Dream and Perspective: American Scene Painting in Southern California
by Susan M. Anderson
Most 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 town existence was not prevalent in the area during the 1920s and 1930s. Edward Hopper's urban visions are certainly tougher and more wrought with existential despair and alienation than Sheets's Beer for Prosperity, 1933, which is full of life and animation. Unlike Reginald Marsh's urban views of New York, which are active and full of crowds into which the individual disappears, Ben Messick's urban paintings of group activity such as Pitchman, 1939, focus on small knots of city dwellers with humor and humanity.
Not all urban scenes were quite so positive, however. The artists of the California School sometimes walked a fine line between playful infatuation with popular culture and the American dream and a sense of a much darker reality. As 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 within 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 1930s Southern California did see a proliferation of painting reflecting the difficult social and economic conditions of the time. Following a national trend, this thematic concern 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 as champions of the American way of life, they began to soften the satirical and critical elements of their art in order to fulfill their cultural role and, in some cases, in order to capitalize on the new popular image. 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 under Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal gave direction to the cultural life of the country and economic relief to artists during difficult times, affording them crucial experience with commissions and group activity, and lending them a sense of mission, impetus, and direction. Many local artists competed for and won prestigious commissions for federal post offices and public buildings in the area under 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 II, 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 civic 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 Art Project (WPA/FAP, 1935-1943) and the Treasury Relief 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.[11] 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. Because of this, paintings and murals created under the projects were honest attempts by local artists to respond to the national program while maintaining "an 'ethic towards society' in harmony with the needs and visions of their 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 diversity. It served the vested interests of both federal and local governments seeking to expand economic and political bases,[14] but 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 by the U. S. Treasury Department following competition, sometimes combined a sophisticated regional statement with social relevance. Most local murals completed under the PWAP and FAP, however, were closely scrutinized by 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 California. They rarely, if ever, made reference to "unpleasant reality or any meaningful social context."[15] Censorship was fairly 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. M. Kurtzworth, director of the Los Angeles Art Association and the California Academy of Fine Arts wrote that
The Depression, coupled with the U. S. desire to maintain neutrality in the face of mounting conflicts in Europe, contributed to a wave of nationalism which was sweeping the country. Artists and critics across the nation spoke out against European art in favor of the development of a truly indigenous art. Los Angeles was naturally in tune with the nationwide critical rejection of European high taste, though Southern California artists were not self-consciously concerned with excluding European art and values, or with forging an artistic nationalism This is not to say that they were immune to becoming heatedly involved in the issue of conservativism versus modernism which was gripping the American art world, however.
For example, artist Rex Brandt studied in Berkeley, where John Haley and Erle Loran had originated a style called by critic Alfred Frankenstein the "Berkeley School." Haley and Loran were professors at the University of California and students of Hans Hofmann. Though the 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 Water Color Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, and subsequently selected by the director of that institute, Robert Harshe, as one of thirty watercolors to represent American painting at the Texas Centennial Exhibition. Yet for all his success with innovation of form, Brandt turned to a purely representational style, as seen in Rain at Box Springs Camp, 1938, shortly after returning to Southern California because of the pressure to paint in a "strictly representational" manner.[17]
During the 1930s, when public murals were destroyed, paintings were also removed from museums under pressure from a broad range of groups. Of interest in this regard is a painting by Barse Miller, quintessentially of the period and of the region. Apparition Over Los Angeles, 1932, which satirized evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, was removed from an exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum because the director believed "the subject matter . . . to be too controversial for exhibition in a county institution."[18] The painting, which had just been awarded a prize for "best interpretation of the Los Angeles scene," depicted the cult leader and her latest husband floating in clouds shaped like sacks of money over Angelus Temple, with a crowd of witnesses below.[19] Miller, who gained national notoriety for the incident, later earned regional distinction as a teacher at the Art Center School in Pasadena. He created many murals for the federal art projects and served as chief of the Combat Art Section in the Pacific during World War II.
Paul Sample, who had entered his painting of revolutionary workers in front of Los Angeles's Mana Brewery, Speech Near Brewery, in the same museum exhibition, regarded the museum's action as "the opening gun in a local fight to 'show whether artists shall paint subjects of vital interest or shall be confined to painting pretty flowers and eucalyptus trees'. "[20] This pressure to conform was stepped up in 1940 when the local Society for Sanity in Art, Inc. formed to "encourage and promote an art that is based on sound, fundamental principles ... To display, exhibit and publicize works of art that are sane, understandable and built upon tradition ..."[21] Even in the late 1940s the Los Angeles art world was a largely conservative society -- 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 element in the community was common during the Depression and reflected the idealism of the Mexican movement in art and New Deal rhetoric. Social commentary in painting reflected the national interest in subjects of social concern as well as 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 factor in the development 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 interest 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 College in Claremont depicting "the creative rebel who heroically sacrifices himself for the good of man." In all his work, Orozco called for the destruction of the existing order in the service of the creation of a new, more 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 fourteen years and died while completing a series of murals for the Margaret Fowler Memorial Garden at Scripps College, also in Claremont. He founded the open-air schools in Mexico which provided the stimulus for Siqueiros and other Mexican artists to enter directly into the revolutionary struggle for freedom.
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