Search Resource Library
Modern Spirit: The Group of Eight & Los Angeles Art of the 1920s
by Susan M. Anderson
The Group of Eight
The Group of Eight exhibited together for the first time at the Friday Morning Club in December 1921. They showed about ten small canvases or watercolors each; many were landscape studies, and they were nearly pocket size. The pochades of Henri, small panels carried in the pocket in order to quickly capture the color and composition of a scene, may have inspired their diminutive size. The small excursions into nature were resolved enough for critic Antony Anderson to write, "Many of them, indeed, are absolutely gem-like."[68] This was most likely a Christmas show meant to entice quick sales; they may not have realized the potential for the group until later. Many of the exhibitions held by the early modernists, including Macdonald-Wright's Group of Independent Artists Exhibition in 1923, were sale shows in which the prices of the paintings were listed in the accompanying catalogues.
The artists exhibited together as the Group of Eight several times in 1921, 1922, 1927, and 1928. Coming together as a group lent them greater visibility and prestige than showing as individuals. Their exhibitions regularly received advance notices in the local newspapers, followed by extensive reviews after the openings.
The Group of Eight also socialized together at a dizzying pace. They frequented crowded Hollywood eateries like the Cat & Fiddle and the Pig 'n Whistle. It was not uncommon for them to hold large dinners in their studios, followed by unruly party games like charades or paradox. Dining on the roof of the Vysekals' garage, they would sit "talking in the dark -- all the stars out & lights twinkling below." In smaller groups they played bridge and mahjong, shared books and ideas.[69] There were numerous sketching trips to Laguna Beach (down and back in one day!), where they visited Hinkle, who had established a second studio there in 1922.
The artists' second exhibition, held at Bullock's Seventh Street Bridgeway from January 23 to February 11, 1922, kicked off the group more formally. Edouard Vysekal designed an elegant emblem for the brochure cover showing an eight-limbed tree, with each branch ending in a hand holding a painter's brush. Anderson's observation that it looked like a walking stick insect set against a gold background is rather apt.[70] On Sunday, a day before the opening, Alvarez and the Vysekals went to the Shraders' Hollywood studio home to address invitations. During the run of the show, the members met often and took turns looking after the exhibition, which was well visited by the public and located in a "lovely big room [with] rich oriental rugs." A Mr. Mitchell, who was the Arts Commissioner of Los Angeles, visited the show, inspecting it through his monocle.[71] Anderson's review in the Los Angeles Times noted that the group "has some decidedly modern tendencies, the best of which is a penchant for lively color."[72]
In the fall, the group met numerous times socially prior to their show's opening at the Franklin Galleries on December 7. Some were exhibiting in a group show at the Southwest Museum. The California Art Club had recently approached Shrader, inviting him to be club president in 1924. Alvarez and the Vysekals hung the exhibition at the Franklin Galleries. Of the opening, Alvarez wrote in her diary: "Went to Reception Group of 8 at Franklin Gal. with Riches. Rained. Quite a few people came to my surprise.... Pouring when we returned. Riches took Donna [Schuster] & strange girl home after leaving me."[73]
The Franklin Galleries exhibition was the subject of a long article in the Sunday Los Angeles Times by critic Antony Anderson. Of the Group of Eight, he wrote: "It's a group of liberals. Some paint by formulas and some don't. A few flirt coyly with modern movements, but never outrageously so. They don't shock us. Others follow familiar paths in paint, giving the flirters a large and benevolent tolerance. There's variety in the exhibition at the Franklin."[74] This supports the idea that they were individuals who came together not with a common aesthetic, but with a temperamental openness to new ideas.
