkeleyfacultyclub.com. If you wish to see the O’Neill Room art display, please check at the front desk for directions to the room and to make sure it isn’t in use for a meeting. A description of the Club’s artworks, written by Phyllis Brooks, is also available for $1 at the front desk. 

The craftsman-style Faculty Club is located on the UC Berkeley campus, on the eastern edge of Faculty Glade just south of Strawberry Creek. Don’t confuse it with the nearby Women’s Faculty Club—another elegant and venerable campus establishment—that stands to its east.