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, 1920s
"Nowhere else in the country were the traditional ideas of urban environment and social structure so inoperative from about 1920. It was as if the city were being reinvented to suit the needs and desires of a new, adolescent society. The result was a world distinguished, and to a remarkable degree formed, by a new set of community values: speed, mobility, constant change and individual choice. In a sense Los Angeles was the first and remains the archetypal twentieth-century city, with the attendant problems and opportunities associated with growth, experimentation, and license.
" . . . In a community that has-more than any other-created itself, the possibility and example for invention and experimentation with a minimum of risk is greatest. The distinction between fine art and popular entertainment/ commercial art is probably more blurred in and around Hollywood during these years than anywhere else in the world and, for that mattter, at any time in history. Los Angeles provided the perfect environment for the emergence of what have now been identified as post-modernist ideas and attitudes. It is entirely possible that, at least in terms of an absence of "requirements" for producing art, Southern California offered an unprecedented freedom to creative individuals . . ."
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Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973), 1990, 1920s, 1918, 1916, 1913, 1912, 1910, 1907, 1904, 1900, 1890
"In the mid-twenties, Macdonald Wright codified his theories of color, prompted by his role as a teacher and director of the Los Angeles Art Students League. In his instructive Treatise on Color, published in 1924, he subjected chroma to in-depth analysis, discussing it as pigment and light, physical substance and emotional force. He warned, however, that his findings only had meaning insofar as they yielded aesthetic harmony . . .
" . . . Macdonald-Wright's Synchromies stand as ideal paradigms that interpret the region as undefiled Eden. Their dreamy vistas of mountains and valleys, nestled in clouds of tropical color, convey a sense of tranquil well-being, of poised serenity.
"In 1927 Macdonald-Wright organized a joint exhibition with Morgan Russell at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where he showed again five years later . . . "