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Dream and Perspective: American Scene Painting in Southern California
by Susan M. Anderson
Southland artists prospered under the sheltering umbrella and glamorous appeal of Hollywood. The region's entertainment industry, which was a locus for such popular arts as film, radio, animation, graphics, and photography, fostered the vital interaction between the popular and fine arts which Los Angeles has since come to epitomize. The city was a magnet for those seeking employment, and many artists pursuing serious careers as painters survived the Depression by working in the film industry, which provided major economic support to the arts and contributed to the economic recovery of the area as early as 1934.
During the Depression, just as Hollywood films captured and disseminated the dream life of the masses, so did the California School. 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 ideal. They have, therefore, special social and cultural significance as embodiments of the American dream, which promises freedom, individualism, and new possibilities. Even in the era of the Depression and the New Deal, the image of California as a golden land prevailed, and the paintings reflected a mobile society 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 as Barse Miller's Balboa Inlet, 1942 and Phil Dike's California Holiday, 1933.
There was a vital interaction between film, an indisputably popular and American art form, and the more traditional arts during this period. This was true to a lesser extent in other parts of the country -- 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 animation field, and in the Disney studio, where they were influenced by the technology and enriched by the discipline of studio work. The industry became an important support system for some of them.
Southland artists also made major contributions to the film aesthetic. Historian Richard Schickel claimed Disney was "a man almost totally disengaged from the realities of the larger world" 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 film and the Regionalist expression was inevitable. Band Concert of 1935, the first Mickey Mouse film in Technicolor, was a Regionalist cartoon and was widely considered a work of high artistic merit.[4] This crossover between 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 also found 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, too: they eschewed realistic detail and preferred well-defined outlines, undulating curves and serpentine lines; they used large areas of white paper, and relied on representational cliches and compositional schemes. The artists were also masters of characterization and the depiction of action or movement. Phil Dike's 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 strong 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 instructor, color coordinator, and story designer on such animated classics as Fantasia and Snow White. In 1941 he told an interviewer for Time that,
Twenty years later Roy Lichtenstein took the image of Mickey Mouse, introduced it into the "high" 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 School began at Chouinard School of Art in the late 1920s (reincorporated in 1935 as Chouinard Art Institute and in 1961 as California Institute of the Arts). Founded by Nelbert Chouinard in 1921, the school developed a national reputation which has persisted to the present day. During the 1930s it was at the heart of the vital Los Angeles art community, centered in Westlake Park and consisting of the Art Center School, Otis Art Institute, the Federal Art Project Center, the Foundation of Western Art, Stendahl Galleries, Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, Jake Zeitlin's Bookshop, the Los Angeles Art Association, and a number of 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 school. Many regularly gathered in the barn behind Chouinard to work and talk about art; some took painting trips together. They shared many common interests including "the fundamental problems of aesthetics and meaning of painting,"[6] though their relative isolation from more established art centers contributed to an innovative disregard for stylistic influences. Though the students were somewhat scattered throughout the large Southern California area after their experiences at Chouinard, they continued to support each other throughout the difficult period of the 1930s, exchanging ideas and dipping out of a communal artistic pool. They created lasting bonds through their joint involvement in educational institutions and associations such as the California Water Color Society, and through their work together in the film industry and on the federal art projects. This artistic interchange resulted in a unified approach to the Southern California environment and shared aesthetic concepts, though the artists developed 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 school, experienced early success (touching off a pattern still enjoyed by California Institute of the Arts graduates today). In October 1930 the Art Digest announced that Sheets was the only 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 United States, and articles on his achievements soon began to appear with regularity in national periodicals. It was in this same year that Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood individually began to receive national recognition as well. Four years later these midwestern artists would appear on the cover of Time magazine and the American Scene, especially Regionalism, would become nationally popularized.
The painting that Sheets entered in the Carnegie International, Women of Cartagena, 1930, was not an American Scene painting though it incorporated some of the same elements. Sheets took the influences of postimpressionism, the early Italian Renaissance, and the Mexican muralists to create a flat design infused with an awareness 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 Angel's Flight, 1931, which contrasts to painting of the urban poor made in other parts of the country in its spectacular use of color and because it depicted the scene without focusing on hardship or squalor. He portrayed the brilliant California sunlight -- a feature of the work of other area artists as well. And he used a dizzying perspective, coupled with a dramatic close-up and action in depth -- possibly related to contemporary filmic devices.
This painting, as well as Sheets's Tenement Flats, 1934, recall George Bellows's influential painting Cliff Dwellers, 1913, in terms of subject matter 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.[7] The stylistic influence of Benton is most obvious in Sheets's Jasper Biddle's House, 1934, as well as in Phil Paradise's Carl, a portrait of artist Carl Beetz.[8] Several of Sheets's 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 also visible in Paul Sample's early paintings such as Speech Near Brewery, 1932. According to Sheets, he was also influenced in his choice of new subject matter by the Eastern artist Edward Bruce, who visited California and befriended Sheets at this time (and who may have been a source for Sheets's new stylistic approach in watercolor beginning in 1932).[9] Bruce was later extremely influential as the national director for the Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project.
Sheets went to teach at Scripps College in 1332. There he built up an art department around which an art colony developed similar in spirit to the art centers later fostered by the federal WPA, or to Grant Wood's well-known Stone City Art Colony near Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Shortly after arriving at the school, Sheets met Hartley Burr Alexander, a philosopher interested in ancient, primitive, and Eastern art. The artist came under Alexander's influence, and it may be due to the relationship that Sheets eventually de-emphasized the social realist subject matter in his paintings and, instead, in works such as Abandoned, 1934, began to create moody and evocative visions exuding a spiritual quality more powerful than a sense of physical time and place.
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