Modern Spirit: The Group of Eight & Los Angeles Art of the 1920s
by Susan M. Anderson
Notes
1. There is conflicting information about Stojana's birth date, birthplace, the nationality of his parents, and his place of entry to the United States. One of his passport applications, that for November 20, 1916, states that he was born in Ulmer, Austrus, on April 2, 1885, and was a Slav by birth. He emigrated from Naples, Italy, to New York in 1903 and was naturalized in San Francisco in 1913. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Passport Applications January 2, 1906-March 31, 1925; Collection Number: ARC Identifier 583830/MLR Number A1 534; NARA Series: M1490; Roll 1713. However, the information is slightly different on other passport applications, ship manifests, census records, etc., information that was provided by Stojana himself. His close friend Annita Delano had this to say about Stojana: "He was a Gypsy from Roumania that I knew, or from one of those Balkan states, and a very creative person." "Southwest Artist and Educator, Annita Delano," Transcript of oral history with James V. Mink, completed under the auspices of the Oral History Program, UCLA, 1976, vol. 1, p. 388.
2. Beth Gates Warren, Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), 216. Stojana, who may have gone to Hawaii with his wife Elizabeth Stanson as early as 1918, returned from there on the SS Manoa in 1920, according to a ship manifest. National Archives and Records Administration, A3510:30. The 1920 census listed his place of residence as Honolulu, Hawaii, with his birthplace as France, along with that of his parents. His race was listed as "Octoroon." 1920 U.S. Federal Census, Koolaupoko, Honolulu, Hawaii Territory, Roll: T625-2035; Page: 11B; Enumeration District: 143; Image: 424.
3. This is how Elizabeth Kennedy has described The Eight, and it seems a very apt description for the Group of Eight as well. Elizabeth Kennedy, "The Eight: Modern Art of One Kind and Another," in The Eight and American Modernisms, ed. Kennedy (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2009), 13.
4. Antony Anderson, "Art Club Elects," Los Angeles Times, December 5, 1921, p. 17. Hinkle and Luvena Vysekal were also members of the California Art Club but were not elected to the board or on the jury of selection.
5. However, it is clear that Alvarez at least had the greatest respect for Hinkle and looked to him as a mentor of sorts. The other artists she held in high esteem during the 1920s were Stojana, Helena Dunlap, and Stanton Macdonald-Wright.
6. Will South, "The Art Students League of Los Angeles: A Brief History," in South, Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, and Julia Armstrong-Totten, A Seed of Modernism: The Art Students League of Los Angeles, 19061953 (Pasadena, Calif.: Pasadena Museum of California Art, 2008), 3.
7. Antony Anderson, "Art and Artists," Los Angeles Times, September 20, 1914, pt. III, p. 5; Virginia Woods, "Society: To Compliment Celebrated Artist," Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1922, pt. II, p. 8; "Master Portrait Painter Vacations in Southland," Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1925, p. 8. For more on early modernism in Los Angeles, see Susan M. Anderson, California Progressives, 19101930 (Newport Beach, Calif.: Orange County Museum of Art, 1996); and Sarah Vure, Circles of Influence: Impressionism to Modernism in Southern California Art, 19101930 (Newport Beach, Calif.: Orange County Museum of Art, 2000). Vure offers a thorough study of Henri's influence in the region.
8. Clarence Hinkle, 1880-1960, a Memorial Exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, exh. cat. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1960), n.p.
9. Teresa A. Carbone, "Body Language: Liberation and Restraint in Twenties Figuration," in Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties, ed. Carbone (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2011), 16.
10. Luvena Vysekal, however, was born in 1873.
11. Marian Wardle, "Thoroughly Modern: The 'New Women' Art Students of Robert Henri," in American Women Modernists: The Legacy of Robert Henri, 1910-1945, ed. Wardle (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Museum of Art, 2005), 1.
12. Weston and Mather cosigned the photographs, all dated 1921. See Beth Gates Warren, Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2001), 28.
13. The photographs are in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
14. Warren, Artful Lives, 285-88.
15. Nancy Newhall, ed., The Daybooks of Edward Weston, Vol. I, Mexico (New York: George Eastman House, 1961), 10.
16. Warren, Artful Lives, 258-59.
17. Patricia Albers, Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 6465. Hinkle most likely lived alone at this residence for a year or so before marrying Mabel in 1921.
18. Antony Anderson, "Of Art and Artists," Los Angeles Times, May 20, 1923, sec. III, p. 19.
19. Mabel Alvarez papers, 18981987. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Diary Entries May 13-23, 1923; May 27, 1923:microfilm roll 8/266. Numerous times throughout the diary, Alvarez mentions Dunlap, who often gave her advice about the trajectory of her career, and more than once invited Alvarez to travel with her. Alvarez, Diaries: March 22, 1922:8/202.
