Federal Arts Programs Emphasized Traditional American Values and President Rooseveltã¢ââ¢s Leadership
Dream and Perspective: American Scene Painting in Southern California
by Susan K. Anderson
The following essay was written by Susan Chiliad. Anderson. It is an essay written for, and included in, the 1991 book titled American Scene Painting: California 1930s and 1940s , edited by Ruth Westphal and Janet Blake Dominik, and published by Westphal Publishing, Irvine, California, ISBN 0-9610520-3-i. Essay reprinted with permission of Westphal Publishing.
The arts which today have almost vitality for the boilerplate person are things he does not take to exist arts: for example, the moving picture, jazzed music, the comic strip, and, too frequently, paper accounts of dear nests, murders, and exploits of bandits.
JOHN DEWEY [1]
I n 1932 when Thomas Hart Benton, the most active participant in the American Scene motility, introduced Mickey Mouse and other cartoon characters into one of his panels for the Whitney Museum of American Fine art landscape, The Arts of Life in America, he demolished the usual boundaries separating "high" and "popular" art. In the aforementioned mural, he alternately historic various aspects of American civilization and "thumbed his nose" at the political world. [2] Benton's artistic human action, considered brazen at the time, gave visual form to a direction for American art that became established coast to declension and that continues to lend vitality to gimmicky art today. Nowhere was the merger of "loftier" and "low" and so compatible in 1930s and 1340s America as in Los Angeles, an irreverant city in which popular culture and fine art went hand-in-hand, and where art and artists played a dual social role: they reflected a growing awareness and concern nearly social bug, while they participated in the American dream by projecting an image of optimistic religion.
In the 1920s, Southern California seemed the promised land of perfect climate and beauty, and of fortunes to exist made in real estate, movies, tourism, and oil. Local plein air painters were making images of this gold land at the very moment that impressionism was beginning becoming widely appreciated by publics in Europe and America. In Europe impressionism was popular due to its simultaneous and seemingly contradictory project of the nostalgic aura of "paradise lost" in the wake ofthe destruction of World War I and the "radicalism" of mod civilization. In the United States, Low-era paintings of the American scene, rather than impressionist scenes, would mirror the
developing machinery of modernistic, and hence, mass civilization, while at the same time reflecting a sense of nostalgia for the agrarian past.
During the first three decades of the twentieth century, Southern California artists still came mostly from distant areas and studied in schools exterior the region. In general, the art scene was conservative, and art-making devoid of ideological underpinnings. While a few artists explored new forms and techniques and worked in a modernist vein, the majority broadly interpreted impressionism and focused on pure landscape. In that location was no strong regional tradition other than impressionism in the visual arts, and there were few institutions -- schools, museums, and galleries -- to support the arts.
In the 1930s creative action in Southern California shifted to Los Angeles. A greater openness to modernism developed, and painters who had been inspired by impressionist models consolidated their findings. Concurrently a younger generation, largely regionally-bred and trained, came to the fore. This essay examines the contribution of these younger painters and the American Scene movement of which they were a part. Like painters associated with the movement elsewhere, Southland artists articulated personal visions of their native land, creating both positive rural and urban views (commonly chosen Regionalism) equally well as scenes incorporating social and political commentary (called Social Realism). And although the artists depicted a specific fourth dimension and place -- Southern California in the 1930s and 1340s -- in their best piece of work they made broader comments on the human condition.
No unmarried individual or group of artists wholly dominated the American Scene movement in Southern California. There were the government fine art projects and the presence of the Mexican muralists which contributed to a strain of Social Realism in the region. Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Lorser Feitelson, who were actively experimenting with modernist forms, were highly influential equally the directors of the federal art projects in the expanse. Barse Miller, Fletcher Martin, Paul Sample, Phil Dike, Millard Sheets, Hardie Gramatky, Emil J. Kosa, Jr., Phil Paradise, Ben Messick, Lee Blair, Rex Brandt, and others formed a loosely-knit group often referred to as the California Schoolhouse, which interpreted the American scene in a uniquely Southern California way.
The California School created mainly positive Regionalist images epitomizing the proclivity to American dream making of the era, although its artists sometimes also painted mild social commentaries. Watercolor, unabashedly traditional and popular, was a major vehicle of expression for artists of the California Schoolhouse. The special climate of the region afforded artists an outdoor existence, encouraging use of the medium in the field. They developed a plein air approach that allowed for improvisation and gestural freedom; completing their paintings in one session, they applied wide strokes of fresh colour chop-chop and spontaneously. The picturesque Southern California landscape and its quality of light drew the artists outdoors to paint, and the power of the land shaped their consciousness, but for the most part, they rejected the traditional painted mural. They were concerned with the rawness of the Southern California urban and rural mural, and they incorporated narrative and various aspects of popular culture into their art too.
The merging of traditional art with popular or autonomous notions about art occurred in the U.s.a. during the 1930s in the midst of political and economic turmoil. Many regions throughout the country forged their artistic identity under the influence of the New Deal. Southern California art reflected the national American Scene movement, but grew out of the existing cultural fabric of the state. Information technology was the unique product of the particular historical condition and economic circumstance of the region. Southern California, with its Hispanic legacy, large population of Pacific Asians, and influx of European emigres, was conditioned by its multicultural nature. Murals and paintings of the California scene such every bit Tom Craig's Plaza Los Angeles, 1935, reflected that reality. During this flow the region grew to over 2 1000000 inhabitants, first emerging quickly from its rural status, and so suffering the plummet of its boomtown image. The surface area witnessed the arrival of whole populations from the Midwest and other points in the Usa harder hit past the Depression, who were seeking Southern California'southward mild climate and healthier economy.