In the same article, Anderson suggested that Macdonald-Wright's newly formed Group of Independent Artists and the Group of Eight were in competing camps vying for supremacy. While this statement may have made for good press, it was not entirely true, although some of the regional artists who exhibited with the Group of Independents, such as Nick Brigante, Ben Berlin, Boris Deutsch, and Peter Krasnow, did practice a more advanced form of modernism incorporating cubism and expressionism. Edouard Vysekal exhibited in both shows; Alvarez and Hinkle were at the time attending Macdonald-Wright's lectures at Chouinard, which appear to have been of wide interest to even established regional artists. For example, Dunlap, also a well-known modernist, attended the lectures as well.[75]
It does appear that Macdonald-Wright's exhibition, which took place in February 1923 at the MacDowell Club, shortly before he took over the directorship of the Art Students League, garnered much positive attention and brought new artists into the modernist fold. A large exhibition of French modernism that showed at the Los Angeles Museum in 1923 with works by Bonnard, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Monet, Pissarro, Redon, Renoir, and Vuillard was probably also a factor. In 1924, when Shrader took over the presidency of the California Art Club, effectively putting himself at the center of the art establishment, the axis of power began to shift as well.[76]
By 1925, the tide had certainly turned. Interest in modern art was active and lively, with newspaper critics giving favorable reviews to artists who explored modernist experimentation and broke with traditional plein-air painting. The Sixth Annual Exhibition of Painters and Sculptors of Southern California at the Los Angeles Museum featured enough modernism that Anderson claimed that "the stigma of provincialism" had been removed; he reported that Macdonald-Wright had won the coveted William Preston Harrison prize for a still life, Yin Synchromy. "It is, indeed, into the realm of pure esthetics that the artists of Los Angeles are advancing from the limbo of naturalism.... Expressionism is coming into its own," he wrote.[77]
The Group of Eight did not exhibit together again until 1927, instead taking part in the organization, governance, and exhibitions of the Modern Art Workers, which included a range of modernists active in Los Angeles. The latter group exhibited twice in 1925 and again in 1926, and it combined members of the Los Angeles Modern Art Society, the Group of Eight, the Group of Independent Artists, and Easterners Thomas Hart Benton, Morgan Russell, Preston Dickinson, and Alfred Maurer. Showing with the group were the Vysekals, Stojana, Alvarez, Brigante, De Kruif, Dunlap, Hinkle, Shore, Delano, Karl Yens, Conrad Buff, Val Costello, Albert King, Ralph Stackpole, and others. The Los Angeles Times published a manifesto for the group that echoed the direction of Henri far more than the strident proclamations one associates with Macdonald-Wright. Although signed by Macdonald-Wright, it might almost have been written by one of the Group of Eight. It stated in part:
The Group of Eight's most important exhibition was at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art from July 20 to August 28, 1927. The artists were accorded small one-person shows of seven or more paintings, covering a period of years and culminating with their most recent work.[79] The extant paintings from this exhibition show a smattering of stylistic influences, not surprisingly, as the artists incorporated works dating back to the second decade of the century. More than likely, this was an exhibition curated not by the museum but by the artists themselves.
Rather than the landscape abstractions of Laguna Beach that he was doing in large, slashing brushstrokes, such as Laguna Beach (p. 112), Hinkle elected to show portraiture. This begs the question: Was the Group of Eight after all a nearly decade-long homage to Henri? Or in Hinkle's case, did he just consider portraiture to be his greatest genre? His depiction of a local Laguna Beach artist and framer, Buck Weaver (location unknown), is a bold color painting with the pale, blue-violet ground the artist started using around this time, indicating that it may have been one of his more current works in the show.[80] By contrasting the cowboy dressed in oranges and yellows against a somber background, Hinkle achieves a primitive intensity that mirrors the brash, forthright demeanor of his subject. The approach echoes that of one of his other portraits in the show, Gjura Stojana (p. 96), but he has heightened the contrast and expressionism, adding a potent black line around some of the color forms. A jagged black textural treatment in the abstract background echoes the defiance of the subject and signals Hinkle's delight in gesture, and paint as paint.[81]
Rich's more conventional figure study The Brass Bowl, or Señorita Lusoriaga (p. 100), which was in the Group of Eight's Franklin Galleries exhibition,[82] shows the regionally inflected influence of Henri in terms of its subject matter and stylistic approach. Rich had studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with the American impressionist Edmund Tarbell. He was adept at creating genre scenes of women in interiors with delicate brushwork and color, exuding a sense of quiet and soft light. Like other members of the Group of Eight, Rich went through many stylistic changes, as evidenced by Yellow Teapot, a painting in the key of red-violet that shows his awareness of Macdonald-Wright's color theories and compositional approaches. The depiction of the hills in the background creates a feeling that nature is a quiet power underlying the whole.
