Modern Spirit: The Group of Eight & Los Angeles Art of the 1920s

by Susan M. Anderson

Modern Spirit, Hollywood, and the New Woman

In the 1920s, Los Angeles was an international center for possibilities of another sort, in which fame, commercial success, and unparalleled health and beauty were the promise.[31] While the Roaring Twenties marked a period of upheaval and rapid change internationally, nowhere was this more pronounced than in Los Angeles, where some 660,000 new residents poured into the city during the decade. The region was flush with money, the result of a boom economy fueled by the growing film industry, real estate speculation, and oil production. The affluence, flapper spirit, and growing interest in the arts caused a cultural boom as well.[32]

Art schools and art clubs proliferated in Los Angeles, creating a nexus around the Westlake Park area of the city. This area, and the rolling Hollywood Hills to the north, served as the seat of the city's bohemia in the decades following World War I. Here artists, political activists, Hollywood studios, and gay subculture resided, interacted, and found the freedom to reinvent themselves.[33] The Art Students League had opened in 1906, Otis Art Institute in 1918, and the Chouinard School of Art in 1921. By mid-decade there were several exhibition venues, including Newhouse Galleries, run by Dalzell Hatfield, Cannell & Chaffin, the Biltmore Salon, Stendahl Gallery, Kanst's Hollywoodland, the MacDowell Club, the California Art Club, and the Friday Morning Club, to name a few, along with the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art and the Southwest Museum. Los Angeles was a haven of cultural freedom dominated by the film industry, luring artists, writers, musicians, actors, and "the beautiful people." The Southern California sun, revered as healthy and rejuvenating, was part of the magnetic attraction.

Physical culture was in its heyday in America during the 1920s. A healthful body was equated with physical liberation and creative empowerment. The "healthy body culture" arose nationally in the wake of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic. Advertising and Hollywood films openly embraced it, and it manifested itself in an outpouring of narrative images, portraits, and nudes.[34]

The rapid change in modern culture paralleled a quickening in the arts; artists sought a new painting language and metaphors to express the change. The dominant aesthetic was one of representation, in which developing modern culture was "cleansed, ordered, and distilled."[35] This coping mechanism was equally at work in the plein-air landscapes of the traditional painters of Southern California, who clustered around the California Art Club and presented a vision of nature that was empty and silent. Fundamental to the region's modern movement was the idea that humankind could be restored by communion with nature.

Alvarez's In the Garden, for example, evinces a powerful faith in the sustaining power of nature, beauty, and youth. In it, a young woman with bobbed hair stands in front of a flowered background. She has pale, bare skin and the small, pouty lips popular in films of the day, though without the sultry vampishness. Recuperation is an implicit theme of the painting, with its restful, garden-like background recalling bold and stylized oriental wallpaper.[36] Still, the young woman does have the disaffected, distant demeanor of the flapper and a slightly sad countenance. Her expression seems to echo the advice given by a writer in Vogue at the time that women should learn to "hover in a slightly detached, balloon-like manner above our perplexities."[37] With the close-up, three-quarter view, we are able to examine the subject closely and inspect her beauty, which is childlike rather than womanly. She is unspoiled youth and beauty, and yet her reserved, introspective demeanor invites us to delve into her soul, ponder her thoughts, and accept her as more than just a pretty face. The iconic image expresses faith in the potentiality of youth, as well as disillusionment or loss.

In the Garden represents the right kind of healthy sexuality, reflecting a notion described in the 1920s as the "clean." Uncleanliness was "a lack of pride, a slackness in fiber and, most of all, the unmistakable aura of promiscuity." Physical forthrightness coupled with discipline was acceptable.[38] Freudian ideas were widely discussed and popularized in the press, especially notions about the struggle between the libido and repression. The struggle in the 1920s was between liberated, natural sexual impulses and social conventions like marriage.[39] Artists in Los Angeles were not above choosing free love over social convention; sexual experimentation, like artistic experimentation, was common -- but not usually flaunted.[40]

Artists and writers used the word "clean" with surprising regularity throughout the 1920s to denote the honesty and directness of their expression.[41] The overt realism of In the Garden, with its precise lines and polished volumes, is well suited to the idealized young woman who is pictured. The classical and restrained approach to form, the visual clarity and lack of detail, and the sense of order all express this notion of the "clean." These were devices of choice for American modernists everywhere. A revival of classicism was internationally popular, with Picasso making the transition from cubism to neoclassicism at about the same time in Europe. In New York, the proponents of neoclassicism included Thomas Hart Benton and Lorser Feitelson, who would move to Los Angeles in 1927.

Alvarez's In the Garden is "focused, abbreviated, and enigmatic," not unlike her Self-Portrait of 1923 (see p. 101), in which the artist confronts the viewer more directly.[42] It calls to mind Luvena Vysekal's slightly ironic description of Alvarez in the Los Angeles Times: "A swarthy young woman, smudgy black hair, soft, smoldering eyes, full, warm, sensitive mouth; lithe and straight, and with it all, so restrained, so shy, so proper, so retiring, so considerate, so altogether nice."[43]

Alvarez was taking classes in color theory from Macdonald-Wright during this period at Chouinard and the Art Students League; in terms of the color palette both portraits exhibit the subtle influence of her teacher. The Asian-inspired floral forms of In the Garden and the use of a black line around areas of color, such as the rim of the hat in Self-Portrait, are other hallmarks of Macdonald-Wright's style.[44] The latter technique was an adaptation from Cézanne that was widely used by others, including Hinkle and other members of the Group of Eight. According to Alvarez's diaries, one night a few months before she started the self-portrait, she dropped by the Vysekals' home and ran into Macdonald-Wright. She wrote that he "gave me interesting criticism -- says to draw myself a lot instead of getting models."[45] This practical advice to Alvarez, who was consistently paying models to come to her studio and had some twenty listed in her address book, caused her to begin a series of self-portraits. Macdonald-Wright's classes and the heady intellectual atmosphere of his milieu stimulated Alvarez's creative process as well, giving her more confidence and a finer aesthetic understanding. However, she rapidly adapted his teachings, without allowing her work to appear derivative.

American women received the vote in 1920, heralding new attitudes and new depictions of women in art.[46] Alvarez's Self-Portrait and Luvena Vysekal's Esther express the vision of the New Woman, who was able to step outside her home and expand her horizons: confident, successful, and liberated.[47] Indeed, the women artists of the Group of Eight -- Mabel Alvarez, Luvena Vysekal, and Donna Schuster -- epitomized the New Woman of the 1920s: they were vitally involved in art groups and art associations; they exhibited widely, were favorably reviewed, received regional awards, and sold their art to collectors and museums. They moved freely throughout the Southland within bohemia and the more bourgeois social circles of the California Art Club.

Since the second decade of the century, Los Angeles modernist groups such as the Los Angeles Modern Art Society and the California Progressive Group had not merely included women; women artists such as Henrietta Shore, Helena Dunlap, Meta Cressey, and Luvena Vysekal had been among their founding members. Progressive artists by necessity had established themselves outside the mainstream of art; the California Art Club, largely composed of artists who practiced a regional form of impressionism, had a monopoly on exhibition venues and actively opposed more progressive modes of expression.[48] The exhibitions of the early modernist groups served a vital function as challenges to the dominance of the California Art Club and as dynamic nexuses for innovative new developments. Like other early modernists in Los Angeles, the Group of Eight started out retaining remnants of a complex mix of influences, including impressionism, post-impressionism, and the work of Henri. But by the mid-1920s they began to break out of that mold and toward more advanced modernist trends, focusing on portraiture, figure painting, still life, and genre scenes created in the studio.[49]

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