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MAMDi: IN CALIFORNIA: ART, IMAGE, AND IDENTITY, 1900-2000
This opulent and expansive volume, published in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's monumental exhibition Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, charts the dynamic relationship between the arts and popular conceptions of California in the twentieth century. Displaying a dazzling array of fine art and ephemera, Made in California challenges us to reexamine the ways in which the state has been envisioned and portrayed. Unusually inclusive, visually intriguing, and beautifully produced. Made in California will appeal to anyone who has lived in, visited, or imagined California.
Drawn from the exhibition, which encompasses more than 1,200 examples of art and ephemera from many public and private collections, Made in California is an image-driven look at the past century featuring more than 400 reproductions of works in a range of media, from painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, and photographs to furniture, fashion, and film. The book also includes images of more than 150 cultural artifacts such as tourist brochures, posters, labor pamphlets, and periodicals that convey the richness and complexity of twentieth-century California. Arranged provocatively by theme, these works of art and ephemera take us on a visual tour of a state promoted, among myriad other ways, as a bountiful paradise by boosters early in the century, as a glamour capital by Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s, as a suburban Utopia in the late 1940s and 1950s, as a haven for counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, and as a new multicultural frontier in the 1980s and 1990s.
The book's exploration of how these themes were reflected and contested in California's visual culture deepens our understanding of the state's artistic tradi- tions as well as its fascinating history. As co-curator Stephanie Barron notes in her introduction: "From vast, sweeping poppy fields to crowded suburban beaches, from Hollywood to Yosemite Valley, from beatnik San Francisco to a disaster-prone Los Angeles, the twentieth- century imagination was infused with popular iconog- raphy derived from California. Yet there was never a single, prevailing image of the state. There are and have been, in fact, many Californias, multiple perceptions of the region shaped not only by predictable forces such as the tourist or real estate industries but also by artists who at times reinforced prevailing views and at others complicated, subverted, or refuted them."
continued on back flap
Which Cahfornia?
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M AMD II IN
CALIFORNIA
ART, IMAGE, AND IDENTITY, 19DD-2D0D
|
Stephanie Barron |
with essays by |
|
Sheri Bernstein Ilene Susan Fort |
Stephanie Barron Sheri Bernstein Michael Dear |
|
Howard N. Fox |
|
|
Richard Rodriguez |
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
University of California Press Berkeley • los angeles • london
This book was published in conjunction with the exhibition Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibi- tion was made possible by a major grant from the S. Mark Toper Foundation, founded in 1989, Q private family foundation dedicated to enhancing the quality of people's lives. Additional support was provided by the Donald Bren Foundation, the Notional Endowment for the Arts, Bonk of America, Helen and Peter Bing, Peter Norton Family Foundation, See's Candies, the Brotman Foundation of California, and Formers Insurance. Primary in-kind support for the exhibition was provided by FromeStore. Additional in-kind support was provided by KLON 88.1 FM, Gardner Lithograph, and Appleton Coated LLC.
Exhibition Schedule
Section 1:
October 22, 2000-March 18, 2001
Sections 2, 3, and 4:
October 22, 2000-February 25, 2001
Section 5:
November 12, 2000-February 25, 2001
Copublished by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, 90036, and University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London.
® 2000 by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cotaloging-m-Publicotion Data:
Barron, Stephanie, 1950-
Made in California : art, image, and identity, 1900-2000 / Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, llene Susan Fort ; with essays by Stephanie Barron ... [etol.]. p. cm.
Published in conjunction with on exhibition held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Calif., Oct. 22, 2000-Feb. 25, 2001.
Includes bilbiogrophicol references and index.
ISBN 0-520-22764-6 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 0-520-22765-4 (pbk. : alk paper)
1. Arts, American— California— Exhibitions. 2. Arts, Modern— 20th century— California- Exhibitions. 3. California— In art— Exhibitions, I. Bernstein, Sheri, 1966- II. Fort, llene Susan. III. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. IV. Title.
NX510.C2B37 2000 704.9'499794053-dc21
Director of Publications: Garrett White
Editors: Nolo Butler and Thomas Frick
Designer: Scott Taylor
Production coordinators: Rachel Ware Zooi
and Chris Coniglio
Supervising photographer: Peter Brenner
Rights and Reproductions coordinator:
Cheryle T. Robertson
Printed by Gardner Lithograph, Bueno Park, California, on Appleton Utopia Two Matte Text
Most photographs are reproduced courtesy of the creators and lenders of the material depicted. For certain artwork and documentary photographs we hove been unable to trace copyright holders. We would appreciate notifi- cation of additional credits for acknowledg- ment in future editions.
The typefaces used in this catalogue. Minion (Adobe), Tarzono and Emperor (Emigre), and Chicago (Apple), were designed in California. The title font, based on the letterforms on a 1940 California license plate, was created for the exhibition.
Front cover
Background:
Granville Redmond, California Poppy Field
(detail), n.d., oil on canvas
Circular details, from left to right, top to bottom:
Julius Shulman, Cose Study House "22. 1958, gelatm-silver print
nes Weeks, Two Musicians,
I on canvas
Jose Moya del Pino, Chinese Mother and Child, 1933, oil on canvas
John Divolo, Zuma No. 21, 1977, from the port- folio Zuma One, 1978, dye-imbibition print
Roger Minick, VJoman with Scarf at Inspiration Point, yosemite National Park, 1980, dye-coupler print
Carlos Almaraz, Suburban Nightmare, 1983, oil on canvas
Will Connell, Make-Up, from the publication In Pictures, c. 1937, gelotin-silver print
Chris Burden, Trans-Fixed, 1974, photo documentation of performance
California for the Settler, brochure produced by the Southern Pacific Railroad, 1911
Maurice Braun, Moonrise over San Diego Bay, 1915, oil on canvas
Background:
Maurice Broun, Moonrise over San Diego Bay,
1915, oil on canvas
Circular details, from left to right, top to bottom:
David Hockney, The Splash, 1966, acrylic on canvas
Willie Robert Middlebrook, In His "Own" Image, from the series Portraits of My People, 1992, sixteen gelatm-silver prints
Elmer Bischoff, Two Figures at the Seashore, 1957, oil on canvas
Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait, 1993, chromogenic development (Ektocolor) print
Alfredo Ramos Martinez, Woman with Fruit, 1933, charcoal and tempera on newsprint
Official program for the Son Francisco— Oakland Bay Bridge celebration, 1936
Ruben Ortiz-Torres, California Taco, Santa Barbara, California, 1995, silver dye-bleach (Cibachrome) print
Dorothea Lange, Pledge of Allegiance, at Raphael Elementary School, a Few Weeks before Svacuation/One Nation Indivisible, April 20, 1942, 1942, gelotin-silver print
Millard Sheets, Angel's Flight, 1931, oil on
Lorry Sliver, Contestants, Muscle Beach, California, 1954, gelatm-silver print
California: America's Vacation Land, poster produced by New York Central Lines, with illustration by Jon 0. Brubcker, c. 1930
Pages 2-18
p. 2: California: America's Vacation Land (detail), poster produced by New /ork Central Lines, with illustration by Jon 0. Bruboker, C.1930
p. 3: Joel Sternfeld, After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California (detail), 1979, chromogenic
pp. 4-5, top: Dana and Towers Photography Studio, '121. Looking East on Market Street (detail), 1906, gelatm-silver print
pp. 4-5, bottom: Dennis Hopper, Double Standard (detail), 1961, printed later, gelatm- silver print
p. 6: Maurice Braun, Moonrise over San Diego Bay (detail), 1915, oil on canvas
p. 7: John Divola, Zuma No. 21 (detail), 1977, from the portfolio Zuma One, 1978, dye- imbibition print
p. 8: Dorothea Lange, Untitled [End of Shift, 3:30, Richmond, California, September 1942], 1942, gelatm-silver print
p. 10: Edward S. Curtis, Mitat-Wailaki, from The North American Indian, vol. 14 (1924), pi. 472, photogravure
p. 11: George Hurrell, Joan Crawford (detail), 1932, gelatm-silver print
p. 12: Phil Dike, Surfer (detail), c. 1931, oil on canvas
p. 13: Eviction of the Arechigo family from Chavez Ravine, May 8, 1959
p. 14: Sid Avery, Dwight D. Eisenhower in
La Quinta, California, 1961, gelatm-silver print
p. 15: Pirklejones, Window of the Black Panther Party National Headquarters (detail), 1968, gelotm-silver print
p. 16: Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait, 1993, chromogenic development (Ektocolor) print
p. 17: Roger Minick, Woman with Scarf at Inspiration Point, Yosemite National Park (detail), 1980, dye-coupler print
p. 18: Robbert Flick, Pico B (detail), 1998-99, silver dye-bleach (Cibachrome) print
CONTENTS
Foreword 22
Andrea L Rich
Sponsor's Statement 24
Janice Taper Lazarof
o
Introduction: 27 The Making of Made in California
Stephanie Barron
Peopling California 49
Michael Dear
Selling California, 1900-1920 65
Sheri Bernstein
Contested Eden, 1920-1940 103
Sheri Bernstein
The California Home Front, 1940-1960 147
Sheri Bernstein
Tremors in Paradise, 1960-1980
Howard N. Fox
Many Californias, 1980-2000
Howard N. Fox
193
235
Checklist of the Exhibition 281
I
Lenders to the Exhibition 325
Acknowledgments 328
Selected Bibliography 335
Illustration Credits 344
Index 346
Where the Poppies Grow 273
Richard Rodriguez
FOREWORD
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has a long history of originating innovative exhibitions that seek to place art and artists within a particular historical, political, social, and economic context. Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 continues that tradition. In this exhibition, lacma has undertaken the ambitious task of focusing attention on the art created about California in the twentieth century. It is fitting that an exhibition of such far-reaching scope should be organized here, not simply because lacma is the only encyclopedic museum in the western United States with a comprehensive collection of twentieth-century art, but more importantly because Made in California extends the museum's commitment to groundbreaking thematic exhibitions with relevance to contemporary life. From its founding early in the twentieth century, the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art supported California art through the presentation of annual exhibitions devoted to painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts. The museum also hosted the annual exhibitions of the California Watercolor Society from the 1920s through the 1940s.
The international regard enjoyed by visual artists active in California today attests to the richness and vitality of the work produced here. California no longer generates only the booster images popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is also at the center of national debates on a wide range of issues, from agriculture, technology, and entertainment to affirmative action and immigration. The state is the focus of Utopian as well as dystopic views of contemporary society. With that background in mind, Made in California was not intended as an art historical survey or a selection of a pantheon of artists. We hope, rather, to encourage new ways of thinking about many familiar ideas and objects and to inspire our audience to discover unfamiliar work. The exhibition will provoke some, surprise others, and challenge many.
Any exhibition claiming to address the image of California and how it has been championed, contested, and disseminated by artists and through popular culture must consider the questions of which and whose California is being traced. The exhibition was conceived by an interdisciplinary team that created a thematic show in which paintings, sculptures, graphic and decorative art, costumes, and photography are seen in new and sometimes surprising juxtapositions in the same rooms with related examples of newspapers, pamphlets, posters, and advertisements — what we refer to here and elsewhere as "material culture." In this way, the exhibition attempts to situate art within a broader social context.
Made in California has been an extraordinary undertaking for lacma, particularly considering its complex subject and the collaborative approach employed to produce it. Encompassing more than 50,000 square feet in six separate exhibition spaces, and on view for more than five months, the exhibi- tion has called for remarkable cooperation among several curatorial departments, as well as early and consistent participation from the museum's education, exhibitions, design, and publications departments. The exhibition effort was adepdy led by Stephanie Barron, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Vice President of Education and Public Programs, who worked closely with Curator of American Art Ilene Susan Fort and Exhibition Associate Sheri Bernstein. They have coordinated the hard work of their colleagues in conceiving and producing this show for our audiences. The content of the exhibition has also been continually enriched through close involvement with a group of outside advisors from many fields. Their names are listed on page 334; their counsel and commitment to the project have con- tributed immeasurably to its success.
i
Made in Calif ortiici draws on the depth of lac: ma's collections in that approximately 20 percent of the art in the show comes from our holdings in many departments. To the hundreds of lenders, institutional and private, who have truly made this undertaking possible, we extend our deepest thanks.
Presenting an exhibition this ambitious is a costly undertaking, and we are tremendously grateful to the S. Mark Taper Foundation for its early commitment to Made in California and for a major grant that made this exhibition possible. Given the S. Mark Taper Foundation's extraordinary commitment to enhancing the quality of people's lives in California, it was an ideal partner in this project.
Additionally, we are delighted to acknowledge the Donald Bren Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Helen and Peter Bing, Peter and Eileen Norton, See's Candies, the Brotman Foundation of California, and Farmers Insurance for their sponsorship. In-kind support was provided by FrameStore, klon 88.1 fm, Gardner Lithograph, and Appleton Coated llc.
lacma's departments of film, music, and education, the lacma Institute for Art and Cultures, and LACMALab have all planned innovative programming for adults, students, families, and children during the extensive run of Made in California. We are also gratified that a number of fellow visual and performing arts and other institutions have joined with us in focusing their programming on aspects of the arts and California, lacma is pleased to have worked with colleagues from a number of these institutions, including the Automobile Club of Southern California, the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, the Japanese American National Museum, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Los Angeles Conservancy, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Public Library, the mak Center for Art and Architecture, the Mark Taper Forum, the Museum of Television and Radio, the Pacific Asia Museum, the Petersen Automotive Museum, the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Skirball Cultural Center, the Society of Architectural Historians, the use Fisher Gallery, and the use Schools of Fine Arts, Theatre, Architecture, and Music. Together these programs offer our region's visitors a tremendously diverse array of programs and events.
Andrea L. Rich
President and Director
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
SPONSOR'S STATEMENT
The S. Mark Taper Foundation takes great pride in partnering with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as primary sponsor of Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000. Sharing this millennial exhibition with the residents of California and visitors to our state represents a profound fulfillment of the Foundation's mission to enhance the quality of people's lives.
The broad scope of this exhibition, the largest in lacma's history, illuminates California's evolving popular image and its rich and varied contributions to the arts throughout the past one hundred years. The California image as depicted in an enormous range of art and cultural documentation — from paint- ings, prints, literature, architectural drawings, photography, decorative arts, film, and music to fashion, posters, magazines, and tourist brochures — has influenced and inspired people worldwide. Made in California brings together this astonishing wealth of images in a coherent context for the enlightenment of museum visitors.
The works that have been selected all relate directly to the central theme of the exhibition: how the arts have shaped, promoted, complicated, and challenged popular conceptions of California over the course of the twentieth century. A team of more than a dozen lac ma curators and educators has worked together for more than six years to create the exhibition, and they deserve our warmest congratulations for this unprecedented effort and the exceptional result.
The start of a new century is an appropriate time to pay tribute to the culture of our great state. Because my father was, since the 1950s, one of the most significant developers of the state of California, I feel it most fitting that his foundation should collaborate with lacma on this extraordinary exhibition. The S. Mark Taper Foundation, a private family foundation founded in 1989, is pleased to join the museum in making Made in California possible. In keeping with the Foundation's traditions, we chose Made in California as a project worthy of our support.
All of us at the S. Mark Taper Foundation look forward to sharing these myriad artworks as well as lacma's incisive scholarship with museum visitors from across the state and around the world. I hope that you find Made in California both enjoyable and thought provoking.
Janice Taper Lazarof
President
S. Mark Taper Foundation
MAMDi: IN CALIFORNIA ART, IMAGE, AND IDENTITY
1900-20G0
Note to the reader
Lenders of posters, brochures, and other ephemeral material in the exhibition are noted in the illustration captions.
Lenders of artworks in the exhibition are listed in the checklist (pp. 281-324).
Artworks not in the exhibition are indi- cated by a bullet (•).
Alexis Smith
Sea of Tranquility, 1982, mixed-media collage
INTRODUCTION
THE MAKING OF MA\DI£ IN CALIFORNIA
Stephanie Barron
In 1994 a group of curators at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art came together to discuss an exhibition that would explore the great richness and diversity of California art in the twentieth century. Conceived collaboratively by members of nine different LACMA departments,' the exhibition that developed over the next several years, Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, would not be a traditional art historical survey, nor would it attempt to establish a new canon or identify certain types of artistic production as distinctively "Californian." Rother, it would investigate the relationship of art to the image of California and to the region's social and political history.
Our goal was to avoid the boosterism that has often characterized surveys of California art, which have
tended to emphasize Utopian or dystopic extremes, and to illuminate, against the backdrop of historical
events that have impacted artistic production, the competing interests and ideologies that informed the
arts and shaped popular conceptions of the state in the twentieth century.
Made in California is the largest and most complex exhibition ever mounted at lacma, comprising
more than 1,200 artworks, ephemera, and other cultural artifacts that reflect the increasingly disparate
images of the state produced and circulated from 1900 to 2000. From vast, sweeping poppy fields to
crowded suburban beaches, from Hollywood to Yosemite Valley, from beatnik San Francisco to a disaster- prone Los Angeles, the twentieth-century imagination was infused with popular iconography derived
from California. Yet there was never a single, prevailing image of the state. There are and have been, in
fact, many Californias, multiple perceptions of the region shaped not only by predictable forces such as
the tourist or real estate industries but also by artists who at times reinforced prevailing views and at
others complicated, subverted, or refuted them. The title of the exhibition and accompanying catalogue
thus refers not simply to art produced in California but to work that bears the imprint of or projects
one of the many images of the state.
In view of the diversity — whether hidden or acknowledged — that has always defined the
California experience, questions about the exhibition's audience and voice surfaced at an early stage.
In the census of 1870, half of the population of San Francisco was shown to be foreign born. Today both
San Francisco and Los Angeles — a city more than 75 percent Anglo just twenty-five years ago — are more
than 50 percent non-Anglo. Now the major nonwhite urban center in the United States, Los Angeles
represents a new type of city, what Charles Jencks refers to as a "heteropolis" and Edward Soja calls a
contemporary cosmopolis.^ Some ninety languages are spoken within its more than 400-square-mile city
limits. Immigrants to California from around the world have created a more diverse population than
ever before. And as groups that were previously in the minority have grown, the state's identity has been
profoundly altered. This ethnic and cultural diversity is key to any effort to review artistic production
in California.
Stephanie Barron iNTRODUCTiOh
With such diversity in mind, what can it mean to try to capture a history of the image of Cahfornia during the past one hundred years? Consider these two observations: "Every museum exhibi- tion, whatever its overt subject, inevitably draws on the curatorial assumptions and resources of the peo- ple who make it." And: "Visitors can deduce from their experience what we, the producers of exhibitions, think and feel about them — even if we have not fully articulated those thoughts to ourselves."' Both statements underscore the obligation of exhibition organizers to reflect carefully on the message they wish to convey and its intended audience. In the last two decades, with the spectacular growth of muse- ums and museum attendance, scholars have sought to examine more thoroughly the role of museums in our society. Even at the most basic level of the selection, arrangement, and juxtaposition of objects, the strategies adopted by museum curators directly affect an audience's interpretation of the material on display. Curators have a responsibility, then, to convey a clearly articulated point of view. As Carol Duncan has noted, exhibitions allow communities to examine old truths and search for new ones. They become the center of a process in which past and future intersect." Our initial question therefore implies a number of others: Whose California? What image? Which history?
Since their advent in the late eighteenth century, museums have been treasured as harbors of a sense of time and space that sets them apart from the bustle of the outside world. They have been revered, in fact, as places similar to churches, with the power to transform, cure, or uplift the soul.^ Museums at the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, are at an unusual crossroads. Never before has there been such interest in visiting them. Newspapers routinely report that more people visit special exhibitions than go to sporting events. Surveys show furthermore that those who visit museums come in search of connections between the art on display and their own lives.' And yet most museums still present art in hushed, elegant galleries, contemplative spaces that are often disconnected from everyday experience and may even appear elitist or intimidating.
In the late 1970s, beginning with the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, with its transparent facade, large urban square, and popular five-story escalators leading to spectacular views of the city, museum architecture began to be employed to break down the rarefied image of traditional art museums. Yet while museum architecture has certainly been transformed in the past twenty-five years, accounting for some of the most exciting buildings of our time, what lies inside and how it is presented have changed little in the last century. Within art museums, as debate continues about the appropriate balance between education and entertainment, museum directors, curators, and educators are searching for strategies of presentation — encompassing thematic as well as chronological organizational modes — that will engage new audiences. "Compelling stories and opportunities that manage to engage all the senses are the experiences that succeed in attracting new and returning visitors," a recent study claims.'
Academic discourse on installations of museum permanent collections and special or temporary exhibitions has called into question presentation strategies and focused discussion on issues of curatorial voice and intended audience, particularly in relation to class, gender, and race.* Author Alan Wallach claims, however, that the revisionism that has transformed much of art history in the universities in the past generation has had little impact on art museums and their audiences. Despite the difficulty of rais- ing funds for shows that confront or question accepted canons, Wallach argues for the need to mount revisionist exhibitions. By exposing museum-going audiences to exhibitions that present art in relation
Anne W. Brigman
The Lone Pine, cA% gelatin-silver print
Richard Diebenkorn
free\Nay and Aqueduct, 1957, oil on canvas
Stephanie Barron
to its social, political, and historical context, the public will grow to value artworks as more than timeless, transcendent, or universal objects of beauty that speak for themselves.' Often such shows inspire fierce critical and public debate. In 1991 the National Museum of American Art mounted The West as America,^' a critical historical approach to representations of nineteenth-century America. Rather than merely celebrating its subject, the exhibition explored, according to museum director Elizabeth Broun, the intentions of artists and their patrons in the context of the history of westward expansion, unearthing a deeper, more troubling story that poses questions for American society today."
