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, 1940s
Paul J. Karlstrom Modernism in Southern California, 1920-1956, Reflections on the Art and the Times
"The 1940s were, of course, dominated by the war; and for the duration art activity in Southern California, as was the case elsewhere decreased or was redirected. Most of the area's artists served in the armed services or some related activity. Temporarily, issues of conservation versus modernism were set aside as the arrts were enlisted in a common cause. Unable to participate directly, modernists such as Peter Krasnow, Knud Merrild, and Hans Burkhardt recorded the great conflict through changes of content and style in their work. The war affected the development of the fine arts as surely as it determined the content and mood of Hollywood movies. The painters responded to global upheaval through highly personal expression. In contrast, the filmmakers reflected direct and indirect pressure to serve national ends by forming public opinion. . . .
"Still, neither was exempt from the political forces that so dramatically shaped the creative climate of the period and infused American society with a regrettable degree of insularity, intolerance, and paranoia. . . . Hollywood was singled out as a particularly fertile area for "red-baiting." . . . postwar Southern California became a fairly heated battleground for the war on Communist-inspired art and "subversive" abstraction. The art world of Los Angeles in the 1940s and early 1950s was basically conservative, and, in alliance with anti-Communist crusaders, the dominant landscape school and academicians mounted an attack on the outnumbered and struggling modernists. . . ." pp. 26, 27
" . . . Novelist Leon Feuchtwanger's advice to Brecht that Hollywood was cheaper than New York and one could make more money there, did not apply to the likes of Mondrian, Ernst, and other artists who gravitated to New York at the same time. . . ."
Peter Krasnow (1887-1979), 1990, 1940s
". . .
"Born in 1887 in Zawill, a small Ukrainian village, Krasnow formed an attachment to craft early in life. As a child of six, he learned to grind and mix paint from his housepainter father, to whom he was apprenticed in his teens. In the wake of the Russian pogroms Krasnow fled to the United States, settling in Chicago in 1908 to study at the Art Institute. After earning his diploma in 1915 and working briefly as a children's art instructor at the Hebrew Institute of Chicago, Krasnow married social worker Rose Bloom and moved with her to New York in 1919. While his wife taught Hebrew classes, Krasnow labored at manual jobs and tried to establish himself in his profession. His efforts were rewarded in 1922 when the prestigious Whitney Studio Club mounted an exhibition in his honor. Yet despite the success of this debut, Krasnow felt dissatisfied with his work and with congested tenement life in Manhattan. Lured by gentle weather and open space, he ventured with his wife to Southern California.
"After six months of travel, the couple reached Glendale in the fall of 1922. In December of that year Krasnow participated in a four-person exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art. Two months later, in February 1923, he was invited by Stanton Macdonald Wright* to join the seminal Group of Independent Artists of Los Angeles Exhibition. This, together with his appearance in Whitney Studio Club Annuals of 1925 and 1926 and in one-man shows at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1927 . . . stamped Krasnow as a leading California modernist.
"During these years, Krasnow enjoyed an active social life, carousing with a small but energetic avant-garde. Included within his social orbit were photography critic Sadikichi Hartmann, architects Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, Kem Weber, and Gregory Ain, bookseller Jake Zeitlin, Blue Four agent and art educator Galka Scheyer, pioneer Synchromist Stanton Macdonald-Wright*, painters Lorser Feitelson, Knud Merrild, Boris Deutsh, and Henrietta Shore, film directors Lewis Milestone and Josef von Sternberg, art critics Anthony Anderson and Arthur Miller and photographer Edward Weston. From the Westons the Krasnows purchased a parcel of land on which Peter constructed a studio cottage in 1924. Headquartered in this simple shelter, he painted, sculpted, and dwelled for the next fifty-five years, intermingling his life and his art in a grand but spartan way.
" . . . in the late forties . . .
"Krasnow, however, veers from these painters[Gottlieb and Torres-Garcia] in his decorative élan and his more inventive palette, a quintessential product of Los Angeles. His juxtaposition of candied pinks and acquatic blues, henna mauves and grassy greens recalls the region's peculiar amalgam of the rustic with the plastic, the organic with the contrived. In his adroit handling of color, Krasnow rivaled Stanton Macdonald-Wright* who also devised daringly luminous spectral hues around which he built his compositions. Importantly, though, he avoided the hazy, transparent effects which characterized Macdonald-Wright*'s Synchromist work.
"If his radiant coloration approached that of Macdonald-Wright*, Krasnow's biomorphic forms real an interest in primal sources which the Synchromist shunned. . . .
"Krasnow's belief in archetypes was not exclusive to him but was shared by many artists of the 1940s, including Jackson Pollack . . .
