Regionalism: The California View

by Susan M. Anderson

Notes

1. James Dennis, Grant Wood (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1986), p. 193.

2. H. W Janson, "Benton and Wood, Champions of Regionalism," The Magazine of Art 39 (May 1945): pp. 183-186.

3. Nancy Dustin Wall Moure examines the school within the context of the California Water Color Society in The California Water Color Society Prize Winners 1931-1954, Index to Exhibitions 1921-1954 (Glendale: By the author, 935 West Mountain Street, 1975). See also Janet B. Dominik, The California School: The Private Collection of E. Gene Crain, exh. cat. (Gualala: Gualala Arts, 1986).

4. Harvey L. Jones, Impressionism: The California View, Paintings 1890-1930, exh. cat. (Oakland: The Oakland Museum Art Department, 1981), p. 9.

5. Chouinard School of Art (reincorporated in 1935 as Chouinard Art Institute), founded by Nelbert Chouinard in 1921, developed a national reputation as an art school. It was part of the vital Los Angeles art community centered in Westlake Park, consisting of the Art Center School, Otis Art Institute, the Federal Art Project Art Center, the Foundation of Western Art, Stendahl Galleries, Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, Jake Zeitlin's Bookshop, the Los Angeles Art Association and art supply stores, chief among them Ted Gibson Framers.

The artists lived together in boarding houses in the neighborhood and shared studios near the school. Many regularly gathered in the barn behind the school to work and talk about art. They shared many common interests including "the fundamental problems of aesthetics and meaning of painting, although nobody discussed it in that sense." For the most part they were neither philosophically nor politically inclined. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, interview with Millard Sheets by Paul Karlstrom on 28 and 29 October 1986, edited draft transcript, p. 40.

6. Winifred Haines Higgins, "Art Collecting in the Los Angeles Area 1910-1960," dissertation, UCLA, 1963, p. 14.

Although they saw the work of Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, and even the Blaue Reiter artists at Hatfield and Stendahl Galleries, it was Mexican art that most impressed the students and teachers at Chouinard according to Millard Sheets. This interest had begun in 1930 with the arrival of José Clement Orozco who painted a mural at nearby Pomona College, and it was intensified by the exhibition of Mexican art organized by the Federation of Arts of Los Angeles in 1931.

Southern California Impressionism is commonly referred to as the Eucalyptus School, although the term, when coined by Merle Armitage, originally referred to amateur painters only. Janet B. Dominik, Early Artists in Laguna Beach: The Impressionists, exh. cat. (Laguna Beach: Laguna Art Museum, 1986), p. 27.

7. Many of the artists and families of the artists interviewed spoke about the profound influence these teachers had on them. An impressive international array of guest lecturers and teachers also visited the school in the early 1930s, including: Richard Neutra, R. M. Schindler, Morgan Russell, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, Alexander Archipenko and Hans Hoffmann. Robert Perine, Chouinard: An Art Vision Betrayed (Encinitas: Artra Publishing, Inc., 1985), pp. 71-75.

8. The artists of the California school subsequently felt strongly that the nature of the subject should dictate style and technique. Their emotional response to the subject was all-important, providing the impetus to paint and guiding their stylistic approach. This attitude accounts for much of the directness and sincerity of the work but also for a general diversity and lack of consistent style sometimes noted in the work of individual artists. Tom Craig expressed this attitude well when he said, "I try to find the means available to the subject at hand . . . The all important element. . . is the mystery of things seen and experienced." Alfred Frankenstein, "Tom Craig's Water Colors," The Magazine of Art 31 (October 1938): p. 578.

9. Conveyed in interviews with Millard Sheets, Phil Dike, Mrs. Carl Beetz Bock; Mary Davis MacNaughton, Art at Scripps: The Early Years, exh. cat. (Claremont: Scripps College, 1987), p. 8.

10. Arthur Millier, "Millard Sheets Career Seen as Swift Growth." Los Angeles Times, 15 May 1932, sec 4, p. 10 .

Millard Sheets began at this time, for example, to make watercolors of farmlands and rolling hills without the broken
wash and white flecks (sometimes called 'accidentals') of his previous style and instead used graduated washes. According to him, his choice of subject matter was influenced by Edward Bruce, who was a watercolor painter, and may have also been a source for the new approach.

11. In California, Art Digest had twice the circulation per capita of New York, which accounts for the amount of space given to the coverage of California art. Peyton Boswell, "California," Art Digest 4 (August 1930): 4. Peyton Boswell, the editor of the magazine, knew many of the watercolor artists personally.