20. Antony Anderson, "Of Art and Artists," Los Angeles Times, March 21, 1926, p. 37; see also unmarked clipping in Hinkle scrapbook, "Points of View on American Show."
21. Margarita Nieto, "The Mexican Presence in the United States, Part I," Latin American Art (Fall 1990): 30-31.
22. Alvarez, Diaries: March 19, 1922:8/201; March 26, 1922:8/203; August 15, 1922:8/240; January 18, 1925:8/465.
23. Ibid., May 24, 1925:8/492.
24. Ibid., August 16, 1925:8/511.
25. Ibid., October 4-5, 1925:8/522.
26. There was most likely exchange between Shrader and others at Otis with the Schindler circle far earlier than this. Karl Howenstein, who was well versed in art and psychoanalysis, was the managing director of Otis for a brief time in the early 1920s while Shrader was dean. Howenstein lived in Schindler's guest house and was a close friend. For more on Schindler and his Kings Road salon, see Robert Sweeney, "Life at Kings Road: As It Was, 1920-1940," in The Architecture of R. M. Schindler, ed. Elizabeth A. T. Smith and Michael Darling (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001). Also see the Otis Art Institute archives at http://www.otis.edu/life_otis/library/collections_online/otis_history.html; and Conrad Buff, interview by Elizabeth J. Dixon, 1964, Oral History Program, UCLA, 122-24.
27. Stanton Macdonald-Wright, "An Open Letter from a Modernist," Los Angeles Times, October 4, 1925, p. 35.
28. Weston, Daybooks, June 3, 1925, p. 120 (letter to Tina Modotti).
29. "Southwest Artist and Educator, Annita Delano," vol. 1, pp. 388, 514; Margaret Leslie Davis, Bullocks Wilshire (Los Angeles: Balcony Press, 1996), 55-56.
30. Alvarez, Diaries/Journal, February 26, 1925:8/388. Alvarez was seemingly influenced by the work of Stojana in taking this new direction toward muralism and design for architectural spaces.
31. Richard Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 59.
32. For a succinct discussion of the development of Los Angeles during the 1920s, see Kevin Starr, "Los Angeles 1900-1930: The Great Gatsby of American Cities," in Vure, Circles of Influence, 9-24.
33. For a discussion of the history of gay culture and bohemianism in Los Angeles, see Daniel Hurewitz, Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
34. Carbone, Youth and Beauty, 26, 29. Carbone acknowledges Christopher Wilk, "The Healthy Body Culture," in Designing a New World, 1914-1939, ed. Wilk (London: V&A Publications, 2006), 250-52.
35. Carbone, Youth and Beauty, 11.
36. Ibid., 13, 15. Alvarez, who was born in Hawaii and was an avid gardener, documented several paintings with flowered backgrounds in her diaries: "There is hardly anything as delicious as gardening on a beautiful morning. . . . There is a lifting of the spirit, a singing within." Alvarez, Diaries, March 1, 1922:8/381-82.
37. "Our Enemy, the Wrinkle," Vogue, January 1, 1921, p. 49; quoted in Carbone, Youth and Beauty, 95.
38. Carbone, Youth and Beauty, 16.
39. Ibid., 19.
40. This experimentation sometimes extended to homosexuality as well. Alvarez was very open-minded and had several gay friends. According to Glenn Bassett, a close friend of Alvarez and Trustee of the Alvarez Estate, she aided Morgan Russell, who was a cross-dresser, in the purchasing of his feminine undergarments. Glenn Bassett, "Mabel Alvarez (18911985): A Personal Memory," http://www.mabelalvarez.com/about/bassett.htm.
41. Carbone, Youth and Beauty, 29.
42. Will South, Mabel Alvarez: A Retrospective (Newport Beach, Calif.: Orange County Museum of Art, 1999), 6.
43. Luvena Vysekal, "Counterfeit Presentment XII," Los Angeles Times, September 17, 1922, sec. III, p. 28; quoted in Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, Love Never Fails: The Art of Edouard and Luvena Vysekal (Pasadena, Calif.: Pasadena Museum of California Art, 2011), 55.
44. Vure, Circles of Influence, 86.
45. Alvarez, Diaries: February 2, 1922:8/191.
46. California awarded women the vote in 1911, nine years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
47. Wardle, Thoroughly Modern, 14.
48. The California Art Club began to lose its dominance over the art scene and the Los Angeles Museum in 1920, with the inauguration of the first annual exhibition of the Painters and Sculptors of Southern California.
