Lost and found ... and found!

Could this be a long-lost corner of Chalon before 1961? Image
 is slightly cropped. (Photo by Bud Hankel. Used with permission.)

OH, THE WONDERS OF SOCIAL MEDIA. Somebody noticed some Mount Archives stuff on the web and surprised us with some heretofore unknown Mount artwork.

We've blogged about the Mount's iconic artist, Sister Ignatia Cordis, CSJ, who founded the Art Department in the 1920s and painted till the end of her earthy life in 1986 at age 99. We've noted how her paintings were largely destroyed in the Bel Air Fire, and when we discovered a treasure trove of slides taken in 1979, we started getting a handle on her surviving and later works. We scanned the slides and put them on our Flickr site at http://flic.kr/s/aHsjCjzRY1.

Debbie Ream in our PR department forwarded a message from Amy Hankel in Rogersville, Mo. In her voicemail, Amy explained that she and her husband, Bud, owned a painting signed by Sister Ignatia and and found out that she once taught at Mount St. Mary's. Could we tell her more about Sister and the painting?

We called back and talked to Bud, who said he'd purchased the watercolor at the Superior Thrift Store in Stockton maybe 15 years ago. The family later moved to the Ozark Mountains in southern Missouri and hung the watercolor of the foyer of their home, where it remains. He has been curious about the signature and did some internet searching, where he eventually found the Flickr site and this blog.

A photograph of the painting, attached to an email from Bud, shows some droopy eucalyptus trees and a steep staircase with a rickety wooden rail. There are some indefinite shadows in the background. Could those be hills? Could this be the Chalon Campus? Even more interesting, could this predate the 1961 disaster?

We're going to show the photo around to some of the landscape guys and see if they recognize those stairs. Our current theory is they were adjacent to the old Bowl, about where the Drudis-Biada Building and parking structure are now. The Bowl was destroyed in the 1961 fire.

Many thanks to the Hankels for reaching out, and three cheers for social media.  Maybe we'll be able to locate some of the other 56 paintings.

Detail of the painting with signature. (Photo by Bud Hankel. Used with permission.)

Sr. Ignatia's works on virtual view

Sister Ignatia in the mid-
1970s when she was about
90 years old. 

THE MOUNT'S Sister Ignatia Cordis was a prolific painter but, as we noted, original, hanging works are rare, and nearly everything she did prior to 1961 was lost in the Bel Air Fire.

The discovery of an unlabeled box of slides on a shelf in the College Archives was exciting indeed, because the contents give us a glimpse of her diversity of styles. Among her later works are watercolors and oils that documented the aftermath of the same fire that destroyed her artistic legacy.

All of the digitized slides can now be enjoyed in the MSMC Archives space on Flickr. If you can contribute a description or comment, feel free. The slides came with no information, and only bits and pieces in the Mount records suggest that the photos were taken at the time of a retrospective exhibit of Sister's work in 1979.

We'd love to know where her cityscapes were painted, and is that Yosemite Valley and the Ahwahnee Hotel we see?

Arches in a quiet corner of Carondelet Center.

Lost and found: the art of Sister Ignatia

Mount convent (Rossiter Hall) in ruins after the 1961 Bel Air Fire.

SISTER IGNATIA CORDIS, CSJ, founded the Mount Art Department in the 1920s and passed away in 1986 at 99, renowned for her sometimes avant-garde work and for pushing the boundaries of what was considered suitable for a Catholic nun to paint.

In a film cabinet drawer in the College Archives, a yellowed envelope tells a familiar story of pictures borrowed and never returned. A typewritten label dated December, 1985 -- a few months before Sister Ignatia's death -- reads:

Lost -- set of slides of Sr. Ignatia's art show. The set was removed from the archives and never returned. I have asked the Art Department, the press, etc., but no positive results.

It's signed by Sister Margaret Lynch, then the College Archivist.

Every archivist knows that kind of frustration, but for Sister Margaret it had to be especially painful. When the Mount convent (Rossiter Hall) was destroyed in the Bel Air Fire in November, 1961, most of Sister Ignatia's early work also went up in flames. She continued to paint -- including documenting the damage to the College in a series of impressionistic watercolors like the one above -- and in October, 1979, the College staged a tribute exhibit of 50 of her paintings. Photographic copies were carefully made of the hanging work by Los Angeles photographer Gerson Bender and a set handed over to the Treasure Room (as the Mount's Archives & Special Collections were then known).

We are happy to report that after nearly 27 years, the slides have surfaced. Our intrepid volunteer Vivian Santibáñez unearthed them in a shoebox full of unmarked yellow slide boxes, and the Skirball Cultural Center archives kindly let us scan them there last week.

We'll post some of the images over on Facebook at MSMC Archives. Mostly buildings and interesting landscapes, some paintings have historic value, like the one below, a drawing of 21 Chester Place. This imposing white mansion next to the Doheny Campus was torn down and the land sold to L.A. Unified to build Lanterman High School.

That's life in the archives world -- you lose a few, you find a few. Some of Sister's originals hang here and there around both campuses, but the location of many from the 1979 show is unknown. At least now we know what we're looking for. We're sure Sisters Margaret and Ignatia are pleased.

21 Chester Place was the model for the Addams Family home in the
classic 1960s sitcom. No other images exist in the MSMC Archives. 

Advent

SISTER IGNATIA CORDIS, CSJ, served as chairman of the Art Department for more than three decades, from the founding of the Mount in 1925 until 1961. She passed away in 1986 at the age of 99.

A few of Sister Ignatia's works grace the college walls, including a watercolor hanging in Hannon Parlor that depicts the ruins of Rossiter Hall after the Bel Air Fire. Many of her works, sad to say, were lost in that same fire, which destroyed her rooms in Rossiter as well as the studios in the Marian Hall of Fine Arts.

The image above is "The Annunciation," an oil painting done in 1946 and probably Sister's best-known and most unusual work. Her surviving works are all landscapes, but this modernistic treatment of a classic theme is unique. The original is hanging in the Chalon office of President Ann McElaney-Johnson and makes a nice welcome to the Advent season.