12. "Edward Bruce Shows California How It Looks to Eastern Eyes," Art Digest 5 (March 1931): 13; Arthur Millier,"Brush Strokes," Los Angeles Times, 15 March 1932, sec. 4, p. 10.

13. "Los Angeles Holds Its Twelfth Annual Show," Art Digest 5 (March 1931): 13; "Charles Payzant Wins First Prize With Art Exhibit," Santa Monica Outlook, 13 March 1931 ; The Los Angeles Museum of Art, The Twelfth Annual Exhibition of American Painters and Sculptors, exh. cat. (Los Angeles Museum Art News, 1931).

14. Holger Cahill, American Art Today, New York World's Fair, exh. cat. (New York: National Art Society, 1939), p. 23.

15. Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, The California Water Color Society Prize Winners 1931-1954, Index to Exhibitions 1921-1954, p. 2.

16. This idea was introduced to me during an interview with Millard Sheets, 17 January 1988.

17. Dalzell Hatfield, Millard Sheets (New York: Dalzell Hatfield, 1935), p. 6.

18. "Twelve California Watercolorists," Art Digest 11(September 1937): p. 13.

19. Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, The California Water Color Society Prize Winners 1931-1954, Index to Exhibitions 1921-1954, p. 2.

20. Cyril Kay Scott, "Aquarelle Revival, Art Digest 9, November 1934, p. 7.

21. Arthur Millier, "Western Water Colorists Seen in Well-Chosen Show," Los Angeles Times, 22 April 1934.

22. Interview with Lee Blair, 27 December 1987.

23. Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, The California Water Color Society Prize Winners 1931-1954, Index to Exhibitions 1921-1954, pp. 1-3; Janet B. Dominik, The California School, The California School: The Private Collection of E. Gene Crain, p. 10.; Arthur Millier, Los Angeles Times, 22 October 1939.

24. Arthur Millier, Los Angeles Times, 15 May 1932.

25. Interview with Millard Sheets, 17 January 1988.

26. Sheets began to set the pace for the other artists when, on completion of his studies in 1929, he won a national competition and had a one-man exhibition at Dalzell Hatfield's gallery. Overnight Sheets received local critical acclaim and acquired enough funds to travel through South America to Europe. Like many fellow American artists traveling internationally at this time Sheet's taste was largely formed before he went to Europe. As Hatfield said in his 1935 essay on Sheets: "Immediately upon the closing of his exhibition he left for a tour of European museums and art centers, to return six months later with a broader comprehension of the field of art, but uninfluenced by any school or "ism;" he returned just as truly a product of Western America as he left it." Dalzell Hatfield, Millard Sheets, pp. 2-3.

While in Europe, Sheets was most impressed with the work of the early Italian Renaissance painters in Florence, J. M. W. Turner's watercolors in London, an exhibition of Winslow Homer's watercolors in New York and Thomas Hart Benton's "America Today" murals at the New School for Social Research in New York. Mary MacNaughton, Art at Scripps: The Early Years, p. 7.

In October 1930, Art Digest announced that Sheets was the only West Coast artist accepted into the Carnegie International, the largest and most prestigious of the annual exhibitions of oil painting in the United States. Although he had exhibited his watercolors in eastern exhibitions the year before, this was the first time that Sheets gained national recognition and articles on his achievements soon began to appear in Art Digest. It was in this same year that Benton, Curry and Wood also began to receive national recognition.

27. Mary Davis McNaughton addresses Sheets' role as a Southern California Regionalist in Art at Scripps: The Early Years, pp. 5 -10.

28. Interview with Millard Sheets, 17 January 1988.

29. Interview with Al Stendahl, 17 March 1988.

30. Jacob Israel Zeitlin, "Books and the Imagination: Fifty Years of Rare Books," transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted by Joel Gardner, University of California, Los Angeles, Oral History Program, 1980.

31. Interview with Lee Blair, 27 December 1987.

32. Generally speaking, the work of the artists developed greater looseness and gestural quality over the decade and reflected their growing interest in action or movement.

33. In many ways, the use of watercolor technique as it is sometimes seen in the work of Dike and some of the other artists of the California school, looks ahead to the work of the Abstract Expressionists. Barse Miller, whose work grew increasingly freer as the decade advanced, was an artist who moved easily into the gestural abstraction of the 1940s.

34. Milford Zornes and Rex Brandt mentioned this in interviews. In a 1941 Life magazine article featuring the work of the "California school" a number of the works reproduced were oil paintings. Many of the artists received their recognition in watercolor but continued to work and exhibit in oil and did not personally identify themselves as "watercolorists". Critics did not draw a sharp distinction either, so that the identity of the California school as a specifically watercolor phenomenon sometimes becomes blurred.