"As for Krasnow, those strains included the special feel of Southern California, which he expressed through glowing coloration. It is here in hs unusual palette that Krasnow's achievement resides, for his hues are at once sui generis and indicative of the stunning chromatics for which the region is known. Not only are his pigments distinctive, but they seem to emanate phosphorescent light. "Californa for color, American earth for form," exulted Kransow as he explained his intent to reify the brilliant light and sturdy foundation of Los Angeles.
"At the same time that he praised his adopted city, Krasnow interacted guardedly with its art community. On the one hand he enjoyed social intercourse, and on the other he cherished his solitude, deeming privacy essential to his creative growth. Thus, during the 1940s and 1950s he limited personal ties to a small coterie that included art critics Jules Langsner and Frode Dann, novelist Irving Stone, artists June Wayne, Grace Clements, and Hilaire Hiler, sculptor Harold Gebhardt, musicians Fred and Frieda Fox and engineer-light artist Charles Dockum. Sequestering himself in his studio, he resisted subscriptions to magazines, rarely attended openings, and refused to join a gallery, believing that art was too sacrosanct to be subjected to the whims of the marketplace. Like Mark Rothko, he felt that art possessed a sanctity that demanded reverent care. Rather than compormise his values, he withdrew from commercial arena, showing his work in his studio and placing them with collectors who had earned his trust.
"With his anti-materialistic bias Krasnow would appear to have been a prescient neo-Marxist. Certainly, his assumption of control over the exhibition and distribution of his works foreshadowed the alternative space impulse of the present day. Notwithstanding his refusal to be co-opted by the system, Krasnow was too much the idealist, too little the collectivist to enlist in any creed's camp. His visionary faith in art and his dogged independence precluded his involvement with communal enterprise.
" . . .
"Krasnow's early celebration of the region's plastic glitz foreshadowed the "Finish Fetish" of the 1960s, also known as the "L.A. Look." By joining high-keyed chromas to quirky figuration, Krasnow also prophesied the spunky subjectivity of the 1980s. Moreover, his focus on ethnic content at a time when it was viewed as retrograde paved the way for artists such as Ruth Weisberg*, Carlos Almarez and Frank Romero. In a similar way, his embrace of Hollywood's tinseled charm, which most artists chose to ignore cleared a path that Billy Al Bengston, Ed Ruscha, Joe Fay, Peter Alexander, and David Hockney would later pursue."
{Note the relationship to Tom Jenkin's* work.}
Knud Merrild (1894-1954), 1990, 1940s
". . . Born on the island of Jutland off the north shore of Denmark in 1894, Merrild decided in his youth to become an artist. At the age of fourteen he apprenticed himself to a housepainter, learning the skills of his trade while he studied art on his own. In 1913 after seeing a Cubist exhibit in Copenhagen, he converted to modernism and became its proselytizer. When he found his views unwelcome at the art schools where he was studying, he formed the Anvendt Kunst society in 1917, a group dedicated to the merger of fine arts and crafts.
"In 1922 Merrild immigrated to America, believing that in this young industrious nation, modernism would take root. While in New York he established a friendship with Peter and Rose Krasnow and when they left for California later that year he followed suit. En route to the Pacific, he spent time as the guest of D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frida at their Taos, New Mexico ranch.
"Merrild arrived in Los Angeles on 11 May 1923. . . . he worked as a housepainter . . .
" . . . Between the 1920s and the 1950s his social orbit included artists Ejnar Hansen (a fellow Dane and partner in Merrild's painting business. Peter Krasnow, Lorser Feitelson, Grace Clements, and Man Ray, art critics Jules Langsner and Kenneth Ross, and collectors Ruth Maitland, Louis and Annette Kaufman, and Walter and Louise Arensberg who acquired several works by Merrild and hired him to paint their house. Merrild's fondness for literature, reinforced by his correspondence with Lawrence, led him to bookish coteries where he established ties with rare book dealer Jake Zeitlin and writers Dudley Nichols, Clifford Odets, Irving Stone, Henry Miller, and Aldous Huxley (who authored the preface in Merrild's memoirs of D. H. Lawrence.) Progressive in politics as well as in art, Merrild co-founded the Los Angeles branch of the American Artists Congress in 1936. . . . .
" . . .
"Merrild's involvement with Post-Surrealism led in the early 1940s into the realm of automatism. While exploring the subconscious, Merrild arrived at a novel, free-form technique which he termed "flux." As he described it, his flux technique consisted of pooling and dripping paint onto a wet surface and then angling the base board until the desired effects were achieved. Rejecting traditional palette knives and brushes, Merrild relied on the lesss conventional means of thrust and gravitational flow. With these tactics he brought into being what he poetically called his "automatic creation by natural law, a kinetic painting of the abstract.
"Merrild valued his method of painting by "remote control" because it signified untrammeled existence and enabled him to capitalