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, 1923
" . . . Nevertheless, a respectable and thoroughly sophisticated community of modernists developed in and around Los Angeles despite the odds. Most, in fact, were well-established by the thirties and some even earlier. For example, when Ben Berlin arrived in 1919, he could already join forces with others of similar interests. In 1923, he exhibited with Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Boris Deutsch, Nick Brigante, Morgan Russell, and Max Reno at the first Group of Independent Artists exhibition. The modernist "tradition" in painting and sculpture did not arrive with the emigrés but in fact was represented by this small group of advocates two full decades before the war . . . " p. 27
"The importance of Los Angeles as an early modern art center is frequently overlooked. In the person of Stanton Macdonald-Wright the city had one of the founders of Synchromism, introduced in Paris by Americans . . ."