The West as America generated a firestorm of criticism for daring to subject cherished myths to critical scrutiny, and it was attacked for what was seen by some as an aggressive lack of objectivity. Yet after nearly a decade of reflection, we can see that the exhibition was important for at least two reasons: By critically examining images long familiar to generations of Americans, it effectively countered the per- ception of museums as nothing more than places of inspiration or repositories of beauty isolated from the everyday world; and it ushered in a decade of debate on the meaning and interpretation of western American art. In its examination of image and identity and its reassessment of traditional perspectives. Made in California draws upon the example set by The West as America, especially with regard to lessons learned about how best to frame questions and raise interpretative issues for a broad public.'^
Despite the reaction caused by such exhibitions, museums have shown a growing interest in new strategies of interpretation. Exhibitions have begun to appear that locate works of art in relation to social and historical conditions; explore issues of audience and reception; consider the roles of the art market, curatorial taste, and collecting practices; invite artists to interpret or curate works by other artists; examine the intersection of art, politics, and national identity; and present permanent collections through thematic lenses.'^
These are some of the approaches that informed the conceptualization of Made in CaUfornia. From our earliest discussions of the project, a fundamental decision was made that the exhibition should not be a succession of "greatest hits" of California art. In general, questions of cultural or historical relevance took precedence over issues of aesthetic innovation, a strategy that necessarily resulted in the exclusion of certain artists or works by which a given artist is usually known. The exhibition is divided into five sections, each covering twenty years and organized thematically rather than according to formal categories. Each section freely mixes paintings, prints, sculpture, decorative art, costumes, and photog- raphy, along with examples of material culture — tourist brochures, labor pamphlets, rock posters, and periodicals. Additionally, twenty-four media stations were commissioned, providing visitors with archival film footage, poetry recordings, examples of popular music, and clips from Hollywood films. Three of the sections contain lifestyle environments, joining together examples of furniture, design, and architecture. The overriding aim of Made in California is to situate art making within the broader con- text of image making and, more specifically, the creation of California's image in the twentieth century. Many familiar images — a glamorous Hollywood, a beachfront or agricultural paradise, a suburban Utopia — have prevailed in the popular imagination not only in the United States but around the world. (Indeed, California, especially as the home of a global film industry, may arguably be the site in the twentieth century in which image permanently detached itself from reality.) Made in California examines the significant role of the arts in generating, shaping, and disseminating such popular images while presenting works that corroborate, challenge, complicate, or refute them. Conflicting images have
Stephanie Barron
always been present; our aim has been to widen the estabhshed discourse to include them. In so doing, Made in California questions the canon of images and ideas long associated with the art of California and encourages a critical examination of recent history.
A similar approach has governed the organization of the main body of the catalogue: The first three sections, written by Exhibition Associate Sheri Bernstein, cover the years 1900 to i960. Sections 4 and 5 were written by Howard Fox, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and cover the years i960 to 2000. To set the stage for the catalogue sections, geographer Michael Dear has provided a synoptic social history that charts the confluences and conflicts of the varied peoples whose destinies have contin- ually forged and reconfigured the California Dream. Closing the volume, noted essayist Richard Rodriguez has contributed a uniquely personal vision of the paradoxical state of mind we know as California.
Made in California differs methodologically from most previous exhibitions that have attempted to address California art, but it has benefited from the scholarship that preceded it. There are, for example, a number of key books that have laid the art historical groundwork for our project in terms of California art scholarship. Although controversial upon publication in 1974, Peter Plagens's Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast was the first attempt at a history of modern art in the region.'" In 1985 Thomas Albright published his comprehensive study Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980, which followed the unique development of Bay Area figuration. Pop, Funk, Conceptualism, realism, and other movements. Richard Candida Smith's Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (1995) charted a history of ideas spawned by California's art and poetry movements from 1925 to the mid-1970s and explored their embodiment in mainstream American culture. For his 1996 publication On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900-1950, Paul Karlstrom assembled essays by several authors who collectively sought to challenge the familiar association of California with popular culture and Hollywood, tracing a history of regional California art in a variety of media in the context of a larger modernist framework.
Most exhibitions that have dealt with California art of the last century have been organized according to geography (California, Los Angeles, the Bay Area); art historical movements (California Impressionism, Bay Area Conceptualism, Bay Area figuration); medium (assemblage, ceramics, print- making); or subject (landscape, the Gold Rush, women painters). Most were boosterist, and nearly all were devoted solely to examples of fine art. By the middle of the twentieth century, with pride in American as opposed to European art, exhibition organizers began to identify aspects of California art that set it apart from that of New York. Exhibitions mounted for export often focused on geography; those intended for a regional audience could perhaps rely more frequently on individual artists. In either case, however, organizers typically selected works of art according to formal or geographic principles, paying scant attention to artists working with political or socially conscious themes. Beginning in the 1960s, museums outside California began to host exhibitions of work by emerging West Coast artists, including, for example, Fifty California Artists (1962), organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (sfmoma) and shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art,'^ and Ten from Los Angeles (1966), organized for the Seattle Art Museum by John Coplans, then director of the art gallery at the University of California, Irvine. The latter featured artists who shared an affinity for shiny, elegant sur- faces, including Billy Al Bengston, Tony DeLap, Craig Kauffman, and others, many of whom showed at the Ferus Gallery. In 1971 London's Hayward Gallery hosted 11 Los Angeles Artists, organized by Maurice
Los Angeles souvenir, 1957. LentbyJimHeiman
LOST ANGEUS
SM06
California: America's Vacation Land, poster produced by New /ork Central Lines, with illustration by Jon 0. Brubaker, c. 1930. Lent by Steve Turner Gallery, Beverly Hills
Tuchman and Jane Livingston. Within the state, exhibition activity increased significantly in the 1970s. The Oakland Museum of California has organized a number of formative exhibitions on California art in a broad range of media." In the 1980s and 1990s, the Laguna Art Museum organized and hosted some two dozen exhibitions devoted to either individual California artists or particular aspects of artistic activ- ity in California. These and other exhibitions in the past twenty-five years have greatly increased our knowledge of artists in California. And yet it may be argued that because much of this scholarship focused on the project of validation, it lagged significantly in efforts to incorporate a multidisciplinary approach that would include, for example, political and social history, gender studies, and cultural studies.
More recently, a tendency has emerged to present West Coast art as a contrast in stark opposites: blight and bounty, abundance and drought, the golden and the noir.'^ A duality has been established (admittedly with precedents earlier in the century in popular literature and film) that may reflect, as Norman Klein suggests, nothing more than equally mythical counterparts promoted by the white middle- class for its own consumption.'* In the past twenty years, this Edenic/dystopic dualism has been elevated to heroic proportions in literature, film, and art. Images from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), for example, became a widely accepted stylistic shorthand for envisioning the future of cities among urban- ists and art and architecture critics. A decade later, curator Paul Schimmel presented Helter Skelter (1992) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, calling out a group of artists, including Chris Burden, Victor Estrada, Llyn Foulkes, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Manuel Ocampo, Raymond Pettibon, Lari Pittman, Charles Ray, and Nancy Rubins, whose provocative styles became emblematic of Los Angeles in the 1990s. Presented in opposition to the often bright, beautiful, hedonistic Los Angeles art characterized by Plagens in Sunshine Muse, the show offered another construct in its place that was largely accusatory and dark. The 1998 traveling exhibition Sunshine and Noir: Art in L.A., 1960-1997, organized by Lars Nittve and Helle Crenzien at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, explicitly followed this dualistic approach.
A number of other important exhibitions have been devoted to tracing movements and "isms" in California art history. As noted above, these often focused on differences between California artists and their East Coast or European confreres. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Henry Hopkins, then director of SFMOMA, presided over several exhibitions devoted to aspects of California art, including his major survey show. Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era (1977),'' which was organized stylisti- cally and included 200 artists and 340 works of art. Although the exhibition was ambitious in scope, covering seventy-five years of California art history, there was a noted lack of feminist, Chicano, and African American artists in the show, and of the 200 artists included, 182 were men. In 1981 Suzanne Foley's Space, Time, Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area: The 1970s for sfmoma identi- fied Bay Area Conceptualism as based more on personal experience than its New York counterpart. Foley also focused on centers of production: alternative spaces, university galleries, periodicals, and theaters. Two exhibitions. Bay Area Figurative Art (1989), organized by Caroline Jones for sfmoma, and The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism (1996), organized by Susan Landauer for the Laguna Art Museum, featured major and less well-known figures, grouped stylistically, and touched on the role of art schools in their work and their relationships to politics and social history.^" Paul Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich's Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists, 1920-1956 for the Santa Barbara Art Museum (1990) and Ehrlich's Pacific Dreams: Currents of Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art,
Stephanie Barron
1934-1957 for the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center at ucla (1995) sought to exam- ine what sets California modernism and California Surrealism apart from European models. Together these exhibitions did much to legitimize specific art movements within California for a national and international audience.
Museum exhibitions organized around a particular medium have tended to emphasize fields in which California artists have been leaders, especially ceramics, photography, printmaking, and the assem- blage tradition. Led by Peter Voulkos in Los Angeles in the 1950s, and Robert Arneson and others in the Bay Area in the 1960s, ceramists transformed their art by creating massive sculptural vessels using fired clay.^' Their work made ceramics a defining medium in postwar California art and was included in numerous exhibitions in the 1960s, among them solo shows at lacma featuring Voulkos (1965) and John Mason (1966)." Printmaking workshops in California, including Tamarind, Gemini G.E.L., Cirrus Editions, Crown Point Press, and Self-Help Graphics, have pioneered the medium in the postwar era. Cirrus alone among them has concentrated on the work of California artists; in 1995 this work was sur- veyed for LACMA by curator Bruce Davis." Proof: Los Angeles Art and Photography, 1960-1980, organized by Charles Desmarais for the Laguna Art Museum in 1992, presented a group of artists whose influential work blurred the boundaries between photography and other media. In 1994, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Huntington Library and Art Collections jointly mounted PictoriaUsm in California: 1900-1940, organized by Michael G. Wilson, which explored the unique contributions of California photographers working in the Pictorialist idiom. Additionally, California assemblage artists, whose work is strongly Hnked to the Dada tradition, have been the subject of a number of exhibitions.^" Exhibitions of artwork in these and other media served to acquaint a larger audience with a number of aesthetic innovations specific to California.
Like Made in California, the most recent exhibitions have tended to be organized around particu- lar themes. They have embraced a wide range of artists, and sought to find an appropriate context for their work. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's exhibition Facing Eden: 100 Years of Landscape Art in the Bay Area (1995), organized by Steven Nash, was a multidisciplinary show that included painters, sculptors, photographers, landscape architects, and environmental artists. Issues of gender grounded Patricia Trenton's Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945 (1995). In 1999, at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center at Stanford University, Pacific Arcadia: Images of California, 1600-1915 charted an image of a California in which economic bliss could be achieved in a spectacular natural setting. In the catalogue to the exhibition, Claire Perry investigated how and why the familiar vision of California as a land of promise was developed and marketed to tourists and residents. She introduced paintings, drawings, and photographs alongside popular Currier and Ives lithographs, maps, printed ephemera, and book and newspaper illustrations. As part of an investigation into how the can- vases and photographs of Carleton E. Watkins, Arnold Genthe, Albert Bierstadt, William Hahn, and James Walker functioned within a network of promotional material, Pacific Arcadia included guidebooks, railroad brochures, travel posters, sermons, and songs. This sensitive presentation of fine art and material culture anticipates the current exhibition.
Edward Ruscha
Burning Gas Station, 1965-66, oil on canvas
Art historical debate has increasingly centered on the idea of a body of art generally recognized as "the canon" and those who have been excluded from it through political and social domination. Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, James Clifford, and others working in the discipline of cultural studies have raised ques- tions on topics such as power, class, ethnicity, and identity and their impact on the creation and reception of works of art. The exploration and depiction of the western landscape and its relationship to American history have been the subject of a number of provocative studies in the past decade. Anne Hyde, for example, has argued that such images played an instrumental role in the building of American nationalism,
fueling railroad expansion and westward tourism." If here the canon represents traditional images of California, our goal is not to remove it but rather to question it by presenting multiple points of view. While tracing mainstream images of the state. Made in California considers alternative conceptions, often produced by minorities, that challenge the popular ones. In this effort to uncover the disparate ways in which artists have produced and responded to popular images of California in the twentieth century — and the ways in which these images have been used by others — the exhibition weaves together examples of fine art (works intended primarily for museum and gallery presentation) and images that appeared in advertisements and promotional material, newspapers, magazine articles, posters, films, postcards, popular music, and documentary photographs. This contextual approach will, we hope, diminish or destabilize the conventional hierarchies, thereby expanding the dia- logue about California and the art it has produced. While each of the five main sections of Made in California contains topics related to a given twenty-year period — Hollywood glamour, spirituality, subcultures and countercultures, beach and car culture, to name a few — two overriding themes prevail throughout: the landscape, including both the natural and the built environment, and the complex relationship California continues to have with the cultures of its two neighbors, Latin America and Asia.
Section i, 1900-1920, examines how paintings, prints, and photographs, as well as images circu- lated on postcards, travel brochures, periodicals, orange-crate labels, and in promotional films, created a vision of a largely Edenic, abundant California, encouraging migration and tourism, much of it from the white middle-class Midwest. The myth of the virgin land, unspoiled by modern life, was for the most part the prevailing image. Early landscapes, whether inland or coastal scenes, rarely included human figures; as such they are unspoiled by economic considerations, either of labor or of ownership. This homogeneous image of the California landscape was shared by boosters of tourism, developers, and artists, many of whom were themselves new arrivals hired by the tourist industry (railroads, hotels, chambers of commerce) to promote California.
David Hockney
Mulholland Drive, The Road to the Studio, 1980, acrylic on canvas. Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Stephanie Barron
In the early years of the century, images of Cahfornia frequently exploited a widespread but care- fully sanitized interest in Native American and immigrant cultures. A dominant theme was the state's Spanish mission past, romanticized in art, literature, theater, architecture, furniture, clothing design, and popular songs. Tonalist painters and Pictorialist photographers, for example, represented the missions in wistful scenes that gave no hint of the devastating treatment of Native Americans by Spaniards and Anglos. The Chinatowns of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and smaller cities also became the subject of an Anglo fascination that frequently characterized the Chinese as exotic and old-fashioned. At the same time, in the era of the Asiatic Exclusion League, the Chinese Exclusionary Act, and aggression on the part of the American Federation of Labor, Chinese populations were subject to attacks by xenophobic Americans. Rarely did artists show Anglos and Chinese interacting or depict the Chinese engaged in modern, productive activities.
Section 2, 1920-1940, reveals pronounced shifts in popular conceptions of the state. The 1920s are characterized by increased tourism, migration, and expansion brought about by a boom economy. With the rapid rise of the automobile, tourists were able to travel to the newly promoted California desert, captured by photographers who aestheticized its desolate beauty. Images of rural life were sold to art collectors, and idyllic farms were depicted in agribusiness publications. The virgin landscapes of earlier decades gave way to agrarian scenes in which laborers — the migrants who tilled the land and picked the crops — at times appeared in the work of painters and photographers. Such cultivated land- scapes were still picturesque and often showed no signs of burgeoning agribusiness and farming con- glomerates. At the same time, a new type of image began to emerge in which California was represented as a land of newly constructed bridges, dams, and oil rigs. A number of artists also began to depict a thriving aviation industry.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the earlier cohesive image of California was shaken by unrest that often focused on Latin and Asian immigrants, many of whom were migrant laborers working in agriculture. Artists, writers, and musicians aligned themselves with the migrant laborers and sympathetically docu- mented their working conditions. Fueled by Roosevelt's Pan-Americanism, Californians responded with initial enthusiasm, and commissions were given to the Mexican muralists who had temporarily migrated northward, including Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. There was a general vogue for Latin American themes throughout the arts, from painting and ceramics to Mayan Revival architecture.
During the Depression in the 1930s, California struggled with the rest of the nation against unemployment, farm foreclosures, massive debt, and a rising distrust of foreigners. While promotion of an Edenic California persisted, new images celebrated growth and modernism but also suggested the rise of urban problems. If, as W. J. T. Mitchell suggests,^' we think of attitudes toward landscape as part of a process by which social and subjective identities are formed, images of California can be seen here to alternate between capitalist boosterism and socialist criticism. More often than not, idyllic images were challenged by the realities of newspaper headlines.
With the Depression, a new kind of migration swelled California's population, as refugees from the Dust Bowl sought relief in the Golden State. Haunting portrayals of migrants in visual and literary works would come to stand for an indelible chapter in American history. Radical artists emerged as a significant social presence, and sympathetic portrayals of urban poverty and labor strikes appeared with increasing frequency. During this time of widespread deprivation, California's newest industry, motion
Robert Frank
Covered Car, Long Beach, California, 1956, gelatin- silver print
pictures, consolidated its national and international audience, feeding an insatiable hunger for the imag- ined lifestyles, sophistication, sensuality, fashion, and glamour of Hollywood and its stars.
California's role as a national force grew significantly from 1940 to i960, the period covered in Section 3 of the exhibition. The state led the nation in the wartime production of aircraft and ships, built in large part by a labor pool that migrated from other states. The need to feed a nation at war led to increased demands on agricultural production, which were satisfied with the temporary importation of Mexican farmworkers. An increase in racism and the widespread xenophobia sparked by the war led to local as well as national attacks on various ethnic groups. Thousands of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans were interned as a result of Executive Order 9066. The effect of this mood on artistic produc- tion was swift. Collectors, museums, and galleries were rarely interested in supporting Mexican or Asian artists in California during this period.
In the years immediately following the war, California's image as a natural paradise and recre- ational destination was once again promoted by the mass media, the tourist industry, and a number of artists. Photographer Ansel Adams's inspiring images of Yosemite, for example, were sold in galleries and published in Life magazine; at the same time, he produced commercial work for corporations such as Kodak. Other artists relied upon the landscape to create a new image of California, in keeping with a trend toward abstract art. Less naturalistic landscapes, such as those painted by Helen Lundeberg, evoke the cool minimalism of the period; others, such as the "flux" paintings of Knud Merrild, prefigure the gestural paintings of the New York School.
Low-cost housing led to the rapid growth of suburban communities, which in turn fostered an increased reliance upon an ambitious system of freeways that forever changed California's landscape. Booster images of the built and natural environment now coexisted more precariously with images of the darker side of expansion. Although the population swelled with an ethnically heterogeneous work- force, the dominant promotional image was still of a homogeneous, white, middle-class population. Nevertheless, with the emergence of the anticommunist fervor of the 1950s, the Golden State began to be associated as well with unconventional and subversive political activities. Beat artists, writers, and musicians routinely challenged white middle-class values, traditional gender roles, and suburban consumer culture. A number of counterculture artists brought aspects of alternative philosophies and religions into their work, and they were attracted in particular to the spiritual beliefs of Zen Buddhists and Native Americans.
California's popular image entered the mainstream of American culture during the 1960s and 1970s, which form Section 4 of the exhibition. By the end of the sixties, beach and car culture as well as the counterculture had been absorbed and commodified by the fashion, tourist, advertising, music, television, and film industries. To some extent, of course, these industries actually helped to create aspects of these cultures, at least as they now existed in the national psyche.
Landscape and nature-oriented traditions continued, reflecting personal artistic concerns and styles. Increasingly artists ricocheted between boosterist idealism and social criticism. Although the Edenic image of California continued to be celebrated, even in artists' depictions of freeways and swimming pools, landscape increasingly came to signify a contested territory in which pollution, environmental disasters, and monotonous urban sprawl prevailed. In the shadow of a vast system of freeways and a relatively modest mass transit system, car ownership became virtually synonymous with mobility and
Frank Gehry
Model of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 1998, mixed media
Frank Gehry
Drawing of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 1991, ink on paper
Stephanie Barron
individual identity. Cars were popularly fetishized and adorned with exuberant decorations, often serving as symbols of power and machismo. A number of artists shared this passion and took pride in their motorcycles, race cars, and pickup trucks, later applying to their art the seamless paint finishes employed by the automotive industry. New materials developed in the aerospace industry, such as resin, plastic, Rhoplex, vacuum-coated glass, Plexiglas, and fiberglass, were used to make slick-looking paint- ings and sculptures. Other artists made use of these same new materials to explore the immateriality of objects, seeking connections to science and philosophy through issues of space, light, and perception.
In the 1960s, art and politics converged, as artists engaged the civil rights movement in their work and turned to repressed or ignored African American, Chicano, and feminist histories for inspira- tion. California gave birth to the Chicano art movement, in which artistic, cultural, and political issues coalesced. Through posters, performances, and political action, migrant labor in California also gained a voice. The movement quickly spread to other parts of the country, as oppressed migrant farmworkers sought to unionize. Many Chicano artists felt compelled to use their cultural and ethnic identity as the basis for their work, taking part in actions against the political and cultural system. Although these artists remained marginalized by the mainstream art establishment during the 1960s and into the 1970s, the issues they raised concerning identity and their relationship to the dominant culture would dramatically alter art making in the ensuing decades. The national emergence of art based on personal and political identity, frequently in nontraditional media such as installation, film, video, and performance, took many of its cues from California artists.
During the period covered by Section 5, 1980-2000, California became the subject of international attention, not as an idyllic destination but as the site of unpredictable calamities such as earthquakes, floods, forest fires, aberrant weather patterns, urban riots, police brutality, racial unrest, freeway shoot- ings, gang violence, and cult killings. In Southern California, a wave of dystopic images was captured by artists in the early nineties, fueled by natural and man-made disasters that seemed to occur with frightening regularity. Mike Davis's City of Quartz (1992) and Ecology of Fear (1998), along with the Helter SAieter exhibition at moca (1992), did much to replace earlier beatific views of Southern California with a dark, cynical, and apocalyptic image of Los Angeles as overdeveloped, dysfunctional, environmentally precarious, and filled with racial and cultural distrust. Hollywood obliged with a spate of violent disaster films set in Los Angeles.