Southland artists prospered under the sheltering umbrella and glamorous entreatment of Hollywood. The region's entertainment industry, which was a locus for such popular arts equally film, radio, animation, graphics, and photography, fostered the vital interaction between the pop and fine arts which Los Angeles has since come to recap. The city was a magnet for those seeking employment, and many artists pursuing serious careers as painters survived the Depression by working in the picture industry, which provided major economic back up to the arts and contributed to the economic recovery of the area as early as 1934.
During the Depression, only as Hollywood films captured and disseminated the dream life of the masses, and so did the California Schoolhouse. Like other expressions of the American scene, films and California School painting articulated American cultural ideals and projected an image of optimistic faith in the democratic platonic. They take, therefore, special social and cultural significance as embodiments of the American dream, which promises liberty, individualism, and new possibilities. Even in the era of the Depression and the New Deal, the image of California as a gold land prevailed, and the paintings reflected a mobile gild that emphasized recreation and entertainment as a way of life. Many of the paintings featured those qualities which make the state a tourist mecca such every bit Barse Miller's Balboa Inlet, 1942 and Phil Dike's California Holiday, 1933.
There was a vital interaction betwixt moving picture, an indisputably pop and American art form, and the more traditional arts during this period. This was true to a bottom extent in other parts of the land -- even the imagery in Thomas Hart Benton's America Today murals made reference to early Hollywood films -- but this was especially the case in Southern California. Many artists associated with the California School actively worked in the film industry, especially in the blitheness field, and in the Disney studio, where they were influenced by the technology and enriched by the subject area of studio work. The industry became an important support organisation for some of them.
Southland artists also made major contributions to the moving picture artful. Historian Richard Schickel claimed Disney was "a human almost totally disengaged from the realities of the larger earth" but acknowledged that the animated cartoons nevertheless "caught something of the truth of the American Scene and situation of the time." [3] Cross pollinations between the animated pic and the Regionalist expression was inevitable. Band Concert of 1935, the first Mickey Mouse film in Technicolor, was a Regionalist drawing and was widely considered a work of high creative merit. [four] This crossover betwixt the arts was recognized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1940 when Roland McKinney organized a Walt Disney retrospective entitled Walt Disney Medium.
Signs of this interaction are too establish in the curious illustrational quality and popular appeal of Southern California Regionalist paintings, especially the watercolor expressions. Chouinard School of Art, where many of the California School artists studied and taught, supplied Walt Disney Studios with many of its artists. Most of the preparatory work and backgrounds for the Disney films were made in watercolor. The Disney cartoons and the California School watercolors shared formal features, besides: they eschewed realistic item and preferred well-divers outlines, undulating curves and serpentine lines; they used large areas of white paper, and relied on representational cliches and compositional schemes. The artists were likewise masters of characterization and the depiction of activeness or movement. Phil Dike'due south Echo Park, 1935, personifies the happy, cleaned-up world of American life that Disney loved to portray. It may be that 1930s movies, which used a potent vertical tilt of the camera, inspired the eccentric angle in this and other California paintings.
Hardie Gramatky, Charles Payzant, and Phil Dike held important jobs at Walt Disney Studios during the 1930s. Dike, nationally prominent for his watercolors and oils of the Southern California scene, was an teacher, color coordinator, and story designer on such animated classics as Fantasia and Snow White. In 1941 he told an interviewer for Time that,
- It'due south an obvious fact that cartoons reach a much greater audience and therefore have a bigger influence than the single picture exhibited in some museum. I'm not ready to say that a Disney moving-picture show is better than a Rembrandt or vice versa. This business organisation is actually too young to tell . . . how far an creative person can go if he makes a career of it. I'm inclined to recall, however, that in time artists will be adult in this field who volition be just as slap-up as some of the past masters whom we apply now as source material. [5]
Xx years later Roy Lichtenstein took the image of Mickey Mouse, introduced it into the "loftier" art context, and epitomized the basic premises of the American Pop aesthetic.
The spirit of artistic exchange that contributed to the emergence of the California Schoolhouse began at Chouinard School of Fine art in the late 1920s (reincorporated in 1935 every bit Chouinard Art Institute and in 1961 as California Constitute of the Arts). Founded by Nelbert Chouinard in 1921, the school adult a national reputation which has persisted to the nowadays 24-hour interval. During the 1930s information technology was at the heart of the vital Los Angeles fine art community, centered in Westlake Park and consisting of the Fine art Centre School, Otis Art Institute, the Federal Art Projection Center, the Foundation of Western Fine art, Stendahl Galleries, Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, Jake Zeitlin's Bookshop, the Los Angeles Art Association, and a number of fine art supply stores, chief among them Ted Gibson Framers.
The artists connected to Chouinard lived together in boarding houses in the neighborhood and shared studios near the schoolhouse. Many regularly gathered in the barn behind Chouinard to work and talk about fine art; some took painting trips together. They shared many common interests including "the fundamental problems of aesthetics and pregnant of painting," [6] though their relative isolation from more established fine art centers contributed to an innovative disregard for stylistic influences. Though the students were somewhat scattered throughout the big Southern California area subsequently their experiences at Chouinard, they continued to back up each other throughout the difficult menstruum of the 1930s, exchanging ideas and dipping out of a communal artistic pool. They created lasting bonds through their joint interest in educational institutions and associations such as the California Water Colour Society, and through their work together in the motion picture manufacture and on the federal art projects. This creative interchange resulted in a unified approach to the Southern California environment and shared aesthetic concepts, though the artists adult individual styles.
Millard Sheets, who studied and taught watercolor to many of the California School artists at Chouinard, was an early driving force behind the American Scene in Southern California. He, as well as Dike, Blair, Gramatky, Miller, Messick, Paradise, and others who studied at the schoolhouse, experienced early success (touching off a pattern still enjoyed past California Establish of the Arts graduates today). In October 1930 the Art Digest announced that Sheets was the just West Coast artist accepted into the International Exhibition of Painting at the Carnegie Institute, the largest and most prestigious of the annual exhibitions of oil painting in the U.s., and manufactures on his achievements shortly began to appear with regularity in national periodicals. It was in this same twelvemonth that Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood individually began to receive national recognition equally well. Iv years later these midwestern artists would appear on the cover of Fourth dimension magazine and the American Scene, especially Regionalism, would go nationally popularized.
The painting that Sheets entered in the Carnegie International, Women of Cartagena, 1930, was non an American Scene painting though it incorporated some of the same elements. Sheets took the influences of postimpressionism, the early on Italian Renaissance, and the Mexican muralists to create a apartment design infused with an sensation of contemporary European modernism -- what was missing to make it an American Scene painting were the interest in spatial depth, illusionism, and the local subject matter popular at the time. His first major American Scene painting was Affections's Flying, 1931, which contrasts to painting of the urban poor made in other parts of the country in its spectacular use of color and considering it depicted the scene without focusing on hardship or squalor. He portrayed the vivid California sunlight -- a characteristic of the work of other surface area artists too. And he used a boundless perspective, coupled with a dramatic shut-up and action in depth -- possibly related to contemporary filmic devices.
This painting, as well as Sheets'south Tenement Flats, 1934, remember George Bellows's influential painting Cliff Dwellers, 1913, in terms of discipline affair but not in terms of stylistic approach. Sheets's prominent influences at the time were the Ashcan School (especially Bellows) and Thomas Hart Benton, whose America Today murals at the New School for Social Research he had visited in 1930. [vii] The stylistic influence of Benton is most obvious in Sheets'due south Jasper Biddle's Firm, 1934, as well equally in Phil Paradise'due south Carl, a portrait of artist Carl Beetz .[eight] Several of Sheets'southward paintings from this period are a mild form of Social Realism (he assisted the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros in the completion of a mural at Chouinard in 1932) and some, such as Tenement Flats, also show traces of precisionism, an influence as well visible in Paul Sample'due south early on paintings such as Speech Near Brewery, 1932. According to Sheets, he was as well influenced in his pick of new bailiwick thing by the Eastern artist Edward Bruce, who visited California and befriended Sheets at this time (and who may have been a source for Sheets'due south new stylistic arroyo in watercolor beginning in 1932). [9] Bruce was later extremely influential as the national manager for the Works Progress Assistants/Federal Art Project.
Sheets went to teach at Scripps Higher in 1332. There he built up an art section around which an art colony adult like in spirit to the art centers later fostered by the federal WPA, or to Grant Wood's well-known Stone Metropolis Fine art Colony near Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Presently later arriving at the school, Sheets met Hartley Burr Alexander, a philosopher interested in ancient, archaic, and Eastern art. The artist came under Alexander's influence, and information technology may be due to the relationship that Sheets somewhen de-emphasized the social realist subject field matter in his paintings and, instead, in works such every bit Abandoned, 1934, began to create moody and evocative visions exuding a spiritual quality more powerful than a sense of physical time and place.
Nigh southern California urban scenes were either positive expressions or mild forms of Social Realism. Urbanization, industrialization, and the passing of agrarian life -- popular themes with the midwestern Regionalists Benton, Curry, and Wood -- were perceived as negative processes in Los Angeles much later than in the rest of the country. The veneration of small boondocks existence was not prevalent in the area during the 1920s and 1930s. Edward Hopper'southward urban visions are certainly tougher and more wrought with existential despair and alienation than Sheets's Beer for Prosperity, 1933, which is total of life and animation. Unlike Reginald Marsh's urban views of New York, which are agile and full of crowds into which the individual disappears, Ben Messick's urban paintings of group activeness such as Pitchman, 1939, focus on pocket-sized knots of city dwellers with humor and humanity.
Non all urban scenes were quite so positive, yet. The artists of the California Schoolhouse sometimes walked a fine line betwixt playful infatuation with popular civilization and the American dream and a sense of a much darker reality. Every bit though disregarding the almost enforced cheerfulness of the official American Scene, Dan Lutz magnified the undercurrent of dread lurking in popular images, creating paintings which nevertheless managed to exude a certain pathos or comic intensity. His painting Neighborhood Theatre, c. 1940, of a movie marquee featuring Greta Garbo -- an image located squarely inside the canon of American pop culture -- rather than symbolizing the glamor of Hollywood, elicits melancholy and a wrenching nostalgia.
For a brief period in the early on 1930s Southern California did see a proliferation of painting reflecting the hard social and economical conditions of the time. Following a national tendency, this thematic business declined somewhat in Southern California after 1934. This was the year in which the federal art projects were instituted and in which Regionalism was featured in Time. When important American artists arrived on the scene equally champions of the American way of life, they began to soften the satirical and critical elements of their fine art in order to fulfill their cultural part and, in some cases, in order to capitalize on the new pop prototype. In general, both watercolor and oil painting of the period in Southern California made a transition from a mild form of Social Realism in the early 1930s, to reflections of American dream-making during the later 1930s and early 1930s, to, finally, paintings of the inevitable build-up to World War II and the war effort itself.
The federal art programs instituted nether Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Bargain gave direction to the cultural life of the country and economical relief to artists during difficult times, affording them crucial experience with commissions and group activity, and lending them a sense of mission, impetus, and management. Many local artists competed for and won prestigious commissions for federal post offices and public buildings in the surface area nether the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture (SECTION, 1934-1943) including Barse Miller, Fletcher Martin, George Samerjan, Edward Biberman, Boris Deutsch, Maynard Dixon, Charles Kassler 2, and Lucien Labaudt. Milford Zornes, Paul Sample, Ben Messick, Rex Brandt, Millard Sheets, Hugo Ballin, Dorr Bothwell, Conrad Buff, Grace Clements, Elanor Colburn, Helen Lundeberg, Lorser Feitelson, Murray Hantman (assisted by Reuben Kadish and Philip Goldstein [Guston]), Leo Katz, Haldane Douglas, and Stanton Macdonald-Wright were some of those who worked on mural projects located in borough centers, libraries, museums, and public schools sponsored by the government relief programs -- the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP, 1933-1934), the Works Progress Administration/Federal Fine art Project (WPA/FAP, 1935-1943) and the Treasury Relief Fine art Project (TRAP, 1935-1938). [10] Leadership of the projects in Southern California included Merle Armitage as chairman of the Federal Art Project, Stanton Macdonald-Wright as director, and Lorser Feitelson as his assistant. Millard Sheets served on the Art Committee of the PWAP which organized much of the work undertaken by artists and craftsmen. [eleven] The Southern California committee received national acclaim for the unusual cooperation between artist and public and for soliciting more money than any other region. [12]
All works completed under the federal projects were "officially" committed to the themes and subject matter of the American Scene. Considering of this, paintings and murals created under the projects were honest attempts past local artists to respond to the national program while maintaining "an 'ethic towards society' in harmony with the needs and visions of their mean solar day." [13] They were also a mild form of propaganda that glorified the American capitalist system. New Deal art in Southern California projected an idyllic image of the region during a period in which Southern California was transformed by poverty, expansion, and cultural variety. It served the vested interests of both federal and local governments seeking to expand economic and political bases, [xiv] simply it also intentionally started an unprecedented local art movement that redefined the forms and issues of art in the region.
SECTION murals, which were awarded past the U. Due south. Treasury Section following competition, sometimes combined a sophisticated regional statement with social relevance. Well-nigh local murals completed under the PWAP and FAP, however, were closely scrutinized past committees of prominent citizens and emphasized regional ideals and subjects, reflecting the resources, industry, and recreational activities of the area, as well as historical phases of early on California. They rarely, if ever, made reference to "unpleasant reality or any meaningful social context." [15] Censorship was adequately common, and some murals were whitewashed which did not comply with local standards of "taste," making either social or modernist statements considered too strong. In 1936 H. 1000. Kurtzworth, director of the Los Angeles Fine art Association and the California Academy of Fine Arts wrote that
- . . murals selected by amateurs and painted by "Our Gang" will postage stamp many a wall with things of which nosotros will soon be ashamed unless level headed professional guidance is used in their creation or groups of citizens armed with whitewash brushes be chosen upon to preserve the dignity of a nation . . . [sixteen]
The Depression, coupled with the U. South. desire to maintain neutrality in the confront of mounting conflicts in Europe, contributed to a wave of nationalism which was sweeping the country. Artists and critics across the nation spoke out confronting European art in favor of the development of a truly indigenous art. Los Angeles was naturally in tune with the nationwide disquisitional rejection of European loftier taste, though Southern California artists were not self-consciously concerned with excluding European art and values, or with forging an creative nationalism This is not to say that they were immune to becoming heatedly involved in the effect of conservativism versus modernism which was gripping the American fine art world, nevertheless.
For example, artist Rex Brandt studied in Berkeley, where John Haley and Erle Loran had originated a style chosen by critic Alfred Frankenstein the "Berkeley School." Haley and Loran were professors at the Academy of California and students of Hans Hofmann. Though the piece of work of the Berkeley School was a manifestation of American Regionalism, the work of these artists exhibited more of the modernist tendency toward abstraction than Southern California paintings. In 1935, while still a student, Brandt completed the watercolor Afternoon at Kellers, which shows the legacy of Hofmann and Raoul Dufy. The painting was selected by Grace McCann Morley, director of the San Francisco Museum of Art, for inclusion in the International H2o Color Exhibition at the Fine art Institute of Chicago, and subsequently selected past the director of that institute, Robert Harshe, as ane of 30 watercolors to represent American painting at the Texas Centennial Exhibition. Notwithstanding for all his success with innovation of form, Brandt turned to a purely representational style, as seen in Rain at Box Springs Camp, 1938, before long after returning to Southern California considering of the pressure to pigment in a "strictly representational" manner. [17]
During the 1930s, when public murals were destroyed, paintings were also removed from museums under pressure from a wide range of groups. Of interest in this regard is a painting past Barse Miller, quintessentially of the menses and of the region. Apparition Over Los Angeles, 1932, which satirized evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, was removed from an showroom at the Los Angeles Museum because the director believed "the subject affair . . . to exist too controversial for exhibition in a county establishment." [xviii] The painting, which had just been awarded a prize for "all-time interpretation of the Los Angeles scene," depicted the cult leader and her latest hubby floating in clouds shaped like sacks of money over Angelus Temple, with a crowd of witnesses beneath. [nineteen] Miller, who gained national notoriety for the incident, later earned regional distinction as a teacher at the Fine art Center School in Pasadena. He created many murals for the federal art projects and served as chief of the Combat Art Department in the Pacific during World War Two.