35. Edward Alden Jewell, "206 Water-Colors of West Exhibited," New York Times, 5 March 1940, p. 21.; When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought nine of the watercolors out of the exhibition, a furor arose, mostly caused by critic Emily Genauer who called the purchase inconsequential, even though she had favorably reviewed the exhibition. (She had also been disapproving of previous museum purchases.) Most of the reviews were favorable, however, and the exhibition proved "once and for all" the importance of the California school. Edward Alden Jewell, "Watercolors," The New York Times, 10 March, 1940. Emily Genauer, "Western Watercolors Praised in New York," Art Digest 14 (March 1940): p. 7, 26; "Met Recognizes California Watercolorists," Art Digest 14 (September 1940); "Questioning the Met," Art Digest 14 (September 1940).

36. When Sheets went to teach at Scripps College in 1932, he encountered Hartley Burr Alexander, a philosopher interested in ancient, primitive and Oriental art, and came under his influence. Craig and Zornes were enrolled in Sheets' first year of classes at the college. Shore at Casmalia also shows the influence of Russell Flint, the English watercolorist whose work was shown regularly at Zeitlin's Bookshop.

37. Beer for Prosperity was painted 11 years before Hopper's oil painting, Nighthawks, 1944. Janet Dominik first pointed out this fact to me.

38. Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), p. 46.

39. New Deal Art: California, exh. cat. (Santa Clara: University of Santa Clara, 1976), pp. 85-107.

40. Arthur Millier, Los Angeles Times, 11 March 1934.

41. Interview with Milford Zornes, 15 March 1988.

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

43. David Gebhard and Harriette Von Breton, L.A. in the Thirties (Los Angeles: Peregrine Smith, Inc., 1975), p. 29.

44. Karal Ann Marling, Wall to Wall America: A Cultural History of Post-Office Murals in the Great Depression (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 99-101 San Francisco Chronicle, 24 December 1933.

45. "Disney's Dike," Time, March 1941, p. 61.

46. American Artist 11 (March 1947), p. 38.

47. Philip Beard and Chris Mullen, Fortune's America: The Visual Achievements of Fortune Magazine, 1930-7965, exh. cat. (England: University of East Anglia Library, 1985), pp. 1-20.

48. John Haley and Erle Loran were the originators of the Berkeley school of painting that arose in the 1930s and 1940s. They were professors at the University of California, Berkeley, and students of Hans Hofmann. The watercolors that these artists produced exhibited a style (coined as "the Berkeley school" by critic Alfred Frankenstein in the 1930s) that was far more modernist than those of Southern California artists. Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), p. 9.

49. Arthur Millier, "Dan Lutz Shows Art of National Stature," Los Angeles Times, 18 September 1938.

50. Interview with Mrs. Brigitta Beetz Bock, 16 January 1988.

51. Ben Messick, exh. cat. (Redlands: Eclectic Framer and Gallery, 1987), p. 2.

52. Interviews with Millard Sheets, 17 January 1988; and Lee Blair, 27 December 1987.

53. In the fresco technique wet pigment is quickly applied to a wet plaster surface, with one section at a time being completed before the surface can dry, as no changes can be made to the surface of a mural once it has dried. This is very similar to the wet-into-wet watercolor technique, in which artists of the California school excelled. Here, the watercolor medium is applied onto a sheet of paper which has been dampened. (Siqueiros was also using an airbrush to complete the murals and was not using strictly traditional techniques such as were described here.)

54. Shifra M. Goldman, "Siqueiros and Three Early Murals in Los Angeles," Art Journal 33, Summer 1974, p. 323; Lester H. Cooke, Jr., Fletcher Martin (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977), p. 22.

55. Telephone interview with Lee Blair.

56. Rex Brandt, like some of the other artists, mentioned in an interview the influence of Burchfield.

57. California Arts and Architecture 57 (November 1940): p. 6.

58. "1 Wonder Where We Can Co Now," Fortune, April 1939, p. 90.

59. Peyton Boswell, "Fletcher Martin Paints the War in Africa," Art Digest 18 (January 1 944).

60. Peyton Boswell, "Life Goes On," Art Digest 17 (September 1943).

61. "Defense Paintings: Life Recruits Major Artists," Life; May 1941.

62. "United States Sends Artists to War Front," Art Digest 17 (May 1943): p. 13.

63. Ernest W. Watson, "Barse Miller: Painter at the Crossroads," American Artist 10 (June 1946): p. 20.

64. Art Digest 20 (October 1945).

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