Following a healthy economic recovery after the recession of the early nineties, California again appears to be viewed as the land of the future. Gradually, despite the vast problems that remain, the state has come to represent diversity and multiple perspectives, and cultural and identity issues have increasingly preoccupied California artists. Characteristic of national and international trends, globalization (the breaking down of borders) and particularization (the attention to specific communities and the bound- aries that divide them) are now key elements of artistic production. Artists routinely work in a variety of media, in which the traditional divisions between art and material culture have become difficuh to dis- cern. Indeed, in the arts and the culture at large, a profusion of multiple, competing images of California has finally replaced the unified, idyllic vision that predominated early in the century.
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Sutro Baths, c. |
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Michael C. McMillen
Central Meridian, The Garage, 1981, mixed media
Stephanie Barron INTRDDUCTIQ^
1 The nine departments included American art, costume and textiles, decorative arts, education, film, modern and contemporary art, music, photography, and prints and drawings.
2 See Paul Ong and Evelyn Blumberg, "Income and Racial Inequality in Los Angeles," in Allen I. Scott and Edward W. Soja, The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997)1 323-241 and, in the same volume, Edward Soja, "Los Angeles, 1965-1992," 442-60.
3 In Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 1; and Elaine Heumann Gurian, "Noodling around with Exhibitions," in Karp and Lavine, 176.
4 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995). 133-34-
5 See, for example, discussions of Goethe, Niels von Hoist, and William Hazlitt in Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 14-15.
6 Marcia Tucker, "Museums Experiment with New Exhibition Strategies," New York Times, Jan. 10, 1999, sec. 2.
7 Bonnie Pitman, "Muses, Museums, and Memories," in the special "America's Museums" issue of Daedalus (summer 1999), 15.
8 See, for example, Karp and Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures; Marcia Pointon, Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology across England and North America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds., Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen, eds.. Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances (New York: New Press, 1995); Duncan, Civilizing Rituals; Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, Sandy Nairne, eds.. Thinking about Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 1996); Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998); and Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradictions: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
9 Wallach, Exhibitirtg Contradictions, 6.
10 See William H. Truettner, ed., The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).
11 Truettner, The West as America, vii.
12 See "The Battle over 'The West as America,'" in Wallach, Exhibiting Contradic- tions, 105-17; and Steven C. Dubin, Displays of Power, Memory, and Amnesia in the American Museum (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 153-273.
13 See Pierre Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Randal Johnson, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29-73, in which Bourdieu describes "fields of cultural pro- duction," which include the creation of art and the strategies and goals of artists and the world of collectors, publishers, galleries, museums, academies, critics, etc. Recent catalogues for exhibitions that reflect these new approaches include Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern and Peter-Klaus Schuster, eds., Hugo von Tschudi and der Kampfdic Moderne (Munich: Prestel, 1996); Stephanie Barron et al.. Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997); Norman Kleeblatt and Kenneth E. Silver, Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine (New York: Jewish Museum, 1998); Kynaston McShine, The Museum as Muse (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999). In addition, a thematic approach was also taken in the recent series of exhibitions moma 2000, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the presentation of the per- manent collection of Tate Modern, 2000.
14 This book has been reprinted as Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945-1970 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).
15 In 1962, Artforum magazine was established in San Francisco, giving California artists a national platform for exposure in their own state; the magazine moved to L.A. in 1965 and then decamped for New York in 1967.
16 For example, The Potter's Art in California, 1885 to 1955 (1980), 100 Years of California Sculpture: The Oakland Museum, Oakland (1982), Twilight and Reverie: California Tonalist Painting, 1890-1930 (1995), and Art of the Gold Rush (1998).
17 "Chinatown, Part Two?" in David Read, ed.. Sex, Death, and God m L.A. (New York: Random House, 1992).
18 See Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (New York: Verso, 1997), 73-93.
19 The show traveled to the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.
20 See also Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985). For a discussion of the role of California's art schools in the state's art, see Paul J. Karlstrom, "Art School Sketches: Notes on the Central Role of Schools in California Art and Culture," in Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000).
21 For example. The Potter's Art in California, 1885-1955 (1980) at the Oakland Museum,
and West Coast Ceramics (1979) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
22 Other important exhibitions include Abstract Expressionist Ceramics, organized by lohn Coplans for the Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine (1966); Peter Selz's Funk at the University Art Museum, Berkeley (1967); A Century of Ceramics, curated by Garth Clark and Margie Hughto for the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York (1979); and, most recently. Color and Fire: Defining Moments in Studio Ceramics, 1950- 2000, curated by Jo Lauria at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
23 Made in L.A.: The Prints of Cirrus Editions presented the work of a generation of printmakers.
24 For example, the exhibitions Assemblage in California: Works from the Late '50s and Early '60s at the University of California, Irvine (1968), Lost and Found in California: Four Decades of California Assemblage (1988) at the James Corcoran Gallery, Santa Monica, and Forty Years of California Assemblage at the Wight Art Gallery, ucla (1989).
25 Anne Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820-1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1990). See also Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987) and Something in the Soil Legacies
and Reckonings in the New West (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), and Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American Wesf (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
26 See W. J. T. Mitchell, ed.. Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)-
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Sabine Eckmann for her
assistance in shaping this essay. Additional
thanks are due to Garrett White, Sheri
Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort for cogent
comments.
Aeqiitaocn^ial Lipe
^
J^
PEOPLING CALIFORNIA
Michael Dear
Know that to the tight hand of the Indies was an island called California, very near to the region of the Terrestrial Paradise, which was populated by black women, without there being any men among them, that almost like the Amazons was their style of living . . . There ruled on that island, called California, a queen great of body, very beautiful for her race, at a flourishing age, desirous in her thoughts of achieving great things, valiant in strength, cunning in her brave heart, more than any other who had ruled that kingdom before her. . . Queen Calafia.
GARCI ORDONEZ DE MONTALVO from Las sergas del muy esfouado caballero Ssplandtan, htjo del excelente rey Amadis de Gaula, a novel published in Spain about 1500.
Map of North America showing California as on island, William Grent, 1625
Ceremonial headdresses of the Costanoon Indians of California, Louis Choris, 1822
Humans have lived on the land called California
for more than 10,000 years. By the time of European contact, CaHfornia, a land of unsurpassed natural bounty, was probably the most densely settled area north of Mexico, occupied by diverse groups of migrants and settlers later referred to as "Indians." The discovery of the New World by Columbus inspired a fantastic mythology about untold riches, earthly paradise, and great peoples. But California remained isolated from Europe and Asia until the early sixteenth century, when Spain sent a war expedition to Mexico under the leadership of Hernan Cortes, who conquered and plundered the Aztec empire, including its capital Tenochitlan (today's Mexico City) in 1521. A 1542 expe- dition on behalf of the Spanish crown allowed Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo to gaze on Alta California (roughly the present-day state of California). England's Francis Drake anchored off San Francisco Bay in 1579. And in 1602, Spain sent Sebastian Vizcaino to explore the California coastline for safe anchorages for its merchant fleets. He issued a hugely exaggerated report on California's attractions but failed to notice San Francisco Bay, like many before him.'
There then followed almost two centuries of colonial indifference, until Spain began to take a new interest in Alta California late in the eighteenth century. This was because the British and French had grabbed parts of Canada and Louisiana, and Russians were mak- ing incursions along the west coast of North America. So the Spanish crown decided to use Alta California as a buffer state to protect its holdings in New Spain.
Lacking the resources to conquer California in a single offensive, Spain adopted its tried-and-tested method of sending soldiers and missionaries to co-opt the indigenous populations and establish a colonial order. (Land grants could be used later to entice civilian
Ferdinand Deppe
Mission San Gabriel, 1832
James Walker
Vaquero, c. 1830s
settlers.) The first major push began in 1769, under the joint stewardship of Captain Caspar de Portola and the Franciscan Father Junipero Serra. Over the next fifty years, the Spaniards estabHshed twenty-one mis- sion settlements in Alta California, as well as a number of pueblos and presidios hugging the coast from San Diego to Sonoma.^
The task of settling a relatively sparsely popu- lated, semiarid region far from the Spanish homeland proved difficult. Half a century later, the region remained relatively underdeveloped, small in popula- tion and military power. One factor that hampered Spanish ambitions was the continuous resistance by native Californians. Despite the myths of harmonious mission life, the colony was violent and unruly. Missionary efforts displaced Indian communities from their villages, disrupted family and tribal life, meted out severe punishments, and introduced often-lethal new diseases. Between 1769 and 1846, the number of California Indians declined to about 100,000, or one- third of earlier totals. Some groups fomented open rebellion; others escaped to the interior, far from the reach of both priest and pestilence. Those who stayed frequently offered passive resistance. Yet it was they
who provided the primary agricultural and artisanal labor force for Spanish California, without whom the colony may not have endured.'
When the state of Mexico was cut loose from Spain in 1821, the mission system faced determined opposition from Alta California's new government. Under Mexican secularization acts, mission lands were seized, intended for redistribution among Indian resi- dents of the mission. In practice, however, they were usually sold into private hands, thus further excluding Indians from their homelands.
The people from colonial Mexico who setded on the California frontier during this time of transition from Spanish to Mexican rule came to be called "Californios." Proud of their links to Spain (via the Franciscans), Californios were a ranching elite (based on a cattle economy, including the production of hides and tallow) who referred to themselves as getite de razon, or people of reason. Many of the great families claimed they carried in their veins the sangre aziil (blue blood) of Spain. The Indians, somewhat predictably, were regarded as gente sin razon, people without reason. Such terminology reflected an ancient theological divide between civilization and savagery but was also strongly imbued with racial overtones." Required to work on the remaining undistributed mission properties to maintain the Mexican territorial government, many Indians found themselves under a regime that was barely distin- guishable from Spanish rule. Miguel Leon-Portilla uses the Nahuatl term nepantla to describe indigenous people's experience of "cultural woundedness," brought about because the colonizers usurped the ethical and spiritual foundations of their world.^
During the late 1820s, more Anglo Americans started arriving in California.' Some married into Spanish-speaking Californio families and thus gained access to land, power, and status. Others converted to
Michael Dear peopling californi
Catholicism, became Mexican citizens, and adopted Mexican customs. However, many Anglos were con- temptuous of the way in which both Spain and Mexico seemed unable to realize California's promise. Richard Henry Dana's Two Years before the Mast (1840) was perhaps the most prominent popular narrative that denigrated Indian, Californio, and Mexican alike. Dana's patronizing lament — "In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!" — was fatefully echoed in the rising sentiment favoring the Manifest Destiny of the United States: the extension of its territorial reach all the way to the Pacific Ocean.' This belief was to provide a powerful impetus in the Mexican War of 1846-48, as a result of which Mexico lost a third of its territory to the United States, includ- ing the land known as Alta California.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 ended hostilities between the United States and Mexico.' In less than eighty years, the land tended by Indians for millennia had passed from Spanish to Mexican to United States control. In law, the treaty protected the civil and property rights of Mexican citizens in California. But all Mexican holdings were formally called into question by the California Land Act of 1851, which required proof of clear title to land. The enor- mous expense this effort entailed was one reason for the swift sale and subdivision of the ranchos in the early 1860s.' The Californios soon became relegated to second-class citizenship. In addition, the United States federal government rarely recognized the Mexican land grants of the very few Indians who held them. Bumped down in the pecking order by Anglo Americans and Californios, indigenous Indians became third- class citizens. Their continuing resistance and efforts to gain legal title to their lands were instrumental in producing the first Indian reservations in Southern CaUfornia in 1865.'°
On the morning of January 24, 1848, at Coloma, on the South Fork of the American River near Sutter's Fort, James Marshall discovered gold. A small, back-page article in The Californian of March 15, 1848, announced curtly: "Gold Mine Found." Suddenly, California became the target of one of the largest, swiftest migrations in
human history. "More newcomers now arrived each day in California than had formerly come in a decade," was how historian Leonard Pitt summed up the begin- nings of the world-famous Gold Rush."
Before news of the gold strike spread, California's non- Indian population was put at 14,000. By the end of 1849, on the eve of statehood, it had risen to almost 100,000; by 1852, it would exceed 200,000 people. A few short years of gold fever accomplished what a century of deliberate colonial efforts had failed to achieve: growth. California's economic boom pushed the Golden State early into integration with the United States. Its admission as a free state in 1850 was not without rancor, but as one journalist-historian put it: "The Union is an exclusive body, but when a millionaire knocks at the door, you don't keep him waiting too long, you let him in."'^ As competition for gold escalated, Anglo Americans moved covetously to protect the claims for themselves. The Foreign Miners' Tax of 1850 effectively barred Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, and even Californios from an equal chance at the riches. Yet despite these constraints, the California Dream was firmly established in minds across the nation and the world. California was where ordinary folk went to become fabulously rich!
San Francisco (renamed from Yerba Buena in 1847) was ground zero for urban growth during the Gold Rush. Sacramento also acted as a supply center, as did Stockton, and Southern California's cow counties even got caught up in the demands of their northern neighbors. But everything that came into and out of the Mother Lode country had to pass through San Francisco. By i860, the city had a population of 57,000, making it America's fifteenth-most-populous urban center, the largest city west of the Mississippi River."
Known for its volatile politics, mob justice, and loose social climate, San Francisco witnessed the rapid development of business institutions, churches, news- papers, and elite neighborhoods. The city became California's first great manufacturing center, based on machinery and metalworking connected to resource- extractive industries. By the late nineteenth century, it had 80 percent of the state's manufacturing capacity,'" earning its machine shops the title of "graduate school
Michael Dear peopl
of mechanics."'^ Approximately half the city's popula- tion was foreign-born during most of the second half of the century. Many of the Gold Rush migrants came from New England and the Pacific Northwest, but they were joined by a large contingent of Chinese and Mexican people, plus a couple of thousand free African Americans and a handful of runaway slaves. Already, San Francisco was the capital of California's nineteenth century.
Carey McWilliams portrayed the breakneck speed of California's entry into the modern world in these words:
Elsewhere the tempo of development was slow at first, and gradually accelerated as energy accumulated. But in California the lights went on all at once, in a blaze, and they have never been dimmed}'
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It was during the latter half of the nineteenth cen- tury, under the stark illumi- nation of the world's gaze, that California became (according to Mark Twain) a mecca for "astounding enterprises."" Silver miners, agriculturalists, railroad mag- nates, bankers, and others rushed in to seize the
moment. The spirit of the times, as expressed by historian J. S. Holliday, was "stand back, make way for the hydraulickers, wheat ranchers, railroad builders, stockbrokers, and tycoons of commerce.""
As if gold were not enough, silver was discovered in i860 in an indecently rich vein known as the Comstock Lode, on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. From deep mines, wage-earning miners hoisted to the surface between i860 and 1880 ore worth $300 million. And as before, everything that went into and came out of the instant town of Virginia City had to pass through San Francisco. To shore up these mines, unimaginable quantities of timber were cut. As one con- temporary observed: "The Comstock Lode may truth- fully be said to be the tomb of the forests of the Sierra."" In addition, wildlife was decimated for food, and river valleys were destroyed by the new hydraulic-power hoses used in gold mining. The whole California economy, it seemed, was instantly and insistently (in geographer Richard Walker's memorable phrasing): "digging up, grinding down, and spitting out the gifts of the earth."^°
The gold miners' seemingly untouchable aristoc- racy was challenged by a persistent group of farmers downstream in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. By the early 1880s, the value of California's agricultural production exceeded that of mining. This bolstered the farmers' case against the miners, whose upstream operations were periodically flooding
William Rich Hutton
San Francisco, 1847
William Hahn
Harvest Time, 1875
and burying the agriculturalists' crops and towns. Ultimately, after a long legal struggle, hydraulic mining techniques were banned in California in January 1884, thereby ushering in the end of the Gold Rush era/'
The agricultural enterprise that sprang out of the plethora of unsettled land titles in the Central Valley was large in scale and operation. The valley's unmatched ecologies, based upon wetlands (cienegas), riparian woodlands, lakes, and rivers, were systemati- cally drained and plowed under for agricultural production. Historian William Fulton described the consequent agribusiness as "capital-intensive, highly mechanized, concentrated in its land ownership pat- terns, and oriented toward export markets."" By the 1870s, more than half the land in California was owned by .2 percent of the state's population." The initial boom crop, the "grower's gold," was wheat.^" In 1881, 4 million acres of wheat fields, stretching throughout the Central Valley and covering two-thirds of all culti- vated land in the state, yielded $34 million on the world market — almost twice the value of the gold produced that year." But just as the demise of gold mining was swift and stark, so the end of wheat's hegemony was surprising and speedy. Competition from home and abroad, rapid soil depletion, and a market slump effectively eliminated California wheat production by the early 1890s.
On its completion in 1856, Theodore Judah had won fame as the engineer who surveyed and promoted California's first railroad — twenty-two miles of track between Sacramento and the foothill town of Folsom, supply center for the mining camps along the American River. Judah optimistically approached San Francisco investors with a plan for a transcontinental railroad, which they huffily rejected, viewing such a pipe dream (quite correctly, it turns out) as a threat to their ocean- oriented transportation monopoly.
So Judah went to Sacramento. There he met four merchants — Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford. The Big Four, as they came to be called, were risk takers and skillful entrepreneurs. They brought the Central Pacific Railroad (cprr) from Sacramento to meet the westward- moving Union Pacific Railroad at Promontory, Utah.
The last spike in this celebrated connection between east and west was struck on May 10, 1869, changing California and the nation forever. Despite their success, the avaricious, monopolistic barons of the newly formed Southern Pacific Railroad (sp), which absorbed the CPRR, inspired Californians' contempt on more than one occasion, and played a pivotal role in state politics in the ensuing five decades. For instance, Charles Crocker's decision to import 12,000 Chinese laborers to complete the most difficult and dangerous work on the railroad had serious repercussions. Unhappy with this competition, the state's white work- ing class developed strong anti-Chinese sentiments. California workers led the charge for a complete federal ban on Chinese immigrants in 1885, an exclusionary outlook on race that persists today in various incarna- tions. Residents also rebelled against the sp juggernaut itself, directing their resentment toward the monopoly's apparent greed and corruption. The attempt to derail "the Octopus" (so known for its propensity to extend its tentacles to control every aspect of the state) defined California politics into the Progressive Era."
In the 1870s, the cprr and its subsidiaries con- structed rail track along the entire length of the Central Valley, thus releasing the fullest development of the valley's agricultural potential." The sp conglomerate helped transform the landscape by bankrolling start-up farms, researching railcar refrigeration, and nurturing experimentation with new crops.^" Another distinctive feature of California's agricultural boom was the growers' exchange, which encouraged farmers to pool resources and work together to develop export markets. But the availability of cheap agricultural labor was the most critical human factor in the state's burgeoning agribusiness. Recounting California's almost unbeliev- able dependence on ethnic migrant farmworkers, Walter Stein wrote: "Chinese in the 1870s; Japanese in the
Carleton 8. Watkins Transcontinental Rail Terminal, 1876
1890s; East Indians after the turn of the century; Mexicans and FiHpinos during and after World War I; Okies during the 1930s; southern blacks along with Filipinos and Mexicans again during the 1940s."" The most critical natural factor in California agriculture was water.^° One of the nineteenth century's least noticed but most fundamental innovations was the 1887 Irrigation District Act, which allowed farmers to coop- eratively build and operate watering systems." By the mid-i920S, innovative farming and intensive irrigation had allowed California to become the nation's leading agricultural state.
The railroad also changed the way California built cities. By September 1876, the sp arrived in Southern California from the north. In 1885, it opened a direct line to the east. But, most importantly, in 1887 the first Santa Fe Railroad train snaked through the San Bernardino Mountains into Los Angeles, thus breaking the sp monopoly. The ensuing rate war (a one-way ticket from Kansas City to L.A. fell from $125 to $1!) inaugurated Southern California's first major land boom. It also, in Leonard Pitt's words, "sealed the coffin of the old California culture.""
Turn-of-the-century Los Angeles offered itself as paradise for land and property speculators, sunseekers and tourists, homesteaders and health fanatics. As early as 1886, local wags claimed it had more real estate agents per acre than any other city in the world." City boosters were, however, anxious to nourish a more conventional industrial base. The discovery of oil helped somewhat (Edward L. Doheny had sunk the first well in 1892), but it required impressive invest- ments in urban infrastructure — rail, water, power, and port — to properly realize L.A.'s potential. For instance, San Pedro harbor (opened in 1899 and annexed to the City of Los Angeles in 1906) very quickly became the state's first-ranked port. And in 1913, the amazing Owens Valley Aqueduct reached L.A., enabling engineer William Mulholland to boldly declare, "There it is. Take it!," as the first waters gushed over the aqueduct's sluiceway. The date was November 5, 1913. It was the earliest indication that Los Angeles was to become the capital of California's twentieth century.
Still, San Francisco continued to view its southern neighbors with complacency. It sought to confirm its arrival on the world scene early in the twentieth century by hiring the eminent Chicago architect Daniel Burnham to prepare a city plan. In addition, an exposi- tion was scheduled to celebrate the much-anticipated 1915 opening of the Panama Canal. But in 1906 an earthquake ignited a huge fire that devastated the metropolis. Neighboring towns anticipated that "the City" would never recover, but recover it did. In 1915, San Francisco opened a new civic center and hosted the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Their architectural designs conjured up visions of a cosmo- politan, classical. Beaux- Arts City by the Bay.
That same year in San Diego, quite a different exposition was mounted. The Panama-California Exposition was determinedly Southern Californian in outlook. As social historian Phoebe Kropp makes clear, both the Panama-Pacific in the north and the Panama-California in the south were self-promotional sorties in the wars between cities." Against San Francisco's studied cosmopolitanism, San Diego adver- tised agricultural and commercial possibilities, plus a distinctly Spanish Colonial sensibility and heritage. While San Francisco aspired to worldly sophistication, Southern California had found a regional identity and had begun to compete for national attention. By 1920, California was the eighth most populous state in the Union, and the growth momentum had shifted south, to Los Angeles.
Since the turn of the century, the local chamber of commerce had hyped Los Angeles into becoming one of the best-publicized places in the United States. Tourists and prosperous Midwesterners were particu- larly targeted, and these efforts ignited successive rushes of untrammeled urban growth. In 1918, 6,000 building permits were issued in Los Angeles; by 1923 (the peak of the boom), this number had climbed to more than 62,000, with a total value of $200 million. By 1925, L.A. had no fewer than 600,000 subdivided lots standing vacant. The city had already parceled out enough land to accommodate 7 million people, fifty years before the reality of population growth would catch up with the speculators' appetites!
Very early during these boom years, the traditions of immigration to Southern California from northern and western Europe were displaced. Southern and eastern Europeans took their place, joined by peoples of Mexican, lapanese, and African American origin. By 1930, Mexicans were by far the largest minority group in Los Angeles, which already had a racial/ethnic diversity unmatched anywhere along the West Coast.
Not everyone regarded the California develop- ment juggernaut with equanimity. One prominent critic was John Muir, who anticipated present-day environmentalism by insisting on the ecological bond between people and nature. In 1892, Muir founded the Sierra Club, an influential conservationist group as well as a social club for wilderness outings. Muir and the Sierra Club won federal jurisdiction for Yosemite Valley in 1906 but lost battles over the Hetch Hetchy Valley and the Owens River, when San Francisco and Los Angeles tapped Sierra rivers during this period."
The taint of conspiracy, collusion, and corrup- tion surrounding so many urban water projects gave impetus to California Progressivism during the early twentieth century. Another favorite target was the Octopus. One quintessential Progressive organization was the California Lincoln-Roosevelt League, initiated in 1907 by reform-minded Republicans. The league set out to free its party from railroad domination but also furthered Progressive goals such as the initiative, referendum, and recall statutes; public regulation of utilities and railroads; and the direct primary election. The league endorsed women's voting rights, providing the impulse for equal suffrage in California (the sixth state in the union to establish this, in 1911), as well as other Progressive issues, including minimum-wage laws, control of child labor, and the deterrence of alcoholism, gambling, and vice.
Yet for all the efforts to extend democracy, the Progressive Era in California was tainted by campaigns of racial exclusion (as were earlier, presumably less- progressive times). Labor leaders and Progressive
reformers together instituted the Asiatic Exclusion League in 1905, advocating such measures as school segregation and immigration restrictions. Resentment of the success of Japanese farmers led to the Alien Land Law Act of 1913, which forbade noncitizens from owning real property in the state. The California Dream and United States citizenship remained determinedly white. And while unions were strong in the Bay Area, fear of labor radicalism (especially following the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles r;>?!ei- building) fostered an antiunion, "open-shop" attitude in L.A. that persists to this day."
Throughout the booming 1920s, the difficult 1930s, and the coming of war, California continued to attract people. In the decade of the 1920s, 2 million Americans became Californians, most of them settling in the Southland, and most of them from white Midwestern states. It was the greatest relative popula- tion increase of any decade in the state's history, and the most homogeneous in terms of origins.
The motion picture industry — Hollywood! — did much to broadcast California's appeal." Begun in New York and San Francisco, production companies soon recognized that Southern California's landscapes and climate were ideal for moviemaking. No less than 70 picture studios had established themselves in and
"Ramona"-style pageant, San Gabriel Mission, early twentieth century
Arnold Genthe
Chinatown, San Francisco, 1898, gelatin-silver print
Pickford/Fairbanks Studios, Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, c. 1926
Dorothea Longe
Resettled, El Monte, California, 1936, gelatin- silver print
around Hollywood by 1914. By the late 1920s, industry integration had given birth to the studio system, domi- nated by Paramount, Fox, mgm, Universal, Warner Brothers, and rko. For locals as well as tourists, it became increasingly difficult to see where movie fantasy stopped and the real world began." Certainly, the movies advertised a seductive lifestyle that became part of the mythos of California. Moviemaking occupied the streets and vacant lots of Los Angeles, even after pro- duction was consolidated in large studio-run facilities. The Industry also attracted filmmakers from Europe, who were often fleeing the rise of fascism, and spawned a tradition of artist-in-exile that was to indelibly stamp Southern California cultural life for the rest of the century." Immigrants typically wanted a single-family home in the suburbs, but decidedly not the urbanism that characterized the eastern and Midwestern cities from whence they came, and the homebuilding indus- try was determined to satisfy those needs. By 1930, Los Angeles housed 94 percent of its residents in single- family homes (the highest percentage in the nation)."" Another significant sponsor of suburbanization was the automobile, which simply accelerated the process already begun by suburban railways. The Auto- mobile Club of Southern California and the California State Automobile Association were both founded in 1900. With the introduction of the relatively affordable Ford Model T, car ownership rose rapidly, but nowhere faster than in Los Angeles. By 1925, Los Angeles had one auto for every three people, more than twice the national average."' The automobile irrevocably altered the landscapes of California, not only with the hundreds of miles of paved roads and highways it demanded but also with the new social forms it inspired — the
supermarket, drive-in theater, and flamboyant roadside architecture."^
Literally fueling this mass motorization were the region's abundant oil supplies. Oil had been found in Los Angeles in the early 1890s, provoking the steady development of exploration, refinery construction, and conversion from coal usage. But a series of exceptionally productive discoveries in the 1920s, accompanied by increasing demand, conspired to make California the nation's largest oil-producing state through the 1930s (including output from the legendary Signal Hill and the Tulare Basin in the south Central Valley). The state produced oil worth more than $2.5 billion during that decade, a half billion dollars more than all the gold ever mined in the state. Prospectors and property specula- tors tripped over each other in many L.A. subdivisions; suburbanites dug deep for oil in their own backyards. Yet by decade's end, the oil industry had faded in Southern California, and elsewhere in the state it had become consolidated into a few corporate entities."'
The Great Depression brought about acute personal hardship, bitter labor struggles, and heightened racial antagonisms. San Francisco staggered under a 25 per- cent unemployment rate; Los Angeles's rate was 20 percent. The 1934 General Strike in San Francisco, called in retaliation against the National Guard's violent sup- pression of the earlier International Longshoremen
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Association's strike, was less than a success. In L.A., city officials and Anglo workers blamed Mexican workers for their troubles. In 1930, a "repatriation" effort was begun, which ultimately returned to Mexico one-third of the city's Mexican and Mexican American popula- tions (approximately 35,000 people). It was also during this time that 300,000 poverty-stricken Midwestern farmers arrived in California and transformed the state's farm labor force. They came from the Dust Bowl regions, largely between 1935 and 1939, and quickly acquired the generic name "Okies." They came at a time when growers faced the possibility of rising wages for the first time in many years, and their willingness to accept low pay kept farm wages down, undercut union efforts, and displaced Mexican farm laborers for years to come."
Ultimately, it was federal money invested in New Deal projects that began to pull the state out of depression. The Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and many other public- works projects created a state infrastructure that has endured as both the material and mental underpin- nings of the California Dream. Along with such familiar monuments as the Golden Gate and San Francisco- Oakland Bay bridges, federal agencies oversaw construc- tion of the Colorado River project (including the Hoover Dam), which brought water to sustain Southern California's urban growth." Then World War 11 erupted in Europe.
California was well positioned to supply the nation for war. In 1919, the U.S. Navy had divided its newly modernized and enlarged fleet, sending half to the West Coast and thereby triggering a nervous struggle among West Coast ports as to who would get what. San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vallejo, and Seattle battled furiously for naval bases, but also for the potential of revitalized merchant marine and shipbuilding industries. This particular conflation of national politics (Senator James D. Phelan led the charge in Washington, D.C., to ensure that the West Coast got its share of the Navy spoils), unstoppable urban growth, and city-father hucksterism ultimately created what historian Roger Lotchin called "Fortress California.""
How .1 PlAYCROtJIIII OOES TO WAR !
Planning Your Victory Vacation in Southern Californit
More than $35 billion in public monies were sunk into California industries during World War II, roughly 10 percent of all government funds. Fueled by fear of a Japanese invasion following the attack on Pearl Harbor, this investment sparked not only strong economic recovery in California, but also a tremendous expansion in scientific and technological enterprises. Some referred to it as the "Second Gold Rush."" In Northern California, shipbuilding was dominant; the Kaiser ship- yards in the East Bay suburb of Richmond employed tens of thousands of workers constructing warships in record time. In the south, the aircraft industry employed more than half the aircraft workers in the nation. These wartime industries drew large numbers of women into the labor force for the first time and intensified migration by African Americans." In 1940, African Americans composed only 1.8 percent of the state's population; by 1950, this proportion had risen to 4.3 percent.
The rapid pace of in-migration plus war-initiated shortages created social problems and exacerbated racial antagonisms. A dearth of affordable housing, aggravated by discrimination in housing markets.
How a Playground Goes to Mar!, brochure, 1943. Lent by
Michael Dear
Participants in the Bracero program awaiting final roll call and distribution of identification papers, Mexico, 1944
solidified the tendency toward racially segregated communities throughout California."' During the 1943 Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles, hundreds of white ser- vicemen attacked flamboyantly dressed Mexican youths because the Anglos interpreted their garb as disloyal. Police arrested the zoot-suiters for disturbing the peace." Long-standing racial prejudice and wartime fears for national security led also to the internment of more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent, two- thirds of whom were American citizens. For the dura- tion of the war, many Japanese Californians found themselves in isolated camps set in some of the more desolate parts of the Mojave Desert, the eastern Sierras, and elsewhere.^'
After 1945, a long period of economic prosperity settled upon California. The Cold War and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam prompted continuing high levels of defense-related expenditures. By i960, aerospace industries employed 70 percent of San Diego's and 60 percent of Los Angeles's manufacturing workers. Such growth, together with further diversification in employ- ment patterns, pushed population to new heights. California became the nation's most populous state in 1962, passing New York, having grown from 6.9 million in 1940 to 15.7 mil- T- - lion in two short decades.
Prosperity fueled social experimentation. The Beat writers congregated in San Francisco during the 1950s, establishing an intel- lectual counterculture based on pacifism, radicalism, and experimentalism that fundamentally informed the student movements of the following decade. Republican governor Earl Warren (and his Democratic successor, Edmund G. Brown) used much of the state's postwar budget surplus to create a model higher-education system in California.
Needless to say, the postwar boom did not benefit everyone equally. Under the provisions of the wartime Emergency Farm Labor Program, an agreement
negotiated with the Mexican government often known as the Bracero program, Mexican workers were to be offered contracts with guaranteed wages, housing, and health care. Kept in operation until 1964, the bracero effort never lived up to its ideals, in part because it was constantly undermined by the continuing high demand for labor, which encouraged unofficial immigration from Mexico. When in 1952 the U.S. government sponsored "Operation Wetback" to stall unauthorized crossings from south of the border, California encoun- tered an ironic situation whereby one government agency was recruiting foreign workers while another was turning them away.
The decade of the 1960s became the contradic- tory apex of prosperity and protest in California." The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley adopted tactics of the civil rights movement to provoke confrontations on academic freedom and students' rights. Intensified by opposition to the Vietnam War, the movement's tactics escalated toward more violent expressions of civil disobedience. At the same time, however, a more pacifist hippie counterculture carried on the Beat traditions, and experimentation with psychedelic drugs became a rite of passage for California youth (and copycats the world over). But students and young people were not the only ones who took to the streets in the 1960s. Cesar Chavez led one of the most successful attempts to organize California farmworkers. Gaining the support of an ethnically diverse pool of workers, Chavez combined the traditional goals of higher wages, better living conditions, and improved benefits with innovative techniques of coalition building and organ- ized boycotts. In his most famous and ingenious campaign, Chavez expanded the Delano grape strike in 1965 by calling for a nationwide boycott of table grapes. This strategy not only netted national publicity for La Causa but also pressured growers to accede to union demands."
The most telling indicator that all was not well with the good ship California was the Watts riots of 1965." Proposition 14 had been approved by a margin of two to one by predominantly Anglo voters in 1964. This revoked the Rumford Act of 1963, which banned racial discrimination in housing, and would have
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curtailed desegregation efforts had it not been declared unconstitutional in later years. For African Americans in South Central Los Angeles, the passage of Proposition 14 was the last straw in an ongoing legacy of discrimina- tion. Between 1940 and 1964, L.A.'s African American population had grown from 40,000 to nearly 650,000. At the same time, residential opportunities had not expanded far beyond the crowded streets of South Central. Following arrests and persistent rumors of police brutality, violent clashes broke out between police and African Americans, leaving $40 million in property damage and thirty-four people dead, all but three black. Before the six days of rioting were over, a National Guard force of 13,900 had been deployed to restore order. In the aftermath of Watts, a more militant black power movement emerged, most notably with the establishment of the Black Panther party in Oakland. Founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the Panthers couched black power in a rhetoric of socialism and armed resistance.
Another reaction to student activism was a wave of political conservatism. In this atmosphere, former actor Ronald Reagan emerged as standard-bearer for the Republican Party. Serving as California governor between 1967 and 1974, Reagan began to implement widely promised campaign goals to cut taxes and roll back government. At the time of his election, the Los Angeles-San Diego corridor was home to 41 percent of the state's population, as against the Bay Area's 15 percent. And more than 90 percent of the state's resi- dents lived in metropolitan areas (increasingly the sub- urban counties), making California the nation's most urbanized as well as its most populous state.
The passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 marked a water- shed in post-World War II California politics. In journalist Peter Schrag's words, it separated "that period of postwar optimism, with its huge investment in public infrastructure and its strong commitment to the development of quality education systems and
other public services, and a generation of declining confidence and shrinking public services."" Since 1978, he asserts, Californians have been involved in a "nearly constant revolt against representative government.""
The initiative, referendum, and recall mecha- nisms that enabled Proposition 13 had been in place since 1911, when Progressive Era reformers were looking for ways to curtail the excesses of a state government dominated by a handful of powerful interests, especially the Southern Pacific Railroad. For most of the twentieth century these checks were used sparingly, until 1978, when Proposition 13 (sponsored by Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann) initiated a tax revolt that changed the prac- tice of California politics to this day
Proposition 13 was basically designed to cut state and local property taxes. In this it was successful; in just four years the state and local tax burden was lowered by more than 25 percent." Local officials sought to replace lost revenues with new fees and service charges. California's public schools began a path of decline from which they have yet to recover. Ironically, about one
Restricted housing tract, Los Angeles, c. 1950
National Guardsmen during the Watts riots, 1965
CALIFOR^
Common Threads Artists Group
"Guess Who Pockets the Difference?" poster, 1995
quarter of the $50 billion that Californians "saved" during the first five years of Proposition 13 was returned to the federal government through personal and corpo- rate income taxes.
The Proposition 13-induced squeeze on tax revenues and public services began to bite just when the state was undergoing a demographic transition of major proportions and entering a period of economic uncertainty that would culminate in the recession of the early 1990s. No one yet understands the precise interconnections among these three events, but their combined impacts on California have been breath- taking. By 1962, 110 years after statehood, California had become the nation's most populous state, with 17.5 million inhabitants. It took only thirty-five more years to double that figure. A large proportion of this enor- mous expansion was fueled by international migration. Changes in immigration quotas, culminating in the
Guess
who pockets
the difference?
1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, allowed 2.5 million illegal entrants to become legal citizens; it also radically altered the complexion of new immi- grants. After 1970, the white share of the state's popula- tion dropped precipitously (from three-quarters to one-half); people of Latino and Asian origins tripled their share; and the African American population remained at about 7 percent. During these decades, nonwhites began to play an increasingly active role in state and local politics.
Simultaneously, the California economy under- went a series of wrenching changes that became very visible during the 1980s and 1990s, even though the seeds of change had taken root in earlier decades. The dein- dustrialization phenomenon closed manufacturing
plants across the nation, most affecting car manufacture, steel production, and other heavy industries. California's adjustment trauma was exacerbated by a decline in defense-related expenditures that severely depleted employment opportunities in aircraft manufacture, ship- building, and ancillary industries. Between 1991 and 1994 (when economic recovery began) California experienced a net domestic out-migration of over 600,000 people, unprecedented in its history.
In place of manufacturing, service industries sprouted overnight all over the state, including retailing, information and financial services, and similar activities that some view as characteristic of a "postindustrial" society. The most fabled success story of this economic restructuring was, of course, Silicon Valley.^' But many other places, especially in Southern California (the "Silicon Coast"), enjoyed the benefits of the computer revolution." However, California boosters often over- look the darker side of this high-tech boom. Many high-skill, high-wage jobs were being created, but there was an even larger explosion of low-wage, low-skill jobs. For example, apparel manufacturing (often involv- ing sweatshop conditions) employs twice as many people as computer manufacturing; and agriculture and canning engage 400,000 workers, more than all the high-tech manufacturers combined.'" As a result, the "new" California economy is increasingly polarized between rich and poor. The rising tide of homelessness, first noticed in the early 1980s, is a direct result of this recession and restructuring." In addition, the federal government's radical undoing of the nation's welfare programs during the 1990s hit California's major cities especially hard.
Many dark clouds conspired to hide the warm glow brought about by the state's much-vaunted economic recovery. A persistent mean-spiritedness was evident in the parade of ballot initiatives that infested the political process since the 1978 tax revolt. In 1990, Proposition 140's tight legislative term limits inspired a game of "musical seats" among state and local politi- cians. Proposition 187 (1994) brought back echoes of a century-long xenophobia, with its denial of schooling to children of undocumented immigrants and their exclu- sion from virtually all other public services. Proposition
209 (the confusingly titled 1996 "California Civil Rights Initiative") prohibited affirmative action in public edu- cation, contracting, and employment. While many of the propositions' specifics remain subject to challenge in the courts, government by initiative is now firmly ensconced as part of the political artillery of advocates of all political persuasions in California."
According to Peter Schrag, California shifted from being "a national model of high civic investment and engagement" in the 1950s and 1960s, to become "a lodestar of tax reduction and disinvestment" in the 1980s and 1990s." The single most important dynamic in this transition was Proposition 13, and perhaps its most emblematic moment occurred when Orange County declared bankruptcy on December 6, 1994. Local voters adamantly refused to approve even a modest tax increase to bail themselves out.'"
Since 1769, California's history has been an ongoing narrative about conquest and immigration, about resources and development. Grabbed by the United States in search of its Manifest Destiny, the state of California was, quite literally, bulldozed by its long twentieth century. At breath-snatching speed, in a spec- tacular succession of material and metaphysical revolu- tions, the Golden State was transformed first by gold, then by green gold (agriculture), black gold (oil), gun- metal gold (defense contracts), and now e-gold (high technology). With hindsight, we can recognize that a new kind of society was in the making at the continent's isolated edge, brought about by a resdess collision
between peoples and place. As the twenty-first century dawns, the rules are changing again. The state's multiple charismas of nature, wealth, diversity, and countercul- ture fold into one another to create an incandescent galaxy of inventiveness and experimentation. At the same time, however, one cannot escape Joan Didion's prescient and oft-quoted reminder about California:
The mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.^^
California has been a remarkably lucky island. Throughout its American century, the state has avoided the principal depredations of the past one hundred years — that "most murderous" of centuries with its dour record of war, famine, and genocide." Now, as the global geopolitical balance shifts starkly from the Adantic to the Pacific Ocean, California is poised to become the capital of America's Pacific Rim.
It goes almost without saying that California is a test bed for a new kind of American society. Even as a Proposition 13 mentality persists, the state remains at the forefront of the nation's environmental conscious- ness, its voters elected two women to the United States Senate, and a revitalized labor movement looks to California for its lead. The precise architecture of the twenty-first century's social contract remains to be uncovered, but one of its principal determinants is already abundantly clear: the Latinization of the state, most evident in many Southern California cities
Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad
(Victor Henderson and Terry Schoonhoven) Isle of California, 1973, pencil and acrylic on photograph
(including Los Angeles) where Latinos are now the majority ethnic group." This demographic shift perhaps represents the ultimate legacy of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo — a peaceful reconquest of Alta California.
The search for California's twenty-first century commenced with the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles that followed the announcement of the Rodney King verdicts." Much has been written about these events, the worst urban violence in an American city during the twentieth century. Some have interpreted the clashes as a continuation of leftover business from the 1965 Watts riots, and certainly racism, poverty, and discrimi- nation played their parts. Others have regarded 1992 not as a "riot" but as an "uprising" by a constellation of marginalized minorities, prefiguring an emergent, reconstituted social order. The truth is most probably somewhere between; the events of 1992 were both a residual bitterness and a novel political hybrid. The cry of "No justice, no peace" that greeted the King verdicts was an expression of rage at a manifest injustice. But the multiculturalism of those who participated in the unrest plus the reconstructive efforts that followed are indicative of something different, something positive.