Paul Sample, who had entered his painting of revolutionary workers in forepart of Los Angeles'due south Mana Brewery, Speech Near Brewery, in the same museum exhibition, regarded the museum'due south activity as "the opening gun in a local fight to 'testify whether artists shall paint subjects of vital involvement or shall be confined to painting pretty flowers and eucalyptus copse'. " [20] This pressure to conform was stepped upwards in 1940 when the local Society for Sanity in Art, Inc. formed to "encourage and promote an art that is based on sound, cardinal principles ... To display, exhibit and publicize works of art that are sane, understandable and congenital upon tradition ..." [21] Even in the tardily 1940s the Los Angeles art world was a largely conservative society -- and so much so that anticommunist crusaders found themselves in alliance with illiberal art groups in mounting attacks on progressive modernism.
The idea that the artist was an integral worker chemical element in the community was common during the Depression and reflected the idealism of the Mexican movement in art and New Bargain rhetoric. Social commentary in painting reflected the national involvement in subjects of social concern every bit well every bit the presence of the Mexican muralists in Southern California. The populism of the Mexican muralists provided the model for the New Deal projects in the U. S. and was a prime cistron in the evolution of American Scene painting in Southern California. Many artists were influenced by their humanistic and political vision in the early 1930s, but the force of their vision extends into contemporary expressions today.
Although they saw the work of Picasso, Matisse, and even the Blaue Reiter artists at Stendahl and Hatfield Galleries, it was Mexican art that most impressed the students and teachers at Chouinard School of Art, and this enthusiasm extended to other artists in the region as well. This involvement began in 1930 with the arrival of José Clemente Orozco, and it was intensified by the exhibition of Mexican art organized by the Federation of Arts of Los Angeles in 1931. Orozco painted the Prometheus mural at nearby Pomona Higher in Claremont depicting "the creative insubordinate who heroically sacrifices himself for the skilful of human being." In all his work, Orozco called for the destruction of the existing order in the service of the creation of a new, more than humane, social system. [22]
In addition to Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Alfredo Ramos Martinez were in Southern California during the 1930s (and Diego Rivera was in San Francisco). Ramos Martinez lived in Southern California for xiv years and died while completing a series of murals for the Margaret Fowler Memorial Garden at Scripps Higher, also in Claremont. He founded the open-air schools in Mexico which provided the stimulus for Siqueiros and other Mexican artists to enter direct into the revolutionary struggle for freedom.
David Alfaro Siqueiros, a staunch Marxist and the Mexican muralist most involved in the revolutionary and economic struggles of this fourth dimension, was besides the most concerned with the revolutionizing of fine art materials, tools, and techniques. He first introduced his ideological approach and experimentation with techniques to U. S. artists in 1932, when he taught a workshop in fresco technique to students at Chouinard. Lee Blair, Phil Paradise, Paul Sample, Elmer Plummer, James Patrick, Barse Miller, Millard Sheets, and others, designated as the Bloc of Mural Painters, assisted the artist in the completion of the landscape Street Meeting in the courtyard of the school. Siqueiros developed his new methods of landscape painting using plastic industrial materials and spray guns while in Los Angeles, and the Bloc of Mural Painters were the first American artists to benefit from his spirit' of experímentation and the spontaneous, direct approach he took to art. [23] These features would become the hallmark of the California Schoolhouse watercolor style, exemplified in Dike'due south Then Information technology Rained, 1939. Here the artist used the improvisational and expressionistic backdrop of the medium to create the effect of a torrential downpour.
Siqueiros's assistants also learned greater boldness and stylization of course, too every bit deeper concern with social issues. Equally Lorser Feitelson recalled, "[Siqueiros] brought tenebrism, illusionism, and also this architectonic quality; it had guts in it! Information technology fabricated everything else of the time wait similar candybox illustrations. Many of the artists said, My God! This is a wonderful vocabulary." [24] Evidence of Siqueiros's influence on these artists is visible in the works of Sample, Blair, Miller, Paradise, and Sheets, simply also extended outward to other artists of the California School. Due to this heightened political and social consciousness, Lee Blair made Dissenting Factions, of workers striking in the picture show industry, and Millard Sheets, Mary Blair, and Leon Amyx depicted the migrant camps and homeless migrant workers. George Samerjan depicted the evacuation of Terminal Island during the Earth War 2 internment of Japanese citizens. Ben Messick and Carl Beetz featured the down-and-out unemployed, while David Levine looked at the destruction left by the 1938 flooding of the Los Angeles River. Paul Sample made paintings of labor themes at this time in response to his experience. Every bit historian Robert L. McGrath has pointed out, Sample's painting Spoken communication About Brewery is closely related to the Chouinard landscape, especially in the figure of the labor agitator speaking to the oversupply. [25] Sample was regionally influential at this fourth dimension equally chairman of the Art Department at the University of Southern California. Inside a few years, he gained recognition as one of America's foremost painters of the time.