With its expressive sensuality and tropicalism, Edouard Vysekal's A Figure in Shadows alludes to the idea of communion with nature. It provides an example of the way in which artists depicting the nude figure in the 1920s melded classical ideals with modernist reduction. Mexican subjects were common in the region, due to its proximity to the border. The painting, which was in the 1927 exhibition, has Vysekal's signature tilted perspective combined with an almost imperceptible distant view of the city. The artist's untitled nude of a young woman wearing a kimono (p. 106) shows a more lyrical bohemianism and yearning as well as Vysekal's layered, wet-into-wet watercolor technique.
De Kruif, who was an etcher, watercolorist, and painter, was the only member of the Group of Eight to focus primarily on landscape. In the 1920s, he created halcyon views of Palm Springs and Red Rock Canyon in vibrant color that had the mystery and ambiguity of symbolist art, showing an affinity for the work of Rex Slinkard. Typical of his work at this time, Song of Autumn is executed in washes like a watercolor; it shows a nude standing at the edge of a pool of water that reflects a landscape beyond the viewer's sight. Perhaps a metaphor for another realm or order of meaning lying beyond the physical world, the painting also refers to the power of nature to restore harmony.
It is hard to say why Alvarez did not show Dream of Youth (p. 108), the symbolist "decoration" that she considered to be her most accomplished modernist attempt to date. She included her earlier Self-Portrait (p. 101), the bravura color painting reflecting her studies with Macdonald-Wright. Alvarez was focusing on a series of still lifes in her studio at the time of this exhibition; they were tabletop arrangements of flowers in vases. In Flowers, she placed the vase within a small enclosure, arranging the drapery in a seemingly haphazard manner but orchestrating the whole for maximum harmony. Alvarez created a lush but controlled composition, setting the high-keyed colors of the flowers against the muted, quiet tones of the drapery. The surface of the painting is lively and seems to pulse with life.
Still life was a popular genre for the Group of Eight, as it provided an opportunity to explore the potential of paint and modernist experimentation. Luvena Vysekal, who exhibited The Aesthete (p. 110), was also focused on still-life painting in the 1920s. Her Floral Still Life is a close-up, precisionist study of intense and vibrant yellow, orange, pink, and white flowers arranged in a green glass vase set on top of a deep-blue tablecloth. Like others of the Group of Eight, the artist was an advanced colorist and a modernist composer of rhythmic form and space.
Schuster, who was described by Luvena Vysekal as "emitting an effulgence of exuberance that exhausts the onlooker,"[83] had studied with Edmund Tarbell and William Merritt Chase; she was a competent figure painter in the impressionist manner. She also studied with Macdonald-Wright in the 1920s and experimented with more modernist trends.[84] O'er Waiting Harp Strings, which was in the exhibition, expresses voluptuous rapture and longing, with an almost lurid juxtaposition of the complementary colors of yellow and violet. This bold painting, in which the color is orchestrated like music to evoke a certain response from the viewer, shows a young woman creating brilliant light effects overhead while plucking the strings of a harp. Schuster developed her color painting over the course of the 1920s, arriving at ever-more-unusual combinations and using long strokes of color to build up form, creating a rainbow effect, as in Stream in Yosemite.
Shrader, perhaps the most conventional painter of the group, included Summer Morning and The Window Seat in the exhibition. Common themes in Shrader's work were his family life and the casual, outdoor lifestyle of Southern California occasioned by the nearly year-round sunlight.[85] Summer Morning (p. 120) is a tranquil, loosely painted, post-impressionistic rendering of the artist's wife surrounded by the bounty of nature. Shrader had studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago under John H. Vanderpoel and with the illustrator Howard Pyle, and he was a nationally recognized illustrator when he returned to Los Angeles in 1917. His modernism was an art of synthesis and transformation, showing he was adept at merging precubist modernism with the regional plein-air approach.