Californians remain alert to Wallace Stegner's challenge to create a civilization worthy of its setting, but time and space are running out. The Southern California megalopolis, extending from Santa Barbara across the international border into Baja and landward to the Inland Empire, is already a single urban system. It is an ecosocial hybrid based on no single heritage; it can be defined only on its own terms; and it is the city of the future." And our Golden State is no longer an isolated margin but, instead, the geographical pivot of America's Pacific century. No longer an exception to the rules governing urban development, it is instead the prototype of a burgeoning multicultural, urban America. Watch California. Ready or not, it is the shape of things to come.
1 See Joshua Paddison, ed., A World Transformed: Firsthand Accounti of California before the Gold Rush (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1999), intro. The Uterature on California's history is large and increasingly rich. Kevin Starr's five volumes are indispen- sable: Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (1973); Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (1985); Material Dreams: Southern California through the J9J0S (1990); Endangered Dreams: Tlie Great Pi-prcffion in I ,i///,>M//,i ( 1996); and The Drciiii I iiilurcy ( nUfouiui I iih-n. ihc 1940s (1997) (New York; Oxford University Press).
2 J. S. HoUiday, Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California (Berkeley: Oakland Museum of California and University of California Press, 1999), chap. 1.
3 A careful accounting of the impact of colonization on the indigenous populations of Alta California is to be found in Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1995). See also Lillian McCawley, Tlie First Angelenos: The Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles (Banning: Malki Museum Press and Ballena Press, 1996).
4 See Lisbeth Haas, Conquest and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955), 2-3,30-32, 37.
5 Ibid., 26-28, 43.
6 The significance of immigration on Californian identity is discussed by Doyce B. Nunis Jr., "Alta California's Trojan Horse: Foreign Immigration," in Ramon A. Gutierrez and Richard J. Orsi, eds.. Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), chap. 11.
7 Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years before the Mast {New York: Penguin Books, 1981), quoted and discussed in Paddison, A World Transformed, 202.
8 The treaty and its legacy are well docu- mented in Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990).
9 Haas, Conquest and Historical Identities, 63, 67. 77-
10 Ibid., 57-61-
u Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish- Speaking Californians, 1846-1890 (1966; reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 52-53-
12 Quoted in Holliday, Rush for Riches, 171.
13 A thorough history of the transformation of Y'erba Buena is Roger W. Lotchin,
San Francisco, 1846-1856: From Hamlet to City (1974; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
14 Mel Scott, The San Francisco Bay Area: A Metropolis in Perspective ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985). 73-
15 Richard A. Walker, "California's Golden Road to Riches: Natural Resources and Regional Capitalism, 1848-1940," Annals of the American Association of Geographers (in press).
U Carey McWilliams, Califonmi: The Great Exception (1949; reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). 25- See also his classic account Si'iilhcni California: An Island on the Land ( 1946; reprint. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1973).
17 Quoted in Holliday, Rmh for Riches, 29.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 227.
20 Walker, "California's tioldon Road to Riches," 25.
21 Holliday, Rush for Riches, chap. 7.
22 William Fulton, California: Land and Legacy (Englewood, Colo.: Westcliffe Publishers, 1998), 44.
23 Stephen lohnson, Cerald Haslam, and Robert Dawson, The Great Central Valley: California's Heartland (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 41-
24 Holliday, Rush for Riches, ijy.
25 Ibid.
26 For a brief history of the railroad in Northern California, see Holliday, Rush for Riches, 229-43; for California as a whole the standard account is William Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). The anti-Chinese movement is recounted in Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1971; reprint, Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995)-
27 Johnson, Haslam, and Dawson, The Great Central Valley, 41.
28 Fulton, California, 46.
29 Quoted in Johnson, Haslam, and Dawson, The Great Central Valley, 47.
30 For a classic account of water in the American West, consult Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1993). See also Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).
31 Johnson, Haslam, and Dawson, The Great Central Valley, 45.
32 Pitt, The Decline of the Calfornios, 249.
33 Edward W. Soja and Allen J. Scott, "Introduction to Los Angeles: City and Region," in Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, eds., The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century {Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), chap. 1.
34 Phoebe S. Kropp, "'There is a little sermon in that': Constructing the Native Southwest at the San Diego Panama- California Exposition of 1915," in Marta Weigle and Barbara A. Babcock, eds.. The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1996), 36-46.
35 For a sweeping perspective on land devel- opment in California during the twentieth century, see Stephanie S. Pincetl, Transforming California: A Political History of Land Use and Dcve/opm(?«f (Bahimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
The case of Southern California in the late
twentieth century is dramatically invoked by Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998).
36 ("alifornia's Progressive Era is reviewed in William Deverell and Tom Sitton, eds., California Progressivism Revisited (ViCxV.c\cy and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); for the case of Southern California the authoritative account is Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (New York: Verso Books, 1990).
37 A good overview of the culture and history of Hollywood is provided by Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995).
38 For one quirky account of Hollywood urbanism, see Creg Williams, The Story of Hollywoodland {Los, Angeles: Papavasilopoulos Press, 1992).
39 See, for instance, Stephanie Barron, et al.. Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler {Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997).
40 The classic narratives of the birth of Los Angeles urbanism in the early twentieth century are Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (1967; reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); and Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). An excellent account of San Francisco's urban history is by Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). See also Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
41 Scott Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).
42 Two excellent accounts of the architectural consequences of automobilization are those by Richard Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retaihng in Los Angeles, 1920-1950 (Cambridge: mit Press, 1997); and The Drive- in, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914-1941 (Cambridge: mix Press, 1999).
43 A colorful history of the oil era in Southern California is by Jules Tygiel, The Great Los Angeles Swindle: Oil, Stocks, and Scandal during the Roaring Twenties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
44 On Mexican repatriation and the Okies, I recommend the following: Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); and James Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
45 The progress and legacy of the New Deal in Southern California's landscapes is reported in Starr, Endangered Dreams, chaps. 10-13.
46 See Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910-1961: From Warfare to Welfare (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992).
47 Marilynn S. lohnson. The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War // (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
48 For a brief account of the Bay Area's war industries, see Scott, The San Francisco Bay Area, chap. 15; also Johnson, The Second Gold Rush.
49 A beautifully illustrated and wide-ranging account of the impact of wartime on the built environment of California is the collec- tion of essays in Donald Albrecht, ed.. World War II and the American Dream: How Wartime Building Changed a Nation (Washington, D.C.: National Building Museum and mit Press, 1995).
50 The standard account of the Mexican experience in Southern California is George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
51 See Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), chap. 10.
52 A brief account of the Bay Area in the 1960s is Charles Wollenberg, Golden Gate Metropolis: Perspectives on Bay Area History
{ Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, 1985), chap. 19. A provocative and engaging reappraisal of the legacy of this era is con- tained in James Brook, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters, eds.. Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, and Culture (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998).
53 See Pincetl, Transforming California, chaps. 4-5.
54 An interesting perspective on this well- documented event is by David Wyatt, Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), chap. 8.
55 Peter Schrag, Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future (New York: New Press, 1998), 10. Schrag's is the most pen- etrating account of this period in California politics.
56 Ibid.
57 A comprehensive balance sheet of Proposition 13's first five years is drawn up by Terry Schwadron and Paul Richter, California and the American Tax Revolt: Proposition 13 Five Years Laftr (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).
58 The best scholarly account of what went into producing Silicon Valley is by AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
59 An influential analysis of Southern California's "technopoles" is by Allen J. Scott, Technopolis: High-Technology Industry and Regional Development in Southern California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
60 Schrag, Paradise Lost, 113.
61 The connection between global forces and local outcomes in the case of homelessness in Los Angeles is explored by Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear, Malign Neglect: Homeless- ness in an American City (San Francisco: lossey-Bass, 1993).
62 Once again, let me recommend Schrag's
Paradise Lost as the best overview of "propo- sition politics" in late-twentieth-century California.
63 Ibid., 275.
64 A useful retelling of the Orange County bankruptcy is Mark Baldassare, When Government Fails: The Orange County Bankruptcy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).
65 Joan Didion, Slouching toward Bethlehem (New York: Noonday Press, 1990), 172.
66 The phrase is from Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), one of the most insightful (if somewhat pes- simLstic) histories of the twentieth century yet to appear.
67 The Latinization of Los Angeles is dis- cussed in Gustavo Leclerc, Raiil Villa, and Michael Dear, eds.. Urban Latino Cultures: La vida latina en L.A. (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1999).
68 For a detailed appraisal of the genesis and impact of the Rodney King beating, trials, and aftermath see Lou Cannon, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the lapd (New York: Times Books, 1997).
69 There is much debate about California's urban future. See, for example, Michael Dear, The Postmodern Urban Condition (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), as well as the collections of essays in Scott and Soja, The City, and Michael Dear, H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise, eds.. Rethinking Los Angeles (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996).
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to friends at lacma for inviting me to become engaged in this project, espe- cially Stephanie Barron, Paul Holdengraber, and Sheri Bernstein. Thomas Frick, Nola Butler, and Garrett White provided useful guidance that assisted me in the preparation of this essay. I am especially indebted to Phoebe Kropp, who prepared many docu- ments and materials that both informed and challenged my understanding. Thanks also to Greg Hise, Selma Holo, Gustavo Leclerc, Aandrea Stang, Kevin Starr, Dick Walker, and Jennifer Wolch, whose advice and comments transformed my understanding of our Golden State, and this essay. Dallas Dishman assisted in preparing images; I am grateful to all those who granted permission for us to use them. None of the individuals mentioned in this note is responsible for any errors or interpretive aberrations that may adorn this essay.
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LATE VALENCIAS^l
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SELLING CALIFORNIA 1900-1920
Sheri Bernstein
Crate label for £1 Capitan brand oranges, San Dimas Orange Growers Associotior n.d. Lent by the McClelland Collection
California officially became the Golden State in the 1960s, but its image in the popular imagination was never more singularly golden than during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Nor did the arts ever play a more pivotal role in the gilding of California. With remarkably few excep- tions, artists and writers from the turn of the century through the 1910s, along with California's promoters in industry, regional government, and the press, embraced a vision of the state as the quintessential Garden of America, an unspoiled and bountiful paradise. This powerful Edenic vision has proven even more enduring than the notion of the Wild West associated with the Gold Rush period. It lies at the heart of myriad booster images — used here to mean propagandistically positive conceptions, often serving the interests of the white mainstream — that to varying degrees have persisted in shaping popular visions of the state and in influencing artistic production to the present day.
On first consideration it might seem curious that an expressly premodern, Edenic conception of California was so pervasive from 1900 through the 1910s, given that significant portions of the state, like other areas in the coun- try, had already experienced or were then in the throes of urbanization and industrial develop- ment. San Francisco was already a considerable metropolis of 343,000 at the turn of the century, growing to 500,000 by 1920; Los Angeles's popu- lation mushroomed from 102,000 in 1900 to over 550,000 in 1920, with a 100 percent increase in manufacturing registered between 1900 and 1910 alone.'
The droves of white middle-class tourists and new residents then descending on California — many of whom were Midwesterners leaving their farms to resettle in cities^ — had a psychological need to see the region as free of the complexities and ills of modern life. Newcomers were often of retirement age and sought to enjoy their final days leisurely in a private bungalow in the sun. Many
of the region's copious tourists — the word tourist was probably coined in Southern California during the nineteenth century' — were looking for a healthful respite from the frantic pace and ubiquitous grime of everyday urban living. It is understandable, then, that the state's transporta- tion, tourist, and agricultural industries, its chambers of commerce, and its powerful individ- ual boosters exerted enormous effort to present white Midwestern audiences with precisely the idyllic images of California they craved, even amid the massive development of the region. Promises of personal well-being and financial prosperity were among the most popular and effective selling strategies. "Oranges for Health — California for Wealth," the slogan for a 1907 pro- motional campaign organized by the California Fruit Growers Exchange and financed by the Southern Pacific Railroad to attract lowans, is a typical example."
At times the sunny, boosterist conceptions of California had explicitly racist overtones. One of the region's unwavering proponents, Massachusetts-born newspaperman and Southwest Museum founder Charles Fletcher Lummis, championed Southern California in his widely read magazine. Land of Sunshine (later renamed Out West), as "the new Eden of the Saxon home-seeker." Further, he boasted of Los Angeles in 1895 that "the ignorant, hopelessly un-American type of foreigner which infests and largely controls Eastern cities is almost unknown here."^ Indeed, for many of the new Anglo arrivals, the image of California as unaffected by the massive immigration from southern and eastern Europe then changing the complexion of the country's major East Coast and Midwestern urban centers was a strong attraction. While it is true that California was home to few European immigrants during these years, its urban popula- tion was in fact quite heterogeneous ethnically.
1 9 B 0 > The Automobile Club of Southern California is formed. > Suspicions of an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco's Chinatown lead health officials to quarantine all Chinese living in a seven-bli
California for the Settler, brochure produced by the Southern Pacific Railroad, 1911. Lent bytheSeaver Center for Western History Research
©(Q)ig<3?2!I^1^SI IPMJ^'S.WE'm
with sizable numbers of Mexicans, Japanese, and African Americans in Los Angeles and a large community of Chinese in San Francisco.' Generally, however, the California image pro- mulgated by boosters was ostensibly more benign than Lummis's, aimed at enticing the broadest possible spectrum of the populace.
To a considerable degree, as Susan Landauer has persuasively argued with respect to plein air landscape painting in Southern California, artists of the period participated either consciously or unconsciously in this discourse of California boosterism.' Reasons for this are easy to come by. First, many of the artists were themselves newcomers to the state — most of the plein air painters, for exam- ple, were recent arrivals from the Midwest and the East — and were undoubtedly swayed in their perceptions of the region by the same promotional strategies that had attracted others. Second, from a more practical standpoint, there was a staggering market for such images, both regionally and nationally One of the most insightful and prescient commentators on the state, journalist and lawyer Carey McWilliams, remarked that "many of [the Southern California painters] saw the region through glasses colored by subsidies."* The Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads sponsored trips for numerous artists in exchange for scenic paintings and photographs of the California
landscape that could be exhibited in railway stations across the country. Moreover, the state's two most important promotional magazines — Sunset, founded in San Francisco in 1898 by the Southern Pacific Railroad, and Lummis's Land of Sunshine, financed by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce — often featured work by artists and writers that glorified the California land- scape. In addition, many of the newly con- structed tourist hotels, including the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey, and the Mission Inn in Riverside, boasted their own art galleries and regularly held exhibitions seen by tourists and locals that featured landscape paintings. Without question, then, there was a healthy demand for scenic, picturesque views of California.
Conversely, no real market existed for images that pictured the state in urban terms, which might have paralleled work then being produced on the East Coast, such as the Ashcan School's gritty scenes of New York City life. The comparatively few urban images of California produced during these years were principally photographs, often depicting the devastation wreaked by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Even William Coulter's highly anomalous paint- ing of the fire that accompanied the earthquake and consumed the city is ultimately a coastal scene rather than an urban one. Moreover, although this depiction initially appears apoca- lyptic, with smoke dramatically billowing from the shore and blackening the sky. Coulter's intention was to put a positive spin on the catastrophe. His subject is San Francisco's suc- cessful maritime rescue of more than 30,000 of its residents from the flaming city.'
The Chinese Merchants' Association reassures frightened tourists. > California Camera Club begins publication of Camera Craft. > Katherine Tingley, known as the Purple Mother, moves headquarters of the
Dana and Towers William A. Coulter
Photography Studio San Francisco Burning,
"121 Looking East on Market April 18, 1906, 1907, oil
Street, 1906, gelatm-silver canvas
Theosophical Society to Point Loma, on San Diego Bay. > 19 0 1 > Henr;/ Huntington organizes Pacific Electric Railway Company, a new interurban transit system. In Los flngeles the trains are called Red Cars.
John O'Sheo
The Madrone, 1921, oil on
Guy Rose
The Old Oak Tree, oil on canvas
Marion (Kavonoufh) Wochtel
Sunset Clouds "5, 1904, wotercolor on paper
Oscar Maurer
Eucalyptus Grove Silhouetted against a Cloudy Sky, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, c. 1915, gelatin-silver print
Gustave Boumann
VJindswept Sucalpytu C.1929, color woodci
In addition to perpetuating an escapist, premodern vision of California that eschewed regional realities as well as monumental interna- tional events such as World War I, scenic California images of this period share other traits. Compared with nineteenth-century California landscapes, generally grand panoramic vistas intended to communicate nature's sublim- ity, early-twentieth-century variants tend to be smaller in size and narrower in visual scope, focusing on a small expanse of terrain or a single tree, as in John O'Shea's The Madrone. They aim less at elevating nature than at conveying a readily accessible, consumable vision of it. In part, these differences bespeak a shift in the country at large toward a more bourgeois — or touristic, consumer-oriented — sensibility among patrons and producers of the arts. Yet California landscapes do stand apart from other scenic American paintings of the period, specifically in the frequency with which they present a "virgin land," untouched by modern life.'"
onal Reclamation Act passes, funding irrigation projects. East Coast manufacturers tiope that an expanded agrarian West will create new markets for their goods. > In California, the turn of the century it
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rked by tremendous industrial innovation, particularly in mining, shipping, logging, and farming. > San Francisco waterfront workers strike on July 30, imrnobilijing maritime trade for three months. > South
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Frances Hommel Gearhort |
William Wendt |
Califorrtia: The Campers' |
John Marshall Gamble |
Leopold Hugo |
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On the Salinas River, 1920s, |
Where Nature's God Hath |
Paradise, brochure produced |
Breaking Fog, Hope Ranch, |
Untitled, c. 1920 |
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color woodcut |
Wrought, 1925, oil on canvas |
by the Southern Pacific Railroad, 1909. Lent by the Cahfornia State Railroad |
Santa Barbara, c. 1908, oil on canvas |
bichromate print |
The motif of the virgin land is common to an otherwise diverse array of images of Cahfornia produced at the time, including Guy Rose's Impressionist rendering of a Southern California oak tree in dappled light; Frances Gearhart's highly decorative, Japanese-inspired color wood-block print of the Salinas River; and Oscar Maurer's moody Pictorialist photograph of a eucalyptus grove in Golden Gate Park. Only a tiny farmhouse dots the landscape in William Wendt's exalted view of a California mountain- side, hi the words of the Bavarian-born Wendt, who had lived in Chicago before coming to California as a tourist in the 1890s, "Here, away from conflicting creeds and sects, away from the soul-destroying hurly-burly of life, it feels that
the world is beautiful; that man is his brother; that God is good."" Despite its spiritual inspira- tion, Wendt's painting echoes images featured in promotional materials, such as the Southern Pacific Railroad brochure California: The Campers' Paradise, in its boldly composed, celebratory vision of the California landscape.
Railroad converts from coal to fuel oil, the beginning of a new market for the burgeoning oil industry. > 1902 > California Society of Artists is founded in San Francisco. > Charles Fletcher Lummis become
.^^
chairman of the Sequoya League, a philanthropic organization providing aid to Native flmerlcans. > 190 3 > Greek Theater Is dedicated at Berkeley, > Carmel-by-the-Sea Is established as an arts colon
9 04 > Developer flbbot Kinney completes Venice, California, a resort with canals and gondolas in imitation of its Italian namesake > San Diego Art fissociation is founded
William Dassonville Underwood and Underwood
Half Dome and Clouds, Publishers
Merced River, Yosemite Valley, /osemite Valley, 1902,
c. 1905, platinum print stereograph
One of the premier tourist destinations for Americans by the turn of the century was Yosemite, billed as "Our National Playground" after its establishment as a national park in 1890. The creation of the park transpired through the efforts of two unlikely allies — the Southern Pacific Railroad, which featured Yosemite in the first issue of Sunset, and the Sierra Club, cofounded by renowned naturalist John Muir in 1892. Indeed, the principal contention over the fate of the parklands was not between the naturalists and the railroads. Rather, it was between the naturalists and those who viewed the region as an answer to San Francisco's need for water, a need that continued to plague the entire state over the course of the century. At stake in particular was the proposed use of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, adjacent to Yosemite Valley, as a reservoir site. Muir and his allies vehemently opposed the idea, and in 1907 Muir urged the public to send letters of protest to the federal government.'^ The proposal's advocates dissemi- nated literature supporting their position — for example, a brochure illustrated with altered pho- tographs approximating what the valley would look like submerged under water — and claimed that the reservoir would only enhance the park's scenic appeal." After a protracted and bitter debate, the Hetch Hetchy proposal passed in 1913.
While Albert Bierstadt and others had painted spectacular majestic views of Yosemite
Valley in the nineteenth century, it was predomi- nantly among photographers that Yosemite remained a popular artistic subject in the early 1900S. Following in the footsteps of Carleton Watkins, photographers such as William Dassonville created images of the park that were exhibited and published as fine art while also promoting Yosemite to high-end audiences as a place to visit. Disseminated to a broader public, stereographic images produced by the company of Underwood and Underwood also appeared on postcards and other souvenir materials. Unlike nineteenth-century variants, these photographs often contain one or two figures dramatically posed at a scenic vista^for example, at the edge of Yosemite's famed Overhanging Rock — through whom the viewer vicariously experi- ences the scene. The fact that both popular and fine-art images promoted Yosemite to actual and potential visitors — paving the way for the subsequent work of Ansel Adams — reveals that the arts and California's booster industries functioned in tandem in fostering tourism and outdoor recreation in the state.'"
19 0 5 > California legislature passes an anti-Japanese resolution ttiat calls upon Congress to limit Japanese immigration.
