Dream and Perspective: American Scene Painting in Southern California

by Susan M. Anderson

David Alfaro Siqueiros, a staunch Marxist and the Mexican muralist most involved in the revolutionary and economic struggles of this time, was also the most concerned with the revolutionizing of 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 mural Street Meeting in the courtyard of the school. Siqueiros developed his new methods of mural 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 School watercolor style, exemplified in Dike's Then It Rained, 1939. Here the artist used the improvisational and expressionistic properties of the medium to create the effect of a torrential downpour.

Siqueiros's assistants also learned greater boldness and stylization of form, as well as deeper concern with social issues. As Lorser Feitelson recalled, "[Siqueiros] brought tenebrism, illusionism, and also this architectonic quality; it had guts in it! It made everything else of the time look like 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, but 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 film 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 World War II internment of Japanese citizens. Ben Messick and Carl Beetz featured the down-and-out unemployed, while David Levine looked at the devastation 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. As historian Robert L. McGrath has pointed out, Sample's painting Speech Near Brewery is closely related to the Chouinard mural, especially in the figure of the labor agitator speaking to the crowd.[25] Sample was regionally influential at this time as chairman of the Art Department at the University of Southern California. Within 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-four 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 conditions of Mexican laborers in the nearby Imperial Valley and the unwarranted deportation of Mexican nationals.[26] In it Siqueiros depicted a naked Indian body crucified on a double cross with the North American eagle perched on top, making a chilling statement about the consequences of U. S. imperialism. Seen at the time as Communist propaganda, the mural was so controversial that the portion of it most visible from the street was soon painted over, with the remainder whitewashed within a couple of years.[27]

The third and last mural that Siqueiros executed in Los Angeles (and in the United States, as he painted no others), was made in the Santa Monica home of Dudley Murphy, 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 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 often met in Martin's studio where they would draw and discuss art theory and the politics of the day. In 1936 Martin painted a mural for North Hollywood High School, 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 replace Grant Wood as artist-in-residence at the University of Iowa. The following year he succeeded Thomas Hart Benton as head of the Painting Department of the Kansas City Art Institute.[30] Many of his greatest works were completed in Los Angeles, however. 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 matter; Martin may have learned from Siqueiros the accentuation of the illusion of sharply receding space and crowding of action into a tondo shape.

As the work of the California School developed throughout the decade of the 1930s, it reflected the artists' increased experimentation with new materials and techniques and interest in movement or action. This was a major direction for American art which would take hold in the post-World War II period. By the late 1930s, many California School artists had mastered their craft 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 codified 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 gestural approach. By 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 time when fascism was on the rise in Europe.

With the U.S. entrance into World War II, the activity of the nation became directed toward defense and international affairs rather than the local scene, and California artists were enlisted into the service of the country. Exhibitions lost their regional focus, and art in general suffered a loss of direction.

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 up immediately after the end of the war during postwar expansion was shortlived. By the late 1940s, when the disastrous effects of urbanization were fully recognized, Angelenos suffered a sharp sense of loss over a passing way of life because it was so rapid and so visible. The art scene in Southern California was also rapidly changing and, though bound 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 image 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, popular taste, and values -- a negative view of the merger of "high" and "low" which arose in 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 artistic activities of the region, thereby providing the foundation upon which postwar art was able to mature. The American mind set which gave birth to Abstract Expressionism formed during this period. Work by the California School in watercolor anticipated postwar Abstract Expressionism mainly in terms of the values it embodied, values often remarked on by critics across the country and extolled as intrinsically American: spontaneity, rawness, emotionality, directness, and an original point of view. But American Scene painting of the 1930s and early 1940s, especially 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 period was similar to the path taken then by such popular arts as comic strips. It was not until the advent of Pop Art in the 1960s, when images were frequently drawn from motion pictures, comics, billboards, and popular heroes, that American artists began to draw on the legacy of prewar art and on the popular imagery of middle-class America.

It is clear now that during the 1930s and 1940s in Southern California, pressure from certain forces at work in that time, 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 issues as well as projecting potent images of the American dream. The Southland was ripe for the rise of a regional art that was appropriate to modern developing culture and which brought national recognition to Southern California for the first time.


Notes:

1. John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; reprint, New York: Capricorn Books, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1958), 5-6.

2. Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1389), 188.

3. 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 Post 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, 3 March 1341, 62.

6. Millard Sheets, interview by Paul Karlstrom, 28 and 29 October 1986, edited draft manuscript, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 40.

7. Mary MacNaughton, Art at Scripps: The Early Years, exhibition catalog (Claremont, California: Scripps College, 1988), 7; Kenneth Ross, Los Angeles Times, 4 November 1976.

8. Paradise entered the painting into the 1939 exhibition at the Faulkner Memorial Art Gallery in Santa Barbara the year after Thomas Hart Benton exhibited his very similar Portrait of Charles Ruggles in the same gallery in the exhibition Artists West of the Mississippi.

9. Millard Sheets, interview with author, Gualala, California, 17 January 1988.

10. New Deal Art: California, exhibition catalog (Santa Clara: University of Santa Clara, 1976), 85-107.

11. Merle Armitage, "The Public Works of Art Projects," California Art and Architecture (February 1934), 20.

12. Susan Silberberg, "New Deal Murals in Los Angeles: Federal Ideals and the Regional Image," Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art Journal 11 (May-June 1970): 18.

13. Francis V. O'Connor, introduction to New Deal Art: California, exhibition catalog (Santa Clara: University of Santa Clara, 1976), 14.

14. Silberberg, "New Deal 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 (1 May 1932): 9. Also see 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 Mexico 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 art exhibition in the United States was held in Los Angeles at the McDowell Club. In 1925 the Los Angeles Museum organized a well-attended Pan American exhibition which included the work of twenty-nine Mexicans. In 1928 the Art Center 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 (Fall 1990): 28-34.

23. Hurlburt; The Mexican Muralists, 205-207; Shifra M. Goldman, "Siqueiros and Three Early Murals in Los Angeles," Art Journal 33 (Summer 1974), 323.

24. Goldman, "Siqueiros and Three 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 again made a great impression on his young assistants, including Philip Guston (then Goldstein). Guston ( 1913-1980) was at this time participating in meetings of the communist John Reed Club and began, along with others, to paint a series of mural panels in fresco on black American themes. Guston's panel, eventually shot at and destroyed by the L. A. Police Red Squad, represented a bound man being whipped by 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 University Art Gallery, 1983), 54.

28. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists, 213, 215.

29. Barbara Ebersole, Fletcher Martin (Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida Press, 1954), 21-24; Ted Cook, "Fletcher Martin," California Arts and Architecture (September 1940), 17.

30. H. L. Cooke, Fletcher Martin (New York: Abrams, 1977), 28-32.

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