49. More work needs to be done on the career trajectories of the individual artists of the Group of Eight before definitive statements can be made about their contributions to the development of modernism in Los Angeles. Until then, their work can best be described as modernist realism.
50. Arthur Millier, preface to Edward Vysekal Memorial Exhibition (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art, 1940), n.p.
51. Stanton Macdonald-Wright, "A Treatise on Color," in Stanton Macdonald-Wright (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1967), 25.
52. Millier, Edward Vysekal Memorial Exhibition, n.p.
53. For an excellent discussion of Macdonald-Wright's legacy in Southern California, see Julia Armstrong-Totten, "The Legacy of the Art Students League: Defining This Unique Art Center in Pre-War Los Angeles," in South, Yoshiki-Kovinick, and Armstrong-Totten, A Seed of Modernism, 3351.
54. Macdonald-Wright had been raised in Santa Monica from age ten. After establishing himself in Paris in 1913, at age twenty-three, as a pioneer of modern art, he returned to Los Angeles in 1918. For the most complete discussion of the artist, see Will South, Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism (Raleigh, N.C.: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2001).
55. I did not find evidence to support Shrader's attendance at the lectures or other interaction with Macdonald-Wright. On De Kruif, see Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, "Henri De Kruif (18821944), Painter and Printmaker," in South, Yoshiki-Kovinick, and Armstrong-Totten, A Seed of Modernism, 101.
56. Will South, "The Art Students League of Los Angeles: A Brief History," in ibid., 4.
57. The form the series took was inspired by Alvarez's interest in the modernism of Slinkard, Justema, and Stojana.
58. On Vysekal, see Yoshiki-Kovinick, Love Never Fails. Vysekal made several paintings in the early 1920s with titles that referred to Macdonald-Wright's color system, such as Brick Yard (Violet Major).
59. According to Janet Blake, Hinkle was also scheduled to teach at Chouinard when he returned from a trip to Europe and Canada in November 1931 and taught until 1935. See "Chouinard Art School Opens Soon," Los Angeles Times, August 30, 1931, p. C3.
60. Sarah Vure feels that Otis's imperative was a return to order following World War I, as evidenced in a statement Shrader made in 1923: "Our main desire is the molding of character and we feel that this aim can be accomplished through an inculcation of a sense of values in color and form and through the appreciation of beauty in its various transformations. In these days of stress and hurry I sometimes think that too little emphasis is laid on the necessity for 'good form' -- not only in the world of art, but in government, religion, industry and our social organizations." "Thousand Works of Art Shown in Three-Day Exhibit of Otis Art Institute Opening Friday," Monrovia News, June 13, 1923; quoted in Vure, Circles of Influence, 60.
61. Julia Armstrong-Totten believes that it was Edouard Vysekal who was responsible for the ready exchange of students between Otis Art Institute and the Art Students League.
62. Mary Jarrett, The Otis Story of Otis Art Institute since 1918 (Los Angeles: Alumni Association of Otis Art Institute, 1975), 9; Yoshiki-Kovinick, Love Never Fails, 43.
63. Edouard Vysekal, "Fourth Anatomy Talk, Friday, October 27, 1927" at Otis Art Institute. I am very grateful to Jean Stern for lending me these lectures from his personal collection.
64. See Yoshiki-Kovinick, Love Never Fails, 5263, for a selection of the Benjamin Blue writings.
65. Luvena Vysekal, "Counterfeit Presentment XX," Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1922, sec. III, p. 20; quoted in Yoshiki-Kovinick, Love Never Fails, 55.
66. Arthur Millier, "Art and Artists," Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1927, p. C28.
67. Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, in association with the National Portrait Gallery, 2010), 33. This excellent catalogue illustrates the differing ways that gay men have been viewed over time, showing how homosexuality has become increasingly politicized. The gay film star William Haines (1900-1973) was often referred to as "the Aesthete."
68. Antony Anderson, "Of Art and Artists," Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1921, pt. III, p. 14.
69. Alvarez, Diaries: May 13, 1922:8/215.
70. Antony Anderson, "Of Art and Artists," Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1922, pt. III, p. 23. For an image of the cover of the brochure, see Alvarez Papers, Smithsonian Institution, VIII, #5, 759.
71. Alvarez, Diaries: January 2226, 1922:8/18889; February 20, 1922:8/191.
72. Antony Anderson, "Of Art and Artists," Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1922, pt. III, p. 23. The Group of Eight also exhibited in March 1922 in the Woman's Club, Pomona.