906 > Five hundred are dead or missing in San Francis
Selden Conner Gile
Boat and Yellow Hills,
William Keith
Looking across the Golden Gate from Mount Tamalpan c. 1895, oil on canvas
Maurice Braun
Moonrise over San Diego I 1915, oil on canvas
Haruyo Matsui, Coronado as Seen through Japanese Eyes, booklet, c. 1910. Lent by the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles
Vacation Land, brochure produced by the Santa Fe Railroad, 1915. Lent by the Seaver Center for Western History Research
Even more frequently than inland locales, the celebrated California coastline was presented in the arts as an utterly vacant and untouched paradise, despite the explosion of seaside leisure and real estate development by the early 1900s. Here, too, although artists adopted a wide range of stylistic approaches — from William Keith's misty view of San Francisco's Golden Gate painted in the Barbizon tradition to the lumi- nous rendering of San Diego's shoreline by plein air painter Maurice Braun — they almost always eliminated signs of a human presence. In contrast, human figures did appear in materi- als promoting coastal tourism, where — as in William H. Bull's poster for Monterey's Hotel Del Monte — they were generally engaged in such elite leisure pursuits as golf or polo.
The absence of such references to human activity in California plein air painting, as Landauer has noted, is one of the important factors that distinguishes it from the frequently leisure-filled scenes by the Impressionists work- ing in Europe and on the East Coast.''^ By creat- ing images of a pristine, uninhabited coastline, California artists enabled viewers to imagine themselves according to their own desires, unencumbered by such contemporary realities as tourists, hotels, residences, and local industry. When these artists did include signs of humanity in their works — and this was the case even with modernists such as Selden Conner Gile, a member of the Northern California-based Society of Six — they generally depicted quaint villages or seaports rather than scenes of indus- trialized, modern life. This choice bespeaks a pervasive nostalgia for an earlier halcyon period among the region's artists, an impulse not as evident among European and East Coast Impressionists, who generally sought to record the contemporary world."
;quent fire fin area of four square miles is destroyed, including 30,000 buildings. Damage is estimated at ?500 million. > Fourteen thousand Japanese laborers are employed as section hands on western railroads,
One of the key coastal spots for creative figures as well as tourists and new residents was the Monterey Peninsula, and particularly the quaint town of Carmel-by-the-Sea. Founded in 1903 by real estate developers who promoted it as an artist colony, Carmel became a particularly attractive refuge for Bay Area artists and literati following the earthquake and fires that ravaged San Francisco in 1906. In 1910 a Los Angeles Times headline facetiously characterized Carmel as the "Hotbed of Soulful Culture, Vortex of Erotic Erudition . . . Where Author and Artist Folk Are Establishing the Most Amazin Colony on Earth.""
and 38,000 workers are ,n the fields at the peak of harvest season, mostly in California. > 19 0 7 > California progressive Republicans form the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, whose main platform and eve,
Carmel by the Sea, brochure produced by the Carmel Realty Co., c. 1905. Lent by Victoria Dailey
William H. Bull, Po/o at De/ Bertha Lum
Monte, poster, 1917. Lent by Point Lobos, 1921, color
Steve Turner Gallery, Beverly woodcut
Hills
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DEL MONTE
Begins March 3P' Ends April 15 ^•^
vement Is to break the grip of the Southern Pacific Railroad on state po
> California School of Arts and Crafts is established in Berkeley, > California Fruit Growers Exchange, a cooperative of citrus
Williom Wendt Guy Rose
Malibu Coast [Paradise Cove] . Carmet Dunes, c. 1918-20,
c. 1897, oil on canvas oil on canvas
Yet artists were not the only people to partake of this region. After the construction of a railroad line from San Francisco in the late nineteenth century, the Monterey Peninsula gained popularity as a convenient getaway for wealthy locals." Whereas its central creative figures, writers George Sterling and Mary Austin, romanticized Carmel as a Bohemian enclave isolated in the wilderness, California historian Kevin Starr has characterized it as "an early example of the leisure community," imbued with artistic charm, available at reasonable prices." Emphasizing the artiness of this area, the Carmel Realty Company included a painter's palette on the back cover of its brochure Carmel by the Sea. Without doubt, Carmel was a place where the interests of boosters and the creative community often overlapped.
As for the numerous artists who flocked to Carmel during these years, they unquestionably were affected by the commercial development of the region. As Ilene Fort has speculated with
regard to Guy Rose, who made a series of paint- ings of the Carmel coastline in the 1910s, many artists probably chose to paint vistas that they had read about previously in guidebooks, and their works were influenced by those written descriptions." Rose and others exhibited their scenic, unpopulated seascapes at the Hotel Del Monte, an exclusive resort hotel opened in Monterey in 1880 by the real estate arm of the Southern Pacific Railroad, where they were accessible to wealthy collectors from across the country.^' Thus, informed by their creators' touristic experiences, these works in turn became visual souvenirs of California for affluent visitors and "advertisements" of the state for friends at home.
concerns better known by its label, Sunkist, markets oranges
ogans sucti as "Oranges for Health— California for V/ealth." > Southwest Museum, the first museum in los flngeles, is founded by
In addition to its purportedly unspoiled natural beauty, a salient aspect of the state's image as the Garden of America was its promi- nence in horticulture, especially citrus and grapes. Indeed, California, which between 1880 and 1920 became an industrialized agricultural empire," was promoted by agribusiness and other booster industries as a veritable cornu- copia, where everything from indigenous fruits and flowers to imported palms flourished in gargantuan proportions. Even international tourists sent this image of bounty home, as indi- cated by a postcard titled A Carload of Mammoth Strawberries, which bears a message in Japanese on the back. This conception of profuse natural abundance had a profound impact on the com- mercial arts in California. For example, it infused visual images that adorned orange crates, which played an enormous role in shaping popular conceptions of the state. It also affected the fine arts, where it fueled the market for certain types of work. Artist Granville Redmond complained that although he preferred other subjects to California's state flower, poppies were what peo- ple wanted to buy. He could scarcely paint them quickly enough to satisfy the demand." The flower paintings of Paul de Longpre were also tremendously popular. He was lauded as "Le Roi des Fleurs" (The King of the Flowers), and the
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Cher Lummis and members of the Southwest Society, a branch of the Archaeological Institute of America. > 19 8 8 > "Gentleman's Agreement" between Japan and the United States is signed, Japanese
h Carload of Mammoth Strawberries, postcard, 191 Lent by the McClelland Collection
Crate label for Rose brand oranges, Redlands Orange Growers' Association, c. 1910. Lent by the McClelland
From Bischoff
California Poppies Vase, porcelain
Granville Redmond
California Poppy Field, oil on canvas
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immigration is limited to the wealthy, but not closed off completely due to fears of Japanese retaliation. > Los flngeles City Council's Housing Commission reports on the living conditions of Mexican railroad I
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found filth and squalor on every hand,'
19 0 9 > State legislature authorizes the sale of bonds to begin California's first integrated network of paved roads. > On June 13 the Los fingeles Times
Postcard showing the garden at Paul de Longpre's home in Hollywood, 1905. Lent by Victoria Dailey
Paul de Longpre
Roses La France and Jack Noses with Clematis on a Lattice Work, No. 56 watercoior on paper
900,
Anne M. Bremer
An Old Fashioned Garden, n.d., oil on canvas
Mathews Furniture Shop
Rectangular Box with Lid, 1929, painted wood
Ira Brown Cross, untitled photograph of agricultural workers, 1908. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
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Randal W. Borough, poster for the Portola Festival, San Francisco, 1909. Lent by Steve Turner Gallery, Beverly Hills
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spectacular garden at his Hollywood home was a popular tourist attraction during this period. Collectors also loved the delicately painted floral porcelains of Franz Bischoff/' Already accom- plished in this medium before moving west from Detroit, Bischoff chose to settle and cultivate his private gardens in Pasadena, a city made famous as a horticultural mecca by the Tournament of Roses parade held there since 1890.
In popular imagery, views of neatly planted orange groves adjacent to cozy bunga- lows— California's answer to the American yearning for private, healthful, and affordable living — fostered a distinctly domestic conception of the state. This vision sharply contrasted with the nineteenth-century image of an uncivilized frontier associated with the Gold Rush. Yet idyllic images of California's domesticated landscape rarely so much as hinted at the human effort expended — largely by Mexican, Japanese, Italian, and other immigrant laborers — to cultivate the natural terrain. Subjects of this sort only appeared in rare documentary images of the period, such as a 1908 photograph by economics professor Ira Brown Cross. Nor did booster images ever allude to the instances of unrest among migratory farmworkers — for example, the violent Wheatland hop-pickers strike of 1913, which was organized by the radical labor organi- zation the Industrial Workers of the World (iww)." Rather, the standard booster conception of the cultivated landscape, serving the interests of agribusiness and largely promoted by the arts, was that of a serene, verdant place that miraculously eschewed the need for human toil, effectively obscuring the harsh realities of the agricultural labor system in California.
publishes Its first story about filmmaking in the city. > Women Painters of California is founded. > 1910 > Mexican Revolution sparks
Mexican immigration to the United States, which g
In addition to producing fantasy images of the physical environment, California's booster industries and individuals presented the cultural landscape to Anglo audiences through a variety of mythologizing and exoticizing lenses. Often references to disparate cultures were mixed and overlaid, fostering a sort of pan-exoticism in California, whereby Mexico was crossed with the Middle East or Asia with classical Greece. At times, however, attention w'as focused on specific ethnic or cultural groups — either their contemporaneous manifestation or their historical past. In most cases, the groups in question were inaccurately envisioned by Anglo culture as indelibly ancient peoples, whose age-old customs needed to be documented before they vanished. While such identities were ascribed in the guise of celebrating or aiding these peoples, in fact they enabled an Anglo assertion of cuhural dominance and superi- ority over the state's nonwhite populations.
Another such means of asserting cultural superiority, especially popular within literary and artistic circles and among wealthy Bay Area collectors, entailed ignoring California's non- white populations altogether and mythologizing the state as a Mediterranean haven along the lines of ancient Athens or Rome. Influenced by the American Renaissance style's Italianizing impulse, which permeated cultural production nationwide," artists visually echoed the senti- ments of popular writers. Charles Dudley Warner, author of Our Italy (1891), for example, asserted that the Mediterranean sensibility was perfectly matched with California's indigenous climate and terrain. Venerated Bay Area artist and teacher Arthur Mathews frequently invoked classical Mediterranean culture in the publication he edited, Philopolis. He asserted that contem- porary (Anglo) Californians should adopt the more balanced lifestyle of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
rcent between 1910 and 1930, The development of the Mexican railroad facilitates the trasportation of political and economic refugees to the United States
Juring a violent ironworkers' strike, tii'
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Arthur Frank Mathews |
Mathews Furniture Shop |
Gottardo Piaizoni |
Arthur Bowen Davies |
Anne W. Brigman |
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California, 1905, oil on |
Desk, c. 1910-15, carved ond |
Untitled Triptych, n,d,, oil on |
Pacific Parnassus, Mount |
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canvas |
painted maple [?], oak, tooled leather, and replaced hardware |
canvas |
Tamalpais, c. 1905, oil on canvas |
silver print |
This enthusiasm for the classical past infused the work of Mathews and his wife, furniture designer Lucia Mathews. Both were major figures in the Arts and Crafts movement, an artistic reaction against industrialization that called for a return to handcraftsmanship and a life led in harmony with nature. Although it began in England, the movement found its ideal home in California. The handsome, highly deco- rative objects produced by the couple's furniture
shop were commonly adorned with colorful arcadian scenes of classicized figures com- muning with nature. In addition to other Arts and Crafts artists. Bay Area figures who shared the Mathewses' penchant for the ancients included painters Gottardo Piazzoni and Xavier Martinez. Piazzoni, for example, used classical columns to divide the three sections of his moody Untitled Triptych.
Los Rngeles Times building is blown up on October 1, killing 20 and injuring 17. > San Diego Academy of Art is founded by painter Maurice Braun. > The socialist Industrial V/orkers of the V/orld tlWW) m
Many of the writers and artists who invoked these classical associations, including Martinez and Piazzoni, were members of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco. Founded in 1872, this exclusive confederation of prominent businessmen, journalists, writers, and artists — a major cultural force in the region at this time — regularly congregated outdoors. One writer mused in the Bohemian Club publication The Lark that immersing himself in the woods of Northern California invariably transported him to an ancient Arcadia: "We had a camp there which was an Arden in an Arcady. We were all young, happy, and sane beneath those boughs, and there came to us there a revelation of simple living, and clean-minded pastimes."" These associations served to strengthen a white, anti- urban conception of California. Moreover, they attempted to legitimize the region's cultural heritage by linking California to the ancient nucleus of Western civilization.
In Southern California, particularly with the impact of early Hollywood on Pictorialist photographers (including award-winning cine- matographer Karl Struss and Arthur Kales, who often used actresses and dancers as models), the Mediterranean metaphor took on a decidedly theatrical bent. This taste for theater also infused real estate developer Abbot Kinney's grand conceptualization of Venice, Cahfornia (begun in 1892; finished in 1904), as a replica of its European namesake, complete with canals, gondolas, and a doge's palace.
In Hollywood, and further south in the San Diego area, the classicizing impulse also manifested itself in the spiritual enclaves of Krotona, founded by Albert P. Warrington, and Katherine Tingley's Lomaland. These communi- ties drew the spiritually hungry and the curious from all over the world to California. And Lomaland, the international headquarters for
,000 migratory farm laborers to a dozen California locals, > Los Angeles's Old Ctiinatown is in its heyday. The area encompasses 15 streets and contains a Chinese opera theater, three temples, and a
Karl Struss
Monterey Coast, 1910-15, gelatin-silver print
Arthur Kales
The Sun Dance, c.1920 gelatin-silver print
Edouard A. Vysekal
Springtime, 1913, oil paper, mounted
Rex Siinkard
Infinite, c, 1915-16, oil on canvas
i
newspaper. Its restaurants, gift shops, and "exotic" qualities make it a popular
jst attraction. > fingel Island, in San Francisco Bay, opens
ing center for Chinese immigrants, v/hi
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Souvenir album of Lomolond, |
Diotima, Myrto, and |
Reginald Machell |
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Point Loma, 1913. Lent by |
Aspasia, frontispiece from |
Kathertne Tingley's Chair, |
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the Theoscphicat Society |
The Theosophical Path |
The Theosophical Society, |
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(Pasadena) |
(November 1911). Lent by |
Point Loma, c. 1905-10, |
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the Theosophical Society |
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the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society, attracted a considerable number of artists. In their designs for Theosophical publica- tions and in individual works of art, many of these figures fostered Lomaland's aesthetic, which incorporated elements of classical, medieval, and Near Eastern sources, among others. Reginald Machell, the principal designer of Lomaland's ceremonial rooms, carved an elaborately filigreed screen and the principal ceremonial chair used by Tingley. Machell's screen is pictured in a photograph of three Theosophical devotees — described only as "Diotima, Myrto, and Aspasia" — at Lomaland's Greek Theater. Such figures and the enclaves where they congregated supported a premodern vision of California as safely (if eccentrically) locked in a spiritually nourishing, ancient past.
Classical antiquity was but one cultural lens through which California was viewed. Perhaps the most pervasive cultural mythology of the period, which continues to have an impact on conceptions of California today, involved the romanticization of the state's Spanish mission history. The impetus for this mythology was the publication of Helen Hunt Jackson's immensely popular Ramona (1884), a sentimental tale of
etimes detained for months while being interrogated and checked for disease, > 1911 > California becomes the sixth state to grant woman suffrage > United States Supreme Court orders the
Frederick J. Schwonkovsky
Woman at the Piano, c. 1925, oil on canvas
Robert Wilson Hyde
A House Book, 1906, suede and brass cover, suede flyleaves, parchment, wove rag paper, and ink
CALIFORNIA LIVING
Arts and Crafts
At the turn of the nineteenth century, travelers to California sought a para- dise that promised renewal, a healthy lifestyle, and a connection to nature. This spirit informed the Arts and Crafts movement, which flourished in California from the 1880s to the 1920s. This social reform movement was originally driven by the philoso- phies of Englishmen John Ruskin and William Morris, whose tenets of simplicity and usefulness had direct application to architecture and decorative arts. Ruskin and Morris protested the quality of the products of the Industrial Revolution, and they rejected mechanization in favor of handcrafting, rustic simplicity, indigenous materials, and motifs inspired by nature. Arts and Crafts reformers advocated a harmonious integration of elements to create a comfortable and healthy environ- ment. They believed that homes designed accordingto such principles
Company of California broken up umjei antitrust laws. > The first municipal arts commission in the United States is formed in Los flngeles. It Is devoted to urban aesthetics, such as stree
background a
Greene and Greene California Faience
Robert R. Blacker House, Vase, c. 1920, earthenware
Pasadena, South Elevation, Drawing's, 1907, black ink on linen
promoted physical and spiritual well-being, both assuring a healthful society.
The classic Arts and Crafts home was the low-profile, horizontal wooden bungalow. Among the most celebrated designers in this style were the architects Bernard Maybeck and Charles Keeler of Northern California and the brothers Charles Sumner and Henry Mather Greene, founders of the Pasadena architec- tural firm Greene and Greene in Southern California. Bungalows were originally intended to be economical and of simple design. Maybeck and Keeler adhered to these paradigms, whereas Greene and Greene's four California bungalow commissions were lavish, monumental structures with elegant custom furnishings and were therefore christened "ultimate bungalows."
The Arts and Crafts period envi- ronment in the Made in California exhibition featured original Greene
and Greene furniture from the Robert R. Blacker and William R. Thorsen house commissions, art pottery, metal accessories, a hand-carved fireplace screen, and California Indian baskets. The mahogany furni- ture with ebony joinery is inlaid with metal and shell in a naturalistic Japanese motif that fuses Asian and Western design and honors nature as the wellspring of inspiration.
In the ideal Arts and Crafts home, light fixtures were intended to softly illuminate the interior, windows framed outdoor vistas, the fireplace served as a welcoming beacon, and pottery and baskets celebrated handcrafting: This was the ambience of warmth, comfort, harmony, and inspired aesthetic living that defined the Arts and Crafts lifestyle.
JO LAURIA
i think C. Sumner Greene's work beautiful . . . Like [Frank] Lloyd Wright the spell of Japan is on him, he feels the beauty and makes magic out of the horizontal line, c r ashbee, 1909
ding design, and purchasing public art. > 1912 > Mack Sennett moves his film studio from New York to Los flngeies and begins making Keystone Cops movies. > T/ie W/ss/on Way, by John McGroarty,
staged near the San Gabriel mission. During a 17-year run.
;n by nnore than 2,5 mill
> First gas station in Southern California opens
19 13 > Cecil B. DeMille begins filming The $qi.
Helen MacGregor
Reclining Woman with Guitar, c. 1921, gelotm-silver print
Souvenir book for John Steven McGroarty's The Mission Play, 1928. Lentbyjim Heimann
Cover illustration for a brochure published by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce promoting Los Angeles County, 1930s. Lent byjim Heimann
Alvin Langdon Coburn
Giant Palm Trees, Califo Mission, 1911, platinum
ill-fated love between an Indian man and Ramona, a so-called half-breed. Set in enchanting Old California, Jackson's novel precipitated a veritable tourist craze, inspiring pilgrimages to the sites where Ramona's tragic drama unfolded. By means of the Mission Myth, the region's boosters recast California's mission history in glorifying terms and whitewashed the Spaniards' gross mistreatment and colonization of Native Americans, thereby supplying tourists and displaced newcomers with a comforting, shared vision of a golden regional past. As Carey Mc Williams has dryly characterized it, the Mission Myth reenvisioned the missions as "havens of happiness and contentment" for the local Indians and sentimentalized Californios (the descendants of the Spanish colonists) of the sub- sequent rancho era as "members of one big happy guitar-twanging family, [who] danced the fan- dango and lived out days of beautiful indolence."^*
I, the story of an aristocrat forced to leave England who marries a Native American. This silent film is the first feature-length movie made in Hollywood. > Hiram Johnson, Progressive governor of California, signs
Charles Rollo Peters
Adobe House on the Lagoon, n.d., oil on canvas
Manuel Valencia
Santa Barbara Mission at Night, n.d., oil on canvas
California's twenty-one missions symbol- ized a romantic, bygone era. In addition to spawning the antimodernist Mission Revival style in architecture — epitomized by Frank Miller's famous Mission Inn in Riverside — the missions were the focus of concerted preser- vationist efforts, bespeaking the idealism of the Progressive Era. The Landmarks Club was founded to this preservationist end in 1894 by Charles Fletcher Lummis, whose enthusiasm for Alta California inspired him to dress in Old Spanish attire and to go by "Don Carlos." (The appellation "Don" associated Lummis with the Spanish landlords of Indian land and labor grants.) Advocates such as Lummis sought not to restore the missions but to preserve them in all of their picturesque, crumbling beauty." Not surprisingly, the numerous artists who depicted this subject matter for eager audiences — among them many Pictorialist photographers and Tonalist painters, such as Charles Rollo Peters — tended toward moody, often nocturnal scenes that nostalgically invoked the image of a beauti- ful, waning civilization.
An emblem of progressivism, Jackson's Ramona was intended to foreground the plight of contemporary Indians. It did give rise to the Sequoya League, which aided 300 displaced Native Americans, albeit with the patronizing aim "To Make Better Indians."" Yet the propo- nents of the Mission Myth conceived of Native Americans in primitivizing terms, as an abject, disappearing race rather than as a vital contem- porary presence. In addition to eccentric ethnographer and collector George Wharton James, others who promoted a conception of California's Indians as noble yet impotent vestiges of an ancient culture included photogra- phers Edward Curtis and Adam Clark Vroman. Their images, populated by women and the elderly, presented Native American culture as
law limiting the lease and prohibiting the purchase of agricultural land by Japanese aliens. > The IWV/'s campaign to organize migratory laborers reaches a violent culmination in the V/heatland riot on a farm I
Channel P. Townsley
Mission San Juan Capistrano, 1916, oil on canvas
W. Edwin Gledhill
Santa Barbara Mission, c. 1920, gelatin-silver print
posing no threat to contemporary Anglo society, in contrast to pervasive earlier depictions of Indians as a savage race of brutal warriors. They fueled the widespread notion that California's Native Americans were an especially pitiable subgroup from the bottom of the evolutionary chain. As an 1897 New York Herald article reported, "It seems to have been the consensus of opinion of all ethnologic students that California gave birth to nearly the lowest type of human creatures who have inhabited the earth. It is the belief of . . . [a] noted ethnologist that the Pacific coast tribes, all in all, are the most primitive and least physically and mentally developed of any of the tribes of North America."" Demeaning images such as The Belles of San Luis Key Mission, which was printed on postcards and published in an 1894 issue of Land of Sunshine that accompanied a nostalgic article on Alta California, reinforced this perception."