Before the museum show, the Group of Eight had started meeting again in August 1926, with Hinkle bringing some interesting ideas to the group for discussion. In October, Schuster invited them to a party at her new remote hilltop studio home at 2672 Glendower Avenue overlooking Griffith Park, with its "marvelous view, sparkling light." Galka Scheyer's Blue Four exhibition opened at the Los Angeles Museum, which caused "quite a discussion over the 4 moderns." Around this time, Alvarez was invited to the office of architect Wallace Neff to talk about her designs for interiors; Neff told her he would discuss her ideas with Douglas Fairbanks. In November the Riches threw a party for Preston Harrison when he got back from a European buying spree, during which he secured fifty works on paper by European moderns for the Los Angeles Museum. In June 1927, the group began selecting and preparing their work for the exhibition, delivering it to the museum on July 19. On August 20, Alvarez had this to say about the opening: "Reception for Group of Eight...Pretty tired after it. Hinkle and Riches to supper. Showed Clarence my last little still lifes etc. Said I had something all my own -- no one else could paint that way & to hang onto it." The next day the Riches had Alvarez, the Hinkles, Shraders, and De Kruifs over for dinner. A few days later, Alvarez drove the Riches to Laguna in her Packard, where they juried an exhibition at the Laguna Beach Art Association.[86]
In October 1928 the Group of Eight showed for the last time. Millier's review of the exhibition indicates that the group may have taken their experimentation to a new level; he stated that the "studio problems of aesthetics come somewhat between spectator and artist."[87] They exhibited their work in the new galleries of the California Art Club. Aline Barnsdall had donated her home to the city of Los Angeles for the use of the club for fifteen years. It had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, with Rudolph Schindler as the supervising architect, and it had opened to the public in August 1927. The hope was that Hollyhock House would essentially be the "museum of contemporary art" for the artists of Los Angeles. The artists of the Group of Eight, all of whom (with the exception of De Kruif) were either officers or committee members of the club at the time, were instrumental in making it happen. With the opening of the institution in the modernist building, the California Art Club became a hotbed of modernist activity and the cultural center of Los Angeles; soon Richard Neutra and Franz K. Ferenz would also become active members.[88]
In November, the club honored brothers Willard Huntington Wright and Stanton Macdonald-Wright at its annual dinner. Huntington Wright spoke about regional art, saying that California was the ideal place for the "mating of East and West."[89] By the late 1920s, modern art in Los Angeles, as in other parts of the country, had in many ways won the fight -- although tremendous skirmishes would break out over the course of the 1930s.[90] One senses that art was taking an in-breath, getting ready for a new direction.
By 1927, collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg and Galka Scheyer were resident in the city, and Jake Zeitlin had opened his first bookshop and gallery, At the Sign of the Grasshopper, at Hope Street near 6th. There was a growing interest in Los Angeles in modernist architecture and design, and at the Los Angeles Academy of Modern Art in Hollywood, Neutra was teaching architecture, and Feitelson, who had recently moved to Los Angeles, was teaching painting. The post-surrealism of Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg was on the horizon. So were the federal art projects and American Scene painting, which early on would reflect a complex mix of influences drawing upon the art of Henri and The Eight as well as Far Eastern art and philosophy. This younger group of regionally bred artists benefited from the teachings of members of the Group of Eight at Otis Art Institute, the Art Students League, and Chouinard, many under the tutelage of Hinkle. They attained exceptional skills in draftsmanship and modernist composition, design, and color. It was the talent of the younger generation in Los Angeles that gave birth to an entirely new art expression -- the animated film. Phil Dike, one of Hinkle's students at Chouinard, taught advanced drawing and composition to animators and became Disney's first color coordinator in 1935, the year the first animated cartoon was made in Technicolor.[91] Dike spoke highly of Hinkle, later recalling, "We all think of him as a particularly gentle and elegant person, elegant painter and it's our feeling that he will be recorded one day as one of the outstanding California painters."[92]
This brief study of the Group of Eight and their milieu is but an introduction to artists who are remembered for their boldness of color, their superior draftsmanship and design, their concern for essential form, and their ability to turn pigment into idea. To provide a fuller picture of the group, more work needs to be done on the individual artists and the development of their art. Their collective and individual histories have been obscured for long enough that little information about them is readily available. The Depression era of the 1930s and its wholly different focus -- a questioning of the relationship of art and the individual to the surrounding social and political context -- provided something of an historical rupture as well. As the twentieth century unfolded, the Los Angeles art world became increasingly authoritative, effectively marginalizing and obscuring the work of these early modernists and women artists in general. The growth of legitimizing institutions, galleries, and critics in Los Angeles did not necessarily mean that art became more independent and inclusive.
