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, Introduction
"In his California Synchromies, Macdonald-Wright brings his early discoveries to a state of perfection. Now, as before, color determines structure and obliges other elements to submit to its control. Operating as a spatial force, it grants forms plasticity. As the artist observed: "Form to me is color . . . I conceive space itself as of a plastic significance that I express in color. Form not being simply the mass of each object seen separately, I organize my canvas as a solid block as much in depth as laterally.
"Clearly, color and form in these Synchromies function synergistically to yield an interwoven field in the mode of the late Cezanne. Luminous hues, harmonically grouped, give the impression of tiny, bright rainbows adrift in a moist atmosphere. . . .
" . . . [These paintings] sustain a light, impalpable air. Blithely, they accurately capture a sense of place-of gullies and bluffs sheathed in soft haze, of villas stacked on palisades overlooking cool bays. Gauzy white patches powder the fields to evoke Santa Monica's ambient fog. The manner in which they blanket the forms recalls the Oriental landscape painting which the artist admired. The gaps that they create on the surface thus might be read, not as negative voids, but as resonant regions of light in accord with their Eastern models." -Karlstrom and Ehrlich, 1990
Paul J. Karlstrom Modernism in Southern California, 1920-1956, Reflections on the Art and the Times
"The look, form, and character of Los Angeles and environs can be explained only in part by geography and climate, the natural features to which artists ordinarily respond and which contributes to a "sense of place." Perhaps more relevant was the mass influx of humanity that overwhelmed the existing community, still little more than a very large village. In the view of historian Carey McWilliams and other astute observers, the formation of urban Los Angeles is the direct consequence of hetergeneous transplanted populations attempting to recreate the familiar on an accommodatingly neutral and expansive landscape . . . In the words of Willard Huntington Wright, "Culture in Los Angeles is not indigenous . . ."
". . . Carey McWilliams, "Lacking deeply rooted social traditions, Los Angeles quickly adopted the motion picture elite as its arbiters of taste and style . . . Los Angeles imitated Hollywood."
". . .
"Far more than an indigenous aesthetic tradition (which, to the extent it existed at all, was a fairly conservative reflection of developments elsewhere) the psychology of the area provided the sense of place to which artists eventually responded in quite unfamiliar ways. More than anything else, including the famous California light and expansive horizontal landscape, it seems to be the psychology of change, incongruity, and impermanence that underlies what is most original in Los Angeles art of the period. These dual qualities, evidence of ideas and forms drawn from elsewhere and their free combination expressive of a distinctiive aesthetic and social point of view, distinguish Southern California's most interesting art . . . none of the [local] well-known artists developed in a creative vacuum . . .
"The cultural situation in Southern California made of Los Angeles-almost from the beginning-a post-modernist, rather than a modernist city . . . I would call attention to the eclectism, fantasy, sense of humor, colorism, and random "grazing" among historical styles . . . The L.A. "fantasy" style, highly imaginative and symbolic, is epitomized in the notorious commercial establishments fabricated in the shape of hotdogs and hats, giant doughnuts and pumpkins . . . Fantasy and the picturesque are essential parts of Hollywood film, popular culture, and the Los Angeles [ambivalent] ambience. Revivalism, playfulness, incongruity, illusion, impermanence, eccentricity, and color are basic qualities . . . pp. 22, 23
". . . 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."
"Presumably, the same would be said of the 1940s and early 1950s, which is generally viewed as a conservative period with the figurative expressionism of Rico Lebrun at one extreme and the reactionary Society of Western Artists at the other . . . p. 23
". . . in comparison to developments in Northern California, art activity in Los Angeles seemed to be fragmented, conservative, and devoid of ideological underpinnings and stylistic direction . . . Los Angeles seemed to enjoy a great deal of artistic activity, but no art-historical personality emerged from this pluralism. Furthermore, no individual or movement seemed dominant enough to impose a single personality, despite the presence of prominent artists such as Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Man Ray, Lorser Feitelson and Rico Lebrun. A number of explanations for the situation are possible, from the area's lack of a strong visual arts tradition and supporting institutions, to its urban sprawl and the absence of a true bohemian center in which ideas are generated and exchanged. But of these explanations, the most fruitful for the purpose of this discussion have to do with the positive aspects of the very factors that would seem to inhibit the emergence and growth of traditional forms of "high-art' culture: community indifference, rootlessness, flexible standards, and indistinct boundaries.
". . . in a least two ways the situation in Los Angeles may well have been unique. First, there existed a young society that put an unprecedented premium on entertainment and recreation as a way of life. Second, as the paradigm of the modern city, Los Angeles by this time had come to embody, both physically and psychologically, change, freedom, and mobility -the very ingredients essential to modernist sensibility and the rise of an art based upon popular culture. A value system developed, contributing to and fed by "the industry" built on illusion, artifice, and the interchangeability of levels of experience. Inevitably, along with a clearly associated life-style it informed the attitudes and work of a generation of local artists . . ."
"What the younger generation of California artists . . . came to admire [those] who worked by choice in semi-isolation on the coast south of Los Angeles, were his extraordinary independence and total commitment to an art developed on its own terms. Like David Hockney, Richard Diebenkorn, and a score of others who chose to work in California in part because they would be left alone . . .
". . . as Susan Larsen points out, McLaughlin's painting is "profoundly anti-classical. He creates disequilibrium and virtually subliminal visual and psychological motion out of stasis and symmetry." In this respect McLaughlin appears to move closer to a general Southern California aesthetic that acknowledges change and impermanence as conditions of existence." p. 34
". . .
"The history of graphic ideas] isn't chronological in the sense that one idea leads to another in the way it does in fields of technology, in which one thing makes another obsolete. You get a faster fighter plane, and you don't continue to make the old ones. But T.S. Eliot doesn't obviate John Donne because he's more modern, any more than Picasso makes El Greco obsolete. Quite the contrary. He confirms El Greco's presence by finding him germinal, alive again in his own work. so this history is, as I say, not chronological: it's a set of graphic ideas that can constantly be interchanged, moved in their relative positions. It's a lacework, a network." -Howard Warshaw