Unable to escape being labeled as Other by the dominant culture, the living members of these objectified cultures at times utilized the stereotypes to their own ends. For example, California's Native Americans used the percep- tion of their cuhure as pitiful to garner support from Anglos in protecting their lands from encroachment by ranchers and others. And though in part fulfilling Anglo expectations of what constituted Native American culture, California Indians responded to the vogue for woven baskets and rugs among tourists and local collectors by fashioning fiinctional objects into decorative consumer goods. These objects — for example, a finely woven trinket basket probably made expressly for sale by Elizabeth Hickox of the Northern California Karok tribe — were more elaborate than traditional utilitarian objects, such as a gathering basket in openwork style eventually acquired by George Wharton
ramento Valley. > The Owens Valley Aqueduct is completed, making possible Los Angeles's spectacular growth in the twentieth century. Upon its opening, engineer William Mulholland says, "There it is— take it!" >
Edward S. Curtis
/I Desert Cahuilla Woman fr( The North American Indian, vol. 15 (1924), pi. 522, photogravure
Adam Clark Vroman
San Gabriel Mission, c.191 gelatm-silver print
The Belles of San Luis Rey Mission, postcard, 1903, Lent by the McClelland Collection
f
Edward S. Curtis
Mitat—I^ailaki from
The Native North An
Indian, M0\. 14 (1924), pi. 472,
photogravure
Los fingeles Museum of History, Science, and flrl holds its first exhibition in its new building in Exposition Park. > 19 14 > San Francisco acquires control of the Hetch Hefchy watershed near Yosernite, viJ
Elizabeth Hickox
Lidded Trinket Basket with Design, 1900-1930, twined maidenhair fern and myrtle shoots
Unknown artist
Basket, c. 1900,juncus
Unknown artist Jolin William Joseph Winkler
Cahuilla Basket with Design of Oriental Alley, 1920, etching
Abstract Flowers, 1890-1920,
Keep California White, pohticol pamphlet, c. 1920. Lent by the Japanese American National Museum
Arnold Genthe
The Opium Fiend, 1905, gelatin-silver print
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lames, the California booster and enthusiast of Native American cuhure.
The Mission Myth was also fostered by Californios such as Manuel Valencia, a descendant of one of the first Spanish families in California, who painted romantic, nocturnal scenes of missions. The same is true of Don Antonio de Coronel, mayor of Los Angeles in the 1850s, who effectively marketed himself as an old-world Spaniard, serving as an advisor to Helen Hunt Jackson and others." As these men undoubtedly recognized, the romanticized image of the dons of Alta California was far preferable to the derogatory view of contemporary Mexicans that prevailed within the dominant culture. By and large, proponents of the mission mythology remained unsympathetic to descendants of the cultures they sentimentalized, preferring instead to hold Spanish fiestas, study traditional Native American basket-weaving techniques, and wistfully laud the waning cultures of yore.
ately supplies 240,000,000 gallons of water daily > Inauguration of the Panama Canal opens California's ports and markets to the East Coast and Europe
1915 > San Diego hosts the Panama-California
One contemporary ethnic group — those of Chinese descent who inhabited the Chinatowns of San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and smaller California locales — was a visible subject of fascination and contention within the domi- nant culture. On the one hand, Chinatowns were popularized as exotic destinations for Anglo tourists and locals and were a great source of intrigue for aesthetes in the Bay Area, including members of the Bohemian Club. On the other, Chinese immigrants were attacked by a number of forces — among them, the Asiatic Exclusion League, the American Federation of Labor, and even California senator (and former San Francisco mayor) lames Phelan — as vice- and disease-ridden detriments to society who threat- ened the American labor system by depressing wages." These detractors sought to uphold the Chinese Exclusionary Acts, which had barred fiarther Chinese immigration to the United States as of 1882, and a host of subsequent anti-Asian laws. That Phelan, one of the most vehement proponents of these laws and author of the publication Keep California White, was a presi- dent of the Bohemian Club demonstrates that sometimes these attacks came from the same camps in which Asian culture was celebrated on an aesthetic level. Notable among the voices that rose to counter these anti-Asian sentiments was that of Chinese consul Ho Yow. In a 1901 article in Overland Monthly, the consul characterized his fellow countrymen in terms intended to appease — as "a sober, temperate, and industrious class . . . intelligent and easy to control." He prom- ised that "by employing Chinese labor you get your money's worth of faithful, steady toil.""
Except for portraits of residents by local Chinese photographers, virtually all of the extant visual images of California's Chinatowns from before 1920 were produced by and for whites. Those created by artists, including
Exposition in Balboa Parl<, > San Francisco hosts the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. > The state legislature passes the Home Teacher Act, intended to "Americanize" Mexican immigrants and Mexican flmer
1916 > Oakland flrt Association is founded. > California School of fine Arts is founded in San Francisco. > fl bomb blast during a parade In San Francisco, while a longshoremen's strike is on, kills 10 and
Henry Nappenbach Hermon Oliver Albrecht
Chinese New Year Celebration, Three if^omen in White,
San Francisco, 1904, oil on c. 1910, gelotm-silver pri canvas
Helen Hyde
Imps of Chinatown, 1910 etching with hand color
Robert Hen
Tarn Can, 1'
Arthur Burnside Dodge
Taken by Surprise, n.d,, wotercolor on paper
German emigre Arnold Genthe's photographs, strongly resemble the images that appeared on postcards and other mass-market tourist sou- venirs. In fact, Genthe's initial intention in taking photographs of Chinatown was to capture what he saw as the exotic flavor of the place for his family in Germany."
Many of the Chinatown images created by artists were meant to be positive in that they presented their subjects as visually appealing, nonthreatening, and generally sympathetic. Thus it is not surprising that photographs by Genthe were used to illustrate Consul Ho Yow's article in defense of his immigrant countrymen (although Genthe was a faithful member of the
Bohemian Club, which had elected Asian xeno- phobe Phelan as its president). Yet Genthe and the majority of white artists picturing Chinatown objectified and exoticized their subjects, revealing the voyeuristic sensibility of a distanced, invisible observer. By far the subjects of choice were passive women, children, and elderly people, as well as opium dens and late-night celebrations, as opposed to intact nuclear families or men engaged in daily labor. The most popular images nostalgically featured San Francisco's Old Chinatown before the enclave had been devas- tated by the 1906 earthquake and rebuilt as a more tourist-oriented space, as evidenced by the success of Genthe's widely circulated Pictures of Old Chinatown (1908). These images depicted Chinese subjects exclusively in traditional dress, thereby effacing any evidence of cultural assimi- lation or modernization.
Among the few artists to diverge somewhat from this characterization was Arthur Burnside Dodge. Although Dodge persisted in portraying Chinese subjects in traditional attire, he depicted less conventional views of Los Angeles's Chinatown. These include a group of men read- ing want ads and an encounter between tourists and local residents that acknowledges the pres- ence of whites as visual and financial consumers of Chinatown. In general, however, California's artists accorded with its tourist industries in promoting notions of the Chinese as an effete and enigmatic people and of the state's Chinatowns as authentic, hermetically sealed, and expressly premodern spaces on the verge of vanishing. Ironically, the romantic vision of Chinese culture as being on the brink of extinc- tion proved sadly accurate: anti-immigration laws were in fact successfully shrinking the state's Chinese population.
serlsusiy wounds 40 others.
J 9 1 7 > U.S. entry into V.'orld War i boosts California's economy, especially in the areas of food processing and cotton production for soldiers' uniforms
91 8
Official program, Panama Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco 1915. LentbytheCaliforn Historical Society, North Baker Research Library, Ephemera Collection
Postcard from the Panama- Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, featuring the Tower of Jewels and James Eorle Eraser's statue The End of the Trail, 1915. Lent by the McClelland Collection
Souvenir stamps, Panama- Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915. LentbytheCalifornit Historical Society, North Baker Research Library, Ephemera Collection
SATURUAY, FEBRtJaaY 27, AMP SUNDAY, FEBRUaBY 28. 8915
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All of the prevailing mythologies of California, involving both the regional culture and the natural environment, were promoted forcefully at the expositions of art and culture that featured or were hosted by California during these years. Among the most notable examples are the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the first international fair to have a sepa- rate building devoted solely to California, and the two expositions held in San Francisco and San Diego in 1915. The latter were, respectively, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (ppie), which celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal; and the Panama-California Exposition (pce), intended to rival the ppie once San Francisco had been declared the site of the official international exposition. Like other expositions held in the United States during this period, these three were federally subsidized and organized by prominent members of the local business community intent on expanding regional commerce and celebrating America as an imperial power. According to Robert Rydell, expositions of this period fostered a sense of unity among whites of disparate classes by promoting a Darwinian conception of racial progress that culminated in the ascen- sion of the Anglo race." The message communi- cated at the two 1915 California expositions was that the American West was the final frontier where this history of racial ascendancy played itself out: first, with the Spanish subjugation of the Indians, then with the Anglo conquest of Alta California.'"
At the 1893 Chicago exposition, many of the mythologies of California that would become central to its early-twentieth-century image — notably, its physical beauty, its fecundity, and its romantic mission past — were encapsulated and intermingled in the fair's displays and in promo- tional materials devoted to the state. In honor of
founded in Los fingele
19 19 > Construction begins on the Hollywood Bowl, a venture financed almost entirely by the public. > California passes the Criminal Syndicalism fict, an antilabor
!D/0F%UN5HINE
Harry Ellington Brook's Southern California: The Land of Sunshine, booklet spon- sored by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce for the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, 1893
Official guidebook, Panama- California Exposition, San Diego, 1915. Lent by the Sierra Madre Public Library
f
Brochure promoting the Panama-California Exposition produced by the U. S. Grant Hotel, San Diego, 1915. Lent by Victoria Daiiey
this sense of regional identity was communicated at the San Francisco exposition through the use of Mission Style architecture in the California Building (most of the fair's other buildings were rendered in a Beaux- Arts style), it was stressed even more forcefully at the San Diego pce. There, the entire complex was designed by archi- tect Bertram Goodhue in an ornate Spanish Colonial-Baroque style that resuscitated the Spanish imperial past in unequivocally glowing terms. As one reporter marveled, "It is as though one stood on a magic carpet, wished himself on the shores of Spain three centuries ago and found the wish fulfilled." Embracing the idealized conception of Spanish culture that was being served up to visitors, another enrap- tured writer dubbed the exposition grounds "a sweet and restful land where 'castles in Spain' seem realities; a land in which you loaf and invite your soul."""
the exposition, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce issued the publication Southern California: The Land of Sunshine^ Published in conjunction with the opening of the California Building, it features on its cover a classicized alle- gorical figure of California. The burgeoning orange bough clasped near her womb conveys the fertility of the region. Behind her lies a thriv- ing cultivated landscape with palm trees and, beyond that, a classic picturesque mission. This idyllic conception, fervently marketed to the mil- lions of visitors who attended the fair, reappeared on a grander scale at the two major California expositions of 1915.
Heavily supported by the railroads and other booster industries, the San Francisco and San Diego expositions perpetuated visions of California as a scenic, bountiful paradise with a distinct regional history and ethnic flavor. While
THE OFFICIAL
GUIDE BOOR
OF THE
PANAMA CALIFORNIA EXPOSITION SAN DIEGO 1915
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and dnfi-Comniunist measure that allows for the arrest and imprisonment of persons accused of threatening the government, > Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery is founded in San Marino >
Postcard showing the Chinese Pavilion, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915. Lent by UCLA Library, Department of Special Collections
Postcard showing a Navaho blanket weaver in the Painted Desert exhibit, Panama- California Exposition, San Diego, 1915. Lent by the San Diego Historical Society Research Archives
While ethnicity was addressed in anthropo- logical exhibits on the main exposition grounds at both of the 1915 fairs, California's nonwhite ethnic groups were largely ghettoized in adjacent entertainment-oriented midways, intended as counterbalances to the "serious" exhibitions of art, anthropology, and technology. For example, both the p pie's Joy Zone and the pce's Isthmus, as these midways were respectively called, featured a little Chinatown, where Chinese culture was pre- sented as exotic, illicit, and sinister. In the San Diego version, a journalist reported on "an under- ground opium den where effigies in wax depicted the horrors of addiction.""' The similarly deni- grating Underground Chinatown at the p p i e was closed after protest by San Francisco's Chinese business community — the closure marked an effort by white local business to foster economic relations with China — only to be replaced by a virtually identical concession called Underground Slumming."^ Another ppie Joy Zone attraction was a fantasy reconstruction of a Mexican village. While outfitted for modern commerce with a restaurant and theater, it was staffed by "primi- tive" Mexicans working at what was described as "characteristic handicrafts."" The term was clearly meant to distinguish the objects they were pro- ducing from contemporary "fine" art.
One of the most popular concessions at the PCE was the Painted Desert. A ten-acre exhibit, it featured pueblos re-created on the site and a group of present-day Native Americans actually engaging in the traditional practices of basket, pottery, and rug making for the viewing and buying pleasure of exposition-goers." Tellingly, it was placed opposite a display celebrat- ing California's modern technological advances in agriculture, reinforcing the contrast between the "primitive" past and the vital present."^ Although dubbed a "living exhibit," the Painted Desert proved quite the opposite, sounding a death knell on Native American culture by presenting Indians as ancient artifacts. It is hardly surprising that the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad sponsored this display, for this decision made good business sense. Such presentations of the region's non-Anglo cultures as disappearing were tremendously appealing and comforting to white visitors, effectively drawing great numbers of them to the expositions and, more generally, to California.
For this brief period early in the century, booster images of California as a premodern, Edenic paradise dominated cultural production in the state. Yet California was far from the homogeneous haven for Anglo culture that it was purported to be. Although largely suppressed during these years, views of California that diverged from the white booster image did exist and would soon gain greater visibility. Indeed, this was the last period in which a glowing con- ception of the state prevailed, or in fact when any cohesive image could be said to dominate. After this point, California would become a contested Eden.
'ews Clark Jr. founds the Philharmonic Orchestra of Los flngeles.
1 For migration statistics, see Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 2850-1930 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 78. On manufacture increase, see Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946; reprint, Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1990), 130.
2 On the migrant population in Los Angeles, as distinct from San Francisco as well as other American cities at the turn of the century, see Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 68-81.
3 Ibid., 143.
4 On the role of the railroads in promoting California and other western states, see Alfred Runte, "Promoting the Golden West; Advertising and the Railroad," California History 70 (1991): 62-65.
5 Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York: O.xford University Press, 1985), 89.
i Ibid., 76-77, 82-83.
7 Susan Landauer, "Impressionism's Indian Summer: The Culture and Consumption of California 'Plein-Air' Painting," in California Impressionists, exh. cat. (Athens, Ga.: Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, and the Irvine Museum, in association with University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996), 11-49.
8 McWilliams, Southern California, 149.
» For further discussion of this painting and other images of the San Francisco earthquake and fire, see Claire Perry, Pacific Arcadia: Images of California, 1600-191$, exh. cat. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 187-92.
10 Henry Nash Smith uses the term "virgin land" to characterize mythic conceptions of the West in the nineteenth-century popular imagination that culminated in Frederick lackson Turner's frontier hypothesis. Smith is referring to an essentially agrarian Utopia, as opposed to a land completely devoid of habi- tation. See Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage Books, 1950). East Coast Impressionists also painted nostalgic visions of the premodern natural landscape. See H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry, American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885-1915, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 67-77.
11 Quoted in Landauer, "Impressionism's Indian Summer," 21.
12 The protest letter, signed by lohn Muir et al., Nov. 1, 1907, stated, "As a lover of the Yosemite National Park, 1 most devoutly protest against the use of one of its most important and beautiful features, the
Hctch Hetchy, as a reservoir. An abundance of water can be had elsewhere to supply San Francisco." William Bad^ Papers, Hetch Hetchy folder, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. On the Hetch Hetchy controversy, see Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Rum (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 101, 102, 108-10. 13 lohn R. Freeman, On the Proposed Use of a Portion of the Hctch-Hetchy, Eleanor and Cherry Valleys (San Francisco: Rincon, 1912). u Similarly, in Southern California the arts contributed to the promotion of such tourist destinations as Mt. Lowe in the San Gabriel Mountains.
15 Landauer, "Impressionism's Indian Summer," 22.
16 Ibid., 40.
17 Willard Huntington Wright, "Hotbed of Soulful Culture, Vortex of Erotic Erudition," Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1910.
18 Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (New York: Knopf, 1957), 23.
19 Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915 (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1973), 268. On the art community at Carmel, see also Michael Orth, "Ideality to Reality: The Founding of Carmel," California Historical Society Quarterly 4S (1959): 195-210.
20 Ilene Susan Fort, "The Cosmopolitan Guy Rose," in Patricia Trenton and William H. Gerdts, California Light 1900-1950, exh. cat. (Laguna Beach: Laguna Art Museum, 1990), 111.
21 On tourism and the Hotel Del Monte, see Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West, 19-20.
22 On California's agricultural history told from the perspective of labor, see Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981).
23 A Time and Place: From the Ries Collection of California Painting, exh. cat. (Oakland: Oakland Museum Art Department, 1990), 34.
24 Reflections of California: The Athalie Richardson Irvine Clarke Memorial Exhibition, exh. cat. (Irvine: Irvine Museum, 1992), 158.
25 On Wheatland and the involvement of the iww in organizing migratory laborers through World War I, see Daniel, Bitter Harvest, 86-98.
26 See Starr, Inventing the Dream, 77.
27 Bayside Bohemia: Fin de Siecle San Francisco and Its Little Magazines (San Francisco, 1954), 20-21, quoted in Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 259.
28 McWilliams, Southern California, 22.
29 lohn Ott, "Missionary Work: Labor, Nostalgia, Philanthropy, and the California
Mission Revival, 1883-1920," paper delivered at American Studies A.ssociation conference, Seattle, Nov. 1998.
30 "To Make Better Indians" was the motto of the Sequoya League. See their second bul- letin. The Relief of Campo [c. 1905]. Archives of the Southwest Museum, Sequoya League, Bulletins folder.
31 "Pictures of Misery: California's Mission Indians, the Most Pitiable Band on the American Continent. What They Really Need," New York Herald, Mar. 21, 1897. Topical California Collection, Mission Indians Box, Huntington Library, Prints and Drawings Department, San Marino, California.
32 Harry Ellington Brook, "Olden Times in Southern California," Land of Sunshine, July 1894, 29-31.
33 Starr, Inventing the Dream, 56-57.
34 K. Scott Wong, "Cultural Defenders and Brokers: Chinese Responses to the Anti- Chinese Movement," in Claiming America: Constructing Chitiese American Identities during the Exclusion Era, ed. K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 5.
35 "The Chinese Question," Overland Monthly 5%, no. 4 (Oct. 1901): 257, 256.
36 Keith E Davis, An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, The Hallmark Photographic Collection, 2nd ed. (Kansas City, Mo.: Hallmark Cards in association with Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1995). 32-33-
37 Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1879-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 235-37.
38 Ibid., 209, 211.
39 Harry Ellington Brook, Southern California: The Land of Sunshine, An Authentic Description of Its Natural Features, Resources, and Prospects (Los Angeles: World's Fair Association and Bureau of Information, 1893).
40 Both are quoted in Phoebe S. Kropp, "'There is a little sermon in that': Construct- ing the Native Southwest at the San Diego Panama-California E.xposition of 1915," in The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway, ed. Marta Weigle and Barbara A. Babcock, exh. cat. (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1996), 43.
41 Ibid.
42 Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 229.
43 Ibid., 228.
44 For the best analysis of the Painted Desert, see Kropp, "'There is a little sermon in that,'" 36-44-
45 Ibid., ^6,44.
CONTESTED EDEN 1920-1940
Sheri Bernstein
Diego Rivera
Allegory of California (detail), 1931, mural, Stock Exchange Building (now City Club of San Francisco) (scale reconstruction m exhibition)
Throughout the first twenty years of this century, on idyllic and remark- ably cohesive picture of California dominated the popular imagination as well as cultural production. This was far from the case, however, in the subsequent decades between the two world wars, during which the coun- try experienced profound shifts of dramatic proportions. The boom of the 1920s, which historian William E. Leuchtenberg has characterized as a decade of "piping prosper- ity,"' gave way to blight in the 1930s, as the entire nation struggled through the Great Depression. Whereas California was lauded as being at the epi- center of the boom — celebrated for the first time as much for its modern sophistication as for its beauty and bounty — its glowing booster image was powerfully contested during the Depression years. At that time, critical visions of the state often put forward by and on behalf of the working class circulated widely. Yet along with these more sobering views, a fairy-tale image of Hollywood permeated the national consciousness, providing a much-needed antidote to the troubles of the day. Complicating the state's image even further was the fact that a considerable range of perspectives on California's ethnic character — including those of non-Anglos — were promulgated throughout this twenty-year span, informed by the nation's struggle to define its complex relationship to Latin America and Asia. For these reasons, as well as because of the incessant migration of an unprece- dented number and diversity of newcomers, mul- tiplicity and inconstancy aptly characterize the image of California during the 1920s and 1930s.
