Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, Barry M. Heisler Introduction Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1990, 1930s
" . . . In . . . Sunshine Muse, Peter Plagens states that "pre-war Southern California produced little important art, and the main gain was the hard-won beginning of modern art's cultural acceptance."
" . . . "
"The second unusual feature paradoxically stands in dramatic contrast to this general cultural environment: the presence of the spectacular group of European artists and intellectuals fleeing Hitler and the Nazi occupation, along with the group of both European and East Coast Americans who were in Hollywood to sell their various literary, dramatic, and musical skills . . .
" . . . Many of the artists and literati who settled in Southern California during the 1940s actually liked their adopted home and pursued productive careers there, and the interaction of the traditions they represented and the lively world of mass culture in which they found themselves ultimately created an idiomatic Los Angeles art.
" . . . "
Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973), 1990, 1930s, 1920s, 1918, 1916, 1913, 1912, 1910, 1907, 1904, 1900, 1890
"[By the early thirties] . . . he had grown disenchanted with Syncromism, which he felt had become too scholastic. Turning to the Orient for inspiration he delved into Asian calligraphy and studied the tenets of Tao and Zen. His infatuation with the Far East reveals itself in a series of murals that he conceived for the Santa Monica Library (1933-1935) as well as his private easel paintings which, more often than not, revolved around Buddhist myth.
"From 1935 to 1942 Macdonald-Wright served as director of the Southern California division of the Federal Art Project under the Works Progress Administration. While performing his bureaucratic duties, he developed architectural murals in Southgate, Santa Monica, and Long Beach and perfected a mosaic compound that he termed Petrachrome. When the Art Project disbanded in 1942, he joined the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles where he taught classes in Eastern aesthetics and art history for the next twelve years [1942-1954].
" . . ."