The opening of the California Art Club building at Barnsdall Park in 1927 signaled the canonization of an era that was swiftly coming to a close. As more research is done on the 1920s, a clearer picture will be drawn of this vibrant and pivotal decade that may have been the first "golden age" for Los Angeles art. This was a time of intense experimentation and interaction between various artistic and intellectual groups. There was a general sense of fascination for the new and of freedom from constraint. Most important, perhaps, it was a time when artists in Los Angeles were self-consciously forging a dynamic art community and a new art, not for any gain but just for the sheer joy of the adventure.
The modernist endeavor in Los Angeles during the 1920s was not an obstacle race in a vacuum, as it is often portrayed. Artists were far less isolated than has been assumed, and they had close contact with currents elsewhere. Although critics may have written about the art scene until around 1925 as a struggle between progressive and conservative camps, there was plenty else going on outside their limited field of vision. This study has only revealed the tip of the iceberg. There was indeed a striking conflict between the ambitions of regional artists and their possibilities for earning a living. This did contribute to a schism and competition between the modernists and the traditional painters of landscapes. As the conventional story goes, serious and seditious, regional modernists, led by Macdonald-Wright, were eager to distance themselves from conventional impressionism and the male-dominated California Art Club because of its associations with tourist art and its market-driven ethos. One senses that by the early 1920s, however, the Group of Eight, at least, couldn't be bothered with the distinction between modernist and conservative. Their bohemianism caused them to conduct their lives largely outside the domain of society's rules, freeing them to explore and create at will. They valued personal experience and individual expression over commercial success. Artistic and intellectual circles in Los Angeles overlapped, with artists of varying persuasions exhibiting together and supporting each other in a fluid atmosphere that was conducive to experimentation. Like the inimitable Gjura Stojana, the Group of Eight was essential to forging a bridge between groups in the region.
We do know a few other things about the Group of Eight and about regional art during the 1920s as a result of this study. The Group of Eight was the longest-lived artist group with an exhibiting affiliation in Los Angeles during the 1920s. The artists won acceptance and acclaim in both conservative and modernist circles because of their command of advanced painting techniques and draftsmanship, while at the same time exploring the potential of modernist color and form. They addressed some of the crucial issues facing developing modern society in their art, and they spoke to some of the pressing issues that were revolutionizing art in America. This was a period in U.S. history when traditional certainties, boundaries, and identities were called into question. The rich intellectual and bohemian life of the Group of Eight lent the artists the aesthetic sensibility and freedom to revel in a search for self during an era in which ideas about identity were changing radically.
The idea that communion with nature could restore humankind was a nationwide direction for art and culture that was particularly salient in Southern California. Although nature was a strong presence in the art of the Group of Eight, it was filtered through a sense of self. The artists focused on the restoration of the human spirit mainly through portraiture, figure painting, genre scenes, and still lifes. However, rather than aspiring to portraits and figurative images that laid bare the souls of their subjects, the Group of Eight created iconic images that were a careful balance between openness and inaccessibility, liberation and restraint. Their art metaphorically expressed the dualities of restoration and encroachment, self-definition and conformity, mirroring both the gains and losses of their generation. They observed a careful balance between subjectivity and objectivity.
Innovative experimentation and fluidity of style were the rule for the Group of Eight, who individually had the sense that they were always on the threshold of something new. In the fulfillment of their modernist endeavor, they had many important allies, but the first was Henri, who was something of a regional patron saint as well as a national catalyst in the development of American realist modernism. Second was Macdonald-Wright, one of the leading international modernist thinkers of the era, who awakened regional artists to more advanced forms of modernism and contributed to the analytical and emotional use of color in the region. The artists' bohemianism and exchange across artistic circles contributed to a plethora of styles in Los Angeles, to syntheses or juxtapositions that did not necessarily exist in other places and so have been difficult to recognize and define.
The Group of Eight saw themselves as participating in and contributing to an international modernist project, establishing an important new art with a modern spirit.[93] As Arthur Millier, writing in the Los Angeles Times, foresaw: "While the art productions of our own day are often puzzling to us, so great is their diversity of style, it is highly probable that they will hold an interest for future generations unparalleled among the art epochs of history, for they express the crucial years of the greatest change in conditions the race has ever experienced."[94] The Group of Eight's enduring contribution to American modernism is their visual celebration of the burgeoning bohemian life they found around them and their belief in the future of Los Angeles art.
Page 4
Search Resource Library
Copyright 2012-2022 Traditional Fine Arts Organization, Inc., an Arizona nonprofit corporation. All rights reserved.