73. Alvarez, Diaries: September 6-December 7, 1922:8/244-64.
74. Antony Anderson, "Of Art and Artists," Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1922.
75. Alvarez, Diaries: January 17 and 27, 1923:8/23639. It is difficult to say whether Hinkle and Dunlap frequented the lectures or just dropped in from time to time. Alvarez's diary entries throughout the 1920s show that Macdonald-Wright was clearly a supporter of Alvarez's, who was a devoted student and attended his classes over several years.
76. Beginning at least as early as December 1921, Shrader, Schuster, Rich, Alvarez, Edouard Vysekal, and De Kruif were officers and chairs of committees of the California Art Club.
77. Antony Anderson, "Of Art and Artists," Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1925, p. 34.
78. Ibid., October 4, 1925, p. 35.
79. Arthur Millier, "Art and Artists," Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1927, p. C28.
80. Alvarez began to note Hinkle's use of this "gray" background beginning in 1925 and also started to experiment with it herself. Alvarez, Diaries: August 6, 1925:8/508. According to a biography written for the Blue Coyote Gallery on http://www.askart.com by Philip Jones, great nephew to Harold Buck Weaver (18891961), he was born in England and worked his way around the world as a jockey, sailor, gunslinger, and broncobuster. He lived in San Francisco (possibly during the same time as Hinkle) and various other places, including in the desert with the Hopi and Navajo, and in Laguna Beach.
81. More study needs to be done of the consequences to Los Angeles art following Galka Scheyer's Blue Four exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum in 1926. For instance, it may have contributed to an undertone of melancholy or "edge" to Hinkle's art of the later 1920s, when his paintings became evermore an expression of a state of mind.
82. Antony Anderson, "Of Art and Artists," Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1922.
83. Luvena Vysekal, "Counterfeit Presentment," Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1922.
84. It is documented that Schuster studied with Macdonald-Wright from 1928 to 1930 in Leonard R. de Grassi, Donna Norine Schuster, 18831953 (Downey, Calif.: Downey Museum of Art, 1977), n.p. However, she most likely studied with him earlier, as evidenced by her work of the early 1920s. Armstrong-Totten believes it was prior to 1923.
85. On Shrader, see Janet Blake and Phil Kovinick, The Art and Life of E. Roscoe Shrader (Los Angeles: George Stern Fine Arts, 2010).
86. Alvarez, Diaries: August 8, 1926:8/511; October 5, 1926:8/525; October 10, 1926:5/827; November 14, 1926:8/535; June 22, 1927:8/595; July 19, 1927:8/602; August 20, 1927:8/610; August 25, 1927:8/611.
87. Arthur Millier, "Art and Artists: Group Exhibits at Art Club, 'The Eight,' Showing Their Paintings Together Over Period of Years, Maintain Adventurous Reputation in Present Display," Los Angeles Times, October 21, 1928, p. B17. The Group of Eight also exhibited in January 1928 at Bullock's, Los Angeles.
88. As officers of the club and teachers at Otis, Edouard Vysekal and Shrader in particular were tremendous advocates for the development of the art community in Southern California. Alvarez, too, was actively involved in the building fund campaign to create a new exhibition opportunity for artists in Los Angeles, which resulted in Aline Barnsdall's donating her home.
89. Alvarez, Diaries, November 15, 1928:8/632.
90. It was in the 1930s, perhaps, that the lines were drawn between artist groups in Los Angeles.
91. See Susan M. Anderson, "California Holiday: Regional Culture and the Natural Environment in Southern California, 1930-1945," in California Holiday: The E. Gene Crain Collection (Laguna Beach, Calif.: Laguna Art Museum, 2002).
92. Oral history with Phil Dike, June 9, 1965, conducted by Betty Hoag for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
93. See Smith, Utopia and Dissent, for an excellent discussion of the emergence of modernism in California.
94. Arthur Millier, "Art and Artists: A Los Angeles Collection,"
Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1928, p. C8.
About the author
Susan M. Anderson is guest curator for Modern Spirit and the Group of Eight.
Page 5
Resource Library editor's note:
The above essay is from the catalogue for the exhibitions Clarence Hinkle and Modern Spirit and the Group of Eight, on view at the Laguna Art Museum June 10 - October 7, 2012. It was reprinted in Resource Library on June 23, 2012 with permission of the Laguna Art Museum, which was granted to TFAO on June 20, 2012. If you have questions or comments regarding the text, or wish to obtain a copy of the catalogue from which it is excerpted, please contact the Laguna Art Museum directly through either this phone number or web address: 949-494-6531, http://www.lagunaartmuseum.org
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