A salient new aspect of California's image was its urban character, which had been largely eclipsed until the 1920s by Edenic visions of the state as a premodern paradise. The proliferation of urban views of California spoke to the massive urban growth then occurring in the Bay Area and, to an even greater extent, in Southern California. The vast majority of the 1.5 million people who flooded into the Southland between 1920 and 1930 settled in urban areas, sparking a
major surge in real estate development and the creation of eight new cities in Los Angeles County alone. By 1920 Los Angeles had surpassed San Francisco as the largest city in California; and by the end of that decade, in the wake of the oil boom, it had emerged as the fourth-largest urban center in America. Not surprisingly, Los Angeles had begun to develop the problems of a modern city. With two automobiles for every three people in Los Angeles by 1929, traffic became a constant, defining feature. San Francisco, too, although it had fewer people and cars than Los Angeles, was a sizable metropolis of 630,000 residents by 1930, with a thriving corporate and commercial sector and an identity as the West Coast hub for maritime trade.
With big business striving to attract and provide for increasing numbers of tourists and new residents, boosterism in California reached an all-time high during the 1920s. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and its institutional counterparts in other CaUfornia cities expanded their ongoing efforts, and new organizations sprang up, such as the All-Year Club of Southern California, which was founded in 1921 by Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler to promote summer tourism in the region. In addition, the Automobile Club of Southern California significantly expanded its publication Touring Topics (renamed Westways in 1934) under the editorship of Phil Townsend Hanna. Far more than a travel magazine, Touring Topics became a central cultural voice in the area, employing numerous artists and writers, fi-om the conventional to the modernist. This publica- tion's existence, like that of Land of Sunshine during the previous two decades, attests to the faithful marriage of boosterism and the arts that existed in Southern California, a marriage then flourishing to varying degrees in different regions nationwide.
19 2 8 > Alien land Law is passed by a 3-to-l majority, prohibiting Japanese ownership of or investment in California land. This is designed to block the loopholes in a si
passed in 1913 > S<
|
Miki HayakowQ |
Millard Sheets |
Barse Miller |
Charles Payzant |
Frederic Penney |
|
|
Telegraph Hill, n.d., oil on |
Angel's Flight, 1931, oil on |
Apparition over |
Los Angeles, |
l^ilshire Boulevard. cA<)lO, |
Madonna of Chavez Ravine, |
|
convQS |
canvas |
1932, oil on can |
vos |
watercolor on paper |
c. 1932, watercolor on pope |
Particularly by the late 1920s, a considerable number of artists began to celebrate California's urban landscape. Some stressed the picturesque quality of the state's burgeoning cities, which necessitated altering the less scenic realities of urban life. Miki Hayakawa, for example, chose to efface any trace of the bustling, bohemian community of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, producing a distinctly Cezannesque rendering of buildings peacefully nestled on the hillside. A similarly picturesque though more humanistic perspective was offered by American Scene painter Millard Sheets, who pictured the every- day life of Bunker Hill, a working-class residen- tial neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles. The title. Angel's Flight, refers to the funicular that transported residents up and down Bunker Hill's steeply graded incline, but Sheets opted not to depict this mechanical convenience. Instead he concentrated on two flights of stairs that led up the hill and falsely portrayed their ascent as cir- cuitous rather than straight so as to enhance the charm of the scene. Once a haven for the city's elite. Bunker Hill had a sizable poor immigrant population by the 1920s. Yet Sheets's painting includes only white subjects; in fact, he used his own wife as a model for the two main figures. Many other white artists also shied away from
lol of the Arts Is founded > Hollywood Art Association Is founded. > Ttie oil boom of ttie 1920s begins with the Standard Oil strike at Huntington Beach, followed by the Shell Oil strike at Signal Hill
depicting the ethnic minorities who were rele- gated to particular urban neighborhoods by restrictive real estate covenants and unregulated racist practices throughout the state. As one realtor in Whittier boasted, "Race segregation is not a serious problem with us. Our realtors do not sell [to] Mexicans and Japanese outside cer- tain sections where it is agreed by community custom they shall reside."^ Booster organizations such as the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce similarly avoided depicting nonwhite ethnic communities in their countless photographs of city life. On the rare occasions when such com- munities were represented, either in promotional literature or in a fine-art context, they appeared as if eternally frozen in a romantic and spiritual past. This is the case, for example, in Madonna of Chavez Ravine by Frederic Penney. While the artist clearly intended to honor the Mexican people of Chavez Ravine by portraying them as saints, he effectively denied their existence as contemporary, ordinary individuals. In contrast to the proponents of the picturesque urban land- scape, other artists heralded the modern aspects of California's cities. Many focused, for example, on industrial subjects or public works, including the recently erected dams that collected water from the Colorado River (Southern California's
the following year, fl third major strike Is made by George Franklin Getty at Telegraph Hill, which produces 70 million barrels a year by 1923. Prosperity due to the oil boom attracts migrants from the South
Childe Hassam
California Oil Fields, 1927, etching
California Highways and Public Marks magazine, January 1940. Lent by the Caltrans Transportation Library
Shinsaku Izumi
Tunnel of Night, c. 1931 gelatm-silver print
Peter Stackpole
The Lone Riveter gelatin-siluer pr
Official program for the San Francisco-Ookland Boy Bridge celebration, 1936, Lentbyjim Heimann
Carquinez Bridge, 1933, gelatin-silver print
EF
i^ALIFORrilA
'AYS AND PUBLIC WORKS
new major water source as of 1928) or on the bridges that numbered among the significant public-works projects of the mid-i930S. Some naturalized these subjects. Childe Hassam's oil derricks — veritable icons of the Southern California landscape in the early 1920s, most notably in Signal Hill, Huntington Beach, and Long Beach — suggest a forest of trees. Others humanized their modern scenes by adding figures. Peter Stackpole's breathtaking views of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge under construction, which appeared in Life magazine, celebrate the technological and psychological feats of erecting this structure.
Still other creative figures, predominantly photographers and designers rather than painters, employed a visual language of sleek forms and smooth textures, closely in keeping with industrialization, in addressing the California landscape. Photographer Alma Lavenson, for example, rejected the filmy aesthetic of Pictorialism in favor of the cleaner look of "straight" photography associated with
fornia's African flmerican population doubles in the early 1920s. However, restrictive covenants and segregation keep blacks out of better neighbortioods > Automobile ownership accelerates in Californr
forever changing the landscape. Roadside amenities and attractions are created, such as Knott's Berry Farm. > V/ilshire Boulevard, In Los flngeles, is partially paved. Between La Brea flvenue and Be
Maynard Dixon
Airplane, c. 1930, gouache paper
Brochure produced by the Los
Angeles Department
of Water and Power, 1928.
Lent by use. Regional History
Center, Department of Special
Collections
Edward Biberman
Sepulveda Dam, n.c
the California-based Group f/64. In their cool exactness and industrial subject matter, her works were also in sympathy with the paintings of contemporaneous East Coast-based Precisionists. Among the California designers most directly inspired by the new technology was Kem Weber; a clean, minimal aesthetic is visible in the streamlined form of his Airline Armchair of 1934-35-
Weber's enthusiasm for the airplane was shared by many. Indeed, excitement over the thriving aviation industry pervaded Southern California cuhure in the 1920s and 1930s. Boosters seized every opportunity to bill the region as the aviation capital of the world, heavily publicizing such events as Charles Lindbergh's triumphal return to Los Angeles after completing a trans- Atlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927.^ Public interest in aviation not only infiased the work of designers such as Weber but also fueled production in the visual arts, thereby providing another point of confluence between boosterism and artistic production. Touring Topics, for exam- ple, featured a painting of an airplane by Maynard Dixon on its December 1930 cover; this was the culminating work in a twelve-part series on the history of transportation that Dixon exe- cuted for the magazine. Helen Lundeberg also cel- ebrated air flight as the pinnacle of transportation history in her eight-panel mural for Centinela Park in Inglewood. Publications that promoted industry, such as Southern California Business, devoured these images, vastly preferring them to picturesque visions of urban life. Yet chamber of commerce and Ail-Year Club publications fea- tured both types of urban views — the forward looking and the nostalgic — often within a single issue or brochure, since both highlighted mar- ketable aspects of California's appeal to tourists and newcomers.
a dirt road surrounded by barley fields, oil wells, and empty acreage.
1 92
> Los Rngeles Times publ
Harry Chandler, along with businessmen and real estate boosters, founds
Helen Lundeberg
The History of Transportation in California (Panel 8), study for mural in Centinela Park, Inglewood, 1940, gouache on paper
Kern Weber
Airline Armchair, c. 1934-35, hickory, alder, maple, metal, and leather
Julius Shulman
Lovell "Health" House, 1950, gelatm-silver print
Early Modernism
Many architects and designers who emigrated from Europe to the United States were drawn to Los Angeles, where they created innovative build- ings, interiors, and furniture. They brought with them the principles of
modernism, which found beauty in the useful and strove for originality. Modernism sought to join purity of design and utility, and those influenced by it championed new technologies, mass production, and the use of geometric shapes and spare lines. The aggressive and experimental approach of trans- planted Europeans led to the synthe- sis of the California Modern style. Two important immigrants were Viennese architects Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra. Schindler designed his own residence, the radical Studio House on Kings Road,
J^ of Southern California to promote tourisr
sninq this year are the San Francisco Mi.
and the San Diego Academy of Fine Rrts
of concrete and redwood, with an open plan and sliding porch doors that dissolved boundaries between indoors and outdoors. Neutro created the Lovell "Health" House, the first U.S. structure with a steel frame. Its expanses of glass united the inte- rior with the hillside surroundings, creating an environnnent for the signature California lifestyle.
The Made in California period environment featured furniture designed by Schindler in the 1930s for the Shep Residence, a commission that was never realized. Schindler called these pieces "unit furniture." Not just knock-down or sectional, they are composed of parts that can be assembled in various combina- tions. These austere and tasteful pieces are all low, wide, and horizon- tal, echoing the low horizon of the Southern California landscape. The living room included a modular sofa, an armchair, on ottoman, an end table, and a stackoble storage chest, all of which reflect the architect's interest in economy of space and multiple use. The dining
background Rudolph Schindler
Milton Shep Residence [Project], Los Angeles, Perspective Elevation, 1934-35, colored pencil on paper
Porter Blanchard Rudolph Schindler
Coffee Set and Tray, 1930-50, Armchair and Ottoman,
pewter and hardwood 1936-38, gumwood and
upholstery
Mario Kipp
Textile Length for Drapery, c. 1938, mohair, Lurex, and chenille
area showcased an expandable table with alternating chairs and stools. Schindler created an aesthetically integrated modernist interior by using 0 versatile suite of movable components — the furniture — and by carefully selecting the appropriate backdrops in the draperies and carpets. In this way he was able to unite all elements into an elegant, clean-lined, and efficient interior space expressive of the new modern style in California, jo lauria
The garden will become an integral part of the house. The distinction between indoors and outdoors will disappear, rudolph schindler
•rcolor Society founded In Los fingeles, > Sabato (Simon) Rodia begins work on the Watts Towers in Los ftnqeles > 192 2 > Throughout the 1910s and 1320s, specially decorated trains and colorful
Glen Lukens
Gray Bowl, c. 1940, earthenware
Rudolph Schlndter
Bedroom Dresser with Hinged Half-Round Mirror, 1936-38, gumwood and mirror
crate, labels market California oranges nationwide. Chambers of commerce, the flII-Year Club, and other organizations Join the advertising campaigns. > 19 2 3 > Under California's Crimina
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Fletcher Martin |
Herman Volz |
Lee Everett Blair |
Behind the Materfront, |
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Trouble in Frisco, c |
.1935, |
San Francisco Materfront |
Dissenting Factions, 1940, |
designed and illustrated by |
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lithograph |
Strike, 1934, lithograph |
watercolor on paper |
Giocomo Patn, c. 1940. Lent by San Francisco State University, Labor Archives and Research Center |
author Upton Sinclair Is arrested for reading tfie U.S. Constitution In public during an Industrial Workers of ttie World strike in San Pedro. > Painters' and Sculptors' Club of Los fingeles is founded > More
Bernard Zakheim
Library, 1934, mural, Coit Tower, Pioneer Par San Francisco (scale reconstruction i exhibition)
Not all of the urban images generated by artists during this period, however, supported boosterism. While criticisms of California had been issued earlier in the century, mainly by radi- cal voices such as the Industrial Workers of the World, in the 1930s they began to permeate the visual arts. This coincided, of course, with the onset of the Depression and the growing visibil- ity of the political Left. The latter was plainly evi- denced by the capture of the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1934 by writer and left-wing populist Upton Sinclair, who authored the End Poverty in California (epic) program. As never before in the state, radical artists became a strong and vocal presence. This mir- rored a trend in the country at large, which had been prefigured by a strong tradition of political activism among New York artists and intellectu- als since the turn of the century. Within California, radicalism could be felt most force- fully in San Francisco. There, creative figures on the far Left — including many Jewish and other European immigrants — formed an alliance known as the Artists' and Writers' Union, loosely affiliated with the then ethnically diverse and aes- thetically open-minded local branch of the Communist Party." Predictably, the works of these and other leftists in California were princi- pally concerned with the state's organized labor: its inherent dignity and its exploitation.
One much-treated subject by radical artists — most notoriously by Anton Refregier in his controversial Rincon Annex murals of the 1940s — was the General Strike of 1934, in which more than 34,000 San Francisco waterfront and maritime workers walked off their jobs, virtually paralyzing the city.^ This uprising occurred under the forceful leadership of Australian-born labor activist Harry Bridges, who became a cult hero for the Left. Herman Volz was among the artists to depict the grave events of July 5, known as the
strike's Bloody Thursday, when police action resulted in the deaths of two longshoremen. Italian immigrant Giacomo Patri was another figure sympathetic to labor. He illustrated publi- cations for the waterfront union and the local branch of the Communist Party and authored the powerful White Collar: A Novel in Linocuts (1940), which documented the mobilization of workers in support of the labor movement. A contemporaneous instance in which radicalism came to the fore was the mural project for San Francisco's Coit Tower, a structure built from 1932 to 1933 to eulogize prominent Bay Area benefactor Lillie Hitchcock Coit. Conservative responses to several of the twenty-seven murals produced for the tower's interior — all of which related to the theme "Aspects of California Life, 1934" — were exacerbated by the events of the 1934 waterfront strike. Federally funded through the short-lived Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), which preceded the Work Projects
Administration (wpa), the Coit Tower murals were masterminded by one of San Francisco's old-guard patrons, Herbert Fleishhacker. Fleishhacker appears to have conceived of the murals as a means of curbing budding militant radicalism in the area by appeasing leftist artists such as Bernard Zakheim and Victor Arnautoff, whom he named the project's idea man and its supervisor, respectively.'
Yet under the leadership of Zakheim and Arnautoff, who had both worked with Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and were members of the Artists' and Writers' Union, the project in fact yielded a handful of highly charged murals on labor-related subjects. Several of these inspired accusations in the mainstream press of Communist propagandizing. Zakheim's depic- tion of a library scene, for example, was deemed "red propaganda" in the San Francisco Chronicle, because it included such details as a newspaper headline that obliquely referenced Harry Bridges
than 20,000 actors and actresses are working in Hollywood, their weekly Incomes totaling over a million dollars. > 19 24 > Increased use of cars spawns new publications like the fiutomobile C
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'T^H(P^*S^^^^^^^P |
hern California's Touring Topics, which advertises such California sites as Death Valley and Yosemite. > The National Origins Act is passed, limiting the number of Immigrants admitted annually to
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Booklet produced by the |
John Gutmann |
John Langley Howard |
Otto Hogel |
Dorothea Lange |
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Southern California |
The Cry, 1939, gelatin- |
The Unemployed, 1937, oil on |
Untitled [Maritime Workers |
A Sign of the Times- |
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Proletarian Culture League, |
silver print |
cardboard |
Looking for Work], c. 1935, |
Depression— Mended |
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cover by yotokuMiyagi, 1931. |
gelatm-silver print |
Stockings— Stenographer, |
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San Francisco, c.mA, |
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as well as an image of artist John Langley Howard reaching for a copy of Karl Marx's Das KapitaU Eventually, the pwap elected to white- wash part of one mural by Clifford Wight that contained a hammer and sickle. In addition, Coit Tower was closed to the public for several months after the waterfront strike in an effort to avoid further galvanizing leftists within the city. Less militant and more sentimental than the subject of a united working class was that of urban poverty and unemployment, which garnered the interest of New Deal centrists and a spectrum of leftists during the Depression years. John Langley Howard, who painted one of the Coit Tower murals, was the brother-in-law of a waterfront worker who participated in the strike. Howard bemoaned the plight of California's unemployed by means of a critical realist style popular among artists of the far Left. Some images of poverty and joblessness in California circulated more widely in mainstream magazines
such as Life, as well as in leftist publications such as Survey Graphic. Photographs by Dorothea Lange and Otto Hagel, for example, humanized their subjects for broad audiences. Those who took a more elliptical approach included German Jewish emigre John Gutmann, whose photo- graphs of San Francisco's urban poor, such as The Cry, were informed by Surrealism and offered the more distanced perspective of a European observer.
While urban views of California prolifer- ated during these years, the natural landscape remained an enduring motif. Its identity became increasingly contested, however, as images of cultivated landscapes came to rival those of untouched terrain, which had dominated cultural production before 1920. Evidence of human labor — either the actual presence of workers or their implied presence in the form of farmhouses and tilled fields — especially characterized the cul- tivated landscape. The preponderance of signifiers of labor in images of California from the 1920s and 1930s attests to the increased attention given to workers in American society during these years.
The disparate approaches to California's agrarian landscape taken by artists of the period speak directly to competing perspectives on the then highly charged subject of agricultural labor. As Carey McWilliams powerfully recounts in Factories in the Field (1939), by the 1920s California's agricultural economy had become heavily indus- trialized and consolidated. It was no longer controlled by individual farmers and ranchers but by "absentee landlords" — large and imper- sonal corporations or wealthy businessmen — who hired itinerant laborers to work for meager wages and under substandard conditions.'
This shift in California away from the Jeffersonian ideal of small-scale farming toward an agribusiness economy elicited feelings of nos- talgia among the very people who had benefited
2 percent of the foreign-born individuals of each nationality living in the United States In 1890. The act favors immigration from northwestern Europe, The annual quota for Japan is 40 people. > Los fin
Edward Weston
Tomato Field, 1937, gelatin-silver print
Millard Sheets
California, c. 1935, canvas
Phil Paradise
Ranch near San Luis Obispo, Evening Light, c. 1935,
Selden Conner Gile
The Soil, 1927, oil on
from the transition. The heads of agribusiness — many of whom were patrons of important cultural institutions, such as San Francisco's Bohemian Club and the California School of Fine Arts — gravitated toward picturesque images of the agrarian landscape that naturalized or effaced the presence of big business.' San Francisco artist Rinaldo Cuneo's highly decorative painted screen, California Landscape, offers a bountiful expanse of neatly ordered lettuce rows set against the Northern California hills. It echoes the visual language used in such agribusiness booster publications as The Land of Oranges (1930), a children's book published by the California Fruit Growers Exchange. Cuneo himself romanticized and aestheticized agricultural production, com- paring the process of cultivating the landscape to that of composing a painting.'" Other pictur- esque agrarian visions include scenes of small farms or ranches executed in a range of styles — from the modernism of Selden Conner Gile, whose palette was inspired by the French Fauve painters, to the down-home regionalism of Phil Paradise. Many of these booster images of California are devoid of laborers or, in fact, of any sign of utilitarian purpose. Yet the farms and ranches pictured appear thriving and well
Rinaldo Cuneo
California Landscape, 1928, oil on canvas set in three-part screen
The Land of Oranges, a coloring book for children produced by the California Fruit Growers Exchange, 1930. Lent by the McClelland Collection
Ises San Francisco's In total annual tonnage, making it the biggest port on the Pacific coast > Pasadena firt Institute opens. > California Palace of the Legion of Honor opens as a museum of fine art In
THE LAND OF
NGES
San Francisco, > 19 2 5 > flimee Sempie McPherson, radio evangelist and founder of tlie International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, based in Los flngeles, is reprimanded by Secretary of Cornrn
maintained, invoking the fantasy of land that works itself with remarkably little effort.
Yet a great number of laborers were, in fact, working the land in California, with heavy concentrations of activity in the Sacramento, Santa Clara, San Joaquin, and Imperial valleys. In the 1920s the labor force was dominated by Mexican and Filipino immigrants, the former comprising more than 30 percent of California's total agricultural workforce by the early 1930s, and the latter representing 90 percent of the labor pool in Northern California by 1938." In the Imperial Valley alone, there were 20,000 Mexican laborers by the late 1920s. Extremely poor conditions gave rise to union organizing, particularly among Mexican workers, and a number of uprisings occurred, including the San Joaquin Valley cotton strike of 1933 and the Imperial Valley lettuce strike of 1934. Mexican unionizing and strikes met with "vigilante terrorism . . . repressive activities of large growers . . . use of arrest, intimidation, etc.," as John Steinbeck noted in Their Blood Is Strong, a collec- tion of reports from the field originally published in the San Francisco News. He added, "As with the Chinese and Japanese, [the Mexicans] have
committed the one crime that will not be per- mitted by the large growers. They have attempted to organize for their own protection."'^
Steinbeck's sympathetic perspective was one of myriad views voiced at that time on immi- grant agricultural labor in California. Closely aligned with him was Dorothea Lange, whose