Soon after the Chouinard mural, Siqueiros increased the number of his Bloc of Mural Painters to twenty-iv and painted another fresco on Olvera Street, the main street of the district that then, as now, conserved the Mexican heritage of Los Angeles. He painted Tropical America in response to the wretched weather of Mexican laborers in the nearby Royal Valley and the unwarranted deportation of Mexican nationals. [26] In it Siqueiros depicted a naked Indian body crucified on a double cross with the Northward American hawkeye perched on summit, making a chilling statement about the consequences of U. S. imperialism. Seen at the time equally Communist propaganda, the mural was so controversial that the portion of it most visible from the street was before long painted over, with the remainder whitewashed within a couple of years. [27]
The 3rd and terminal landscape that Siqueiros executed in Los Angeles (and in the U.s.a., as he painted no others), was made in the Santa Monica home of Dudley Potato, the film director. Portrait of Present-Day Mexico dealt with contemporary Mexican political concerns and included a portrait of the president of Mexico, according to Siqueiros the "lowest symbol of corruption." [28] Fletcher Martin, Luis Arenal, and Reuben Kadish assisted Siqueiros in this fresco. Fletcher Martin was strongly influenced by Siqueiros's ideology and later on became head of the American Artists' Congress in Southern California, an organization that put on exhibitions and was a forum for political ideas .[29] Dan Lutz, Phil Dike, Barse Miller, Paul Sample, and Merrill Gage ofttimes met in Martin's studio where they would draw and discuss fine art theory and the politics of the day. In 1936 Martin painted a mural for North Hollywood Loftier Schoolhouse, then won a competition for a Treasury Department mural at the U. S. Post Office in San Pedro. He became extremely well-known and influential nationally after leaving Los Angeles in 1940 to supersede Grant Forest as artist-in-residence at the University of Iowa. The post-obit year he succeeded Thomas Hart Benton as caput of the Painting Department of the Kansas City Art Institute.[30] Many of his greatest works were completed in Los Angeles, notwithstanding. The classic Trouble in Frisco, 1938, a painting of labor struggle on the waterfront, shows the influence of Siqueiros in terms of form as well as subject field matter; Martin may take learned from Siqueiros the accentuation of the illusion of sharply receding space and crowding of activeness into a tondo shape.
Equally the work of the California School adult throughout the decade of the 1930s, it reflected the artists' increased experimentation with new materials and techniques and involvement in motion or action. This was a major direction for American art which would take agree in the post-Globe War II period. By the tardily 1930s, many California School artists had mastered their arts and crafts and were refining an established direction. The work of some lost its original vitality as the spirit of improvisation in response to one's locale became codification into a certain look or style. Others, such as Dan Lutz, Barse Miller, and Phil Dike, were already experimenting with new forms and a more than gestural arroyo. Past about 1938, when the country was opening up again with the waning of isolationism, criticism was already mounting against the American Scene movement which began to be seen as chauvinistic and narrow at a fourth dimension when fascism was on the rising in Europe.
With the U.Due south. archway into World War 2, the activity of the nation became directed toward defence and international affairs rather than the local scene, and California artists were enlisted into the service of the land. Exhibitions lost their regional focus, and art in general suffered a loss of management.
The Los Angeles of the 1940s, noted for its rapid growth, differed very much from the previous decade. The sense of euphoria and optimism that sprang upwardly immediately after the end of the war during postwar expansion was shortlived. By the belatedly 1940s, when the disastrous effects of urbanization were fully recognized, Angelenos suffered a sharp sense of loss over a passing manner of life because it was then rapid and and so visible. The fine art scene in Southern California was besides rapidly changing and, though leap by tradition, was becoming fertile ground for a myriad of vanguard European and American influences. Though it was not until the 1950s that Los Angeles, already a decentralized suburban society, was characterized in Hollywood films as a wasteland, the epitome of the city began to change during the 1940s. Los Angeles became a national symbol of the manipulation of mass culture and the leveling of the arts, pop taste, and values -- a negative view of the merger of "loftier" and "depression" which arose in human knee-jerk reaction to the rhetoric of the previous decade.
Although the contribution of American Scene painters was overshadowed by postwar artistic developments, their accomplishments served to consolidate and expand the creative activities of the region, thereby providing the foundation upon which postwar art was able to mature. The American mind set up which gave birth to Abstruse Expressionism formed during this period. Work by the California School in watercolor anticipated postwar Abstract Expressionism mainly in terms of the values information technology embodied, values often remarked on by critics across the land and extolled as intrinsically American: spontaneity, rawness, emotionality, directness, and an original indicate of view. But American Scene painting of the 1930s and early on 1940s, particularly in California, equally yielded a Pop legacy in its discovery that mass popular culture presented valid sources for art.
The decline and fragmentation of the California School during the postwar menses was like to the path taken then by such popular arts as comic strips. Information technology was not until the advent of Pop Fine art in the 1960s, when images were often drawn from motion pictures, comics, billboards, and popular heroes, that American artists began to describe on the legacy of prewar art and on the popular imagery of middle-grade America.
It is clear now that during the 1930s and 1940s in Southern California, pressure from certain forces at work in that fourth dimension, and in that place, combined to create a regional art that merged popular culture and fine art and fulfilled a dual social role, reflecting pertinent social problems every bit well equally projecting strong images of the American dream. The Southland was ripe for the rise of a regional fine art that was appropriate to modern developing culture and which brought national recognition to Southern California for the first time. Notes:
i. John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; reprint, New York: Capricorn Books, Yard. P. Putnam'south Sons, 1958), 5-6.
2. Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1389), 188.
three. Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 155, 163.
4. Karal Ann Marling, Wall to Wall America: A Cultural History of Postal service Office Murals in the Great Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 39-101; San Francisco Chronicle, 24 December 1933.
5. "Disney's Dike," Time, three March 1341, 62.
6. Millard Sheets, interview past Paul Karlstrom, 28 and 29 October 1986, edited draft manuscript, Athenaeum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 40.
7. Mary MacNaughton, Art at Scripps: The Early on Years, exhibition catalog (Claremont, California: Scripps College, 1988), 7; Kenneth Ross, Los Angeles Times, 4 November 1976.
eight. Paradise entered the painting into the 1939 exhibition at the Faulkner Memorial Art Gallery in Santa Barbara the year afterward Thomas Hart Benton exhibited his very like Portrait of Charles Ruggles in the same gallery in the exhibition Artists W of the Mississippi.
9. Millard Sheets, interview with author, Gualala, California, 17 Jan 1988.
10. New Bargain Fine art: California, exhibition catalog (Santa Clara: Academy of Santa Clara, 1976), 85-107.
xi. Merle Armitage, "The Public Works of Art Projects," California Fine art and Architecture (Feb 1934), 20.
12. Susan Silberberg, "New Deal Murals in Los Angeles: Federal Ideals and the Regional Image," Los Angeles Constitute of Gimmicky Art Journal eleven (May-June 1970): xviii.
13. Francis V. O'Connor, introduction to New Deal Fine art: California, exhibition catalog (Santa Clara: University of Santa Clara, 1976), 14.
xiv. Silberberg, "New Bargain Murals," 18.
15. Ibid., 20.
16. Ibid., 22-23.
17. Rex Brandt, interview with author, Corona del Mar, California, 18 March 1988.
18. "Barse Miller's Award Winning Picture Removed from Show," Art Digest 6 (i May 1932): 9. Also meet Robert L. Gambone, Art and Popular Religion in Evangelical America, 1915-1940 (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 87-93, 101.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Charles Bensco, quoted by Arthur Millier in "The Art Thrill of the Week," Los Angeles Times, 25 August 1940. This was a national society founded in Chicago in 1936.
22. Laurance P. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United states (Albuquerque: University of New United mexican states Press, 1983), 6, 28. It should be noted, however, that the interest in Mexican art went back as early as 1923 when the first Mexican fine art exhibition in the U.s.a. was held in Los Angeles at the McDowell Gild. In 1925 the Los Angeles Museum organized a well-attended Pan American exhibition which included the work of xx-nine Mexicans. In 1928 the Art Eye Gallery hosted an exhibition which included the works of the muralists and others under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation. See Margarita Nieto, "The Mexican Presence in the United States: Part 1," Latin American Art (Autumn 1990): 28-34.
23. Hurlburt; The Mexican Muralists, 205-207; Shifra 1000. Goldman, "Siqueiros and Three Early Murals in Los Angeles," Art Journal 33 (Summer 1974), 323.
24. Goldman, "Siqueiros and Iii Early Murals," 325.
25. Robert L. McGrath and Paula F. Glick, Paul Sample: Painter of the American Scene (Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Are, Dartmouth College, 1988), 31.
26. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists, 210-211.
27. During the completion of Tropical America Siqueiros once again made a great impression on his young assistants, including Philip Guston (so Goldstein). Guston ( 1913-1980) was at this time participating in meetings of the communist John Reed Gild and began, along with others, to paint a series of mural panels in fresco on black American themes. Guston'due south panel, eventually shot at and destroyed by the L. A. Constabulary Red Squad, represented a bound man being whipped past the Ku Klux Klan. In 1934 Reuben, Kadish and Guston traveled to Mexico, where with the help of Siqueiros, they painted a large public mural. Upon returning to Los Angeles, they joined the WPA Federal Art Project and assisted on a mural for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union Tuberculosis Sanitorium in Duarte. Patricia Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Painting of the 1930s (Boston: Boston Academy Fine art Gallery, 1983), 54.
28. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists, 213, 215.
29. Barbara Ebersole, Fletcher Martin (Gainesville, Florida: Academy of Florida Press, 1954), 21-24; Ted Melt, "Fletcher Martin," California Arts and Architecture (September 1940), 17.
30. H. L. Cooke, Fletcher Martin (New York: Abrams, 1977), 28-32.
About the Author
At the time of publication of the book American Scene Painting: California 1930s and 1940s, Susan M. Anderson was acquaintance curator of the Laguna Fine art Museum, was co-curator of the exhibition and essayist for Regionalism: The California View, Watercolors, 1923-1945, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1988.
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Resources Library features these essays concerning Southern California fine art:
The American Scene: Regionalist Painters of California 1930-1960: Selections from the Michael Johnson Collection by Susan M. Anderson
Dream and Perspective: American Scene Painting in Southern California by Susan M. Anderson
Modern Spirit: The Group of Viii & Los Angeles Art of the 1920s past Susan M. Anderson
A Seed of Modernism: The Art Students League of Los Angeles, 1906-53 by Julia Armstrong-Totten, Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, and Volition Due south
The Arts in Santa Barbara past Janet Blake Dominik
Ranchos: The Oak Grouping Paints the Santa Barbara Countryside by Ellen Easton
Speculative Terrain - Recent Views of the Southern California Landscape from San Diego to Santa Barbara by Gordon 50. Fuglie
Sampler Tour of Fine art Tiles from Catalina Island past John Hazeltine
Mission San Juan Capistrano: An Artistic Legacy by Gerald J. Miller
Loners, Mavericks & Dreamers: Art in Los Angeles Before 1900 past Nancy Moure
Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and the Eucalyptus School in Southern California by Nancy Moure
San Diego Beginnings by Martin E. Petersen
Keeping the Faith: Painting in Santa Catalina 1935-1985 by Roy C. Rose
Artists in Santa Catalina Island Before 1945 by Jean Stern
The Development of Southern California Impressionism past Jean Stern
The Development of an Art Community in the Los Angeles Area by Ruth Westphal
A Seed of Modernism: The Art Students League of Los Angeles, 1906-53 past Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick and Julia Armstrong-Totten
The Celebrated Landscapes of Malibu by Michael Zakian
and these articles:
California Impressionists at Laguna is a 2000 exhibit at the Florence Griswold Museum organized by Florence Griswold Museum curator Jack Becker, the exhibition consists of xx-six paintings by over a dozen California artists and selected works by members of the Lyme Art Colony, providing opportunity to compare and contrast the styles and subjects of the Lyme and Laguna Impressionists. The exhibition examines how the colonies contributed to the very identity of their regions; in the case of Laguna as a new Eden of perpetual sunshine, and for Lyme as a place rooted in traditional New England values. (left: William Wendt (1865-1946), South Coast Highway, Laguna Embankment, 1918, oil on canvas, 12 10 sixteen inches, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas B. Stiles Two)
Circles of Influence: Impressionism to Modernism in Southern California Art 1910-1930 is a 2000 showroom at the Orangish Canton Museum of Art which thematically explores Southern California's early twentieth-century artistic evolution -- from the expanding influences of East Coast artists, to the edifice of local art organizations striving for independent expression, and finally the early stirrings of avant-garde Modernism. Presenting over seventy paintings, drawn from public and individual collections, the exhibition will focus attention on the progressive artists of Los Angeles and their response to national and international art movements.
Clarence Hinkle: Modernistic Spirit and the Group of Viii is a 2012 exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum which features over i hundred paintings dating from the early on 1900s through the 1950s, and includes many paintings that were in the original exhibitions of the Group of 8, especially their 1927 show at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art.
The Fieldstone Collection: Impressionism in Southern California , a 1999 exhibit at the the William D. Cannon Art Gallery, includes approximately xl works, created between the late 1800s and early 1900s, depict the natural landscapes of the region in the "plein air" style of the French Impressionists.
The Terminal Eden: Early Images of the Santa Barbara Region 
is a 2002 Wildling Art Museum exhibit of paintings, watercolors and prints depicting the Central Declension of California between 1836 and 1960 and celebrating "its rural pristine and fertile nature," selected by guest curator, Frank Goss. It is his thesis that the paradise that once was California, a state of dizzying resources and unlimited opportunities, has shrunk through urbanization and exploitation, and the Central Coast, not yet paved over, is "the Last Eden." (left: John Hall Esq. (1808 - ?), "Santa Barbara-Upper California," 1836, hand-colored lithograph.. Lent by Eric Hvolboi
First Generation: Art in Claremont, 1907-1957 is a 2008 exhibit at the Claremont Museum of Art, which traces the fine art history of Claremont and the region in the beginning 50 years afterwards the city's incorporation in 1907.
On a articulate twenty-four hours a century ago, i could see the peak of Mt. Baldy from virtually every corner of the Los Angeles basin, from sea to desert. The original inhabitants of this area, the Tongva/Gabrielino Indians, called the mount "Yoát," or snowfall. Its siren song has drawn generations of settlers to its shadow. Since the late 19th century, prominent artists have been among those attracted to the foothills of Mt. Baldy and its neighboring peaks-and the city of Claremont, in detail.The showroom traces the art history of the region, from the work of such artists every bit Hannah Tempest Jenkins, Emil Kosa, Jr., and William Manker to that of Millard Sheets and his circle in the 1930s. Sheets's influence as artist and instructor extended as well to bringing artists such as Henry Lee McFee, Phil Dike, and Jean Ames to Scripps College, thereby enhancing the existing fine art community and assuring its lasting influence.
Greetings from Laguna Beach: Our Town in the Early 1900s is a 2000 Laguna Art Museum exhibit which illustrates Laguna's early on history through 20 landscapes painted by some of the town's earliest artist residents as well equally historical photos and a room-sized installation of a typical period cottage. The paintings include works past Franz A. Bischoff, Conway Griffith , Clarence Kaiser Hinkle, Joseph Kleitsch Millard Sheets, William Wendt, and Karl Yens.
50.A. RAW: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles 1945-1980, From Rico Lebrun to Paul McCarthy is a 2012 exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. The figurative artists, who dominated the postwar Los Angeles art scene until the late 1950s, have largely been written out of today's art history. This exhibition, role of the Getty Foundations initiative "Pacific Standard Time: Fine art in Fifty.A. 1945-1980," traces the distinctive aesthetic of figurative expressionism from the finish of Earth War II, bringing together over 120 works by forty-one artists in a variety of media -- painting, sculpture, photography, and functioning
The Legacy of the California Art Gild in San Diego chronicles the history of art in San Diego, California from the plough of the 20th century through the beginning of the present century.
Painted Light: California Impressionist Paintings from the Gardena High School Los Angeles Unified School Commune Collection , hosted by CSU Dominguez Hills in 1999, features works past Franz A. Bischoff, Jessie Artillery Botke (1883-1971), Maurice Braun (1877-1941), Benjamin Chambers Brownish, Alson Skinner Clark, Leland S. Curtis, Maynard Dixon, Victor Clyde Forsythe, John (Jack) Frost, Joe Duncan Gleason, Armin Carl Hansen, Sam Hyde Harris, Clarence Kaiser Hinkle, Frank Tenney Johnson, Emil Jean Kosa, Jr., Jean Mannheim, Peter Nielsen, Edgar Alwin Payne, Hanson Duvall Puthuff, John Hubbard Rich, Carl Clemens Moritz Rungius, Walter Elmer Schofield, Clyde Eugene Scott, Jack Wilkinson Smith, James Guifford Swinnerton, Marion Kavanagh Wachtel, William Wendt (1865-1946) and Orrin Augustine White.
Painted Low-cal: California Impressionist Paintings: The Gardena High School/Los Angeles Unified School District Collection toured to The Irvbine Museum in 1999.
Representing LA, Pictorial Currents in Contemporary Southern California Fine art , featured at the Frye Museum in 2000, is the offset group exhibition to explore the rich and varied representational painting, cartoon, printmaking, and sculpture produced by Southern California artists from 1990 to 2000, and fills a gap in West Declension and Southern California fine art history by surveying and interpreting about 80 works by lxx artists working in representational or realist styles and approaches.
This page was originally published in Resources Library Magazine. Please meet Resources Library'due south Overview section for more information. rev. 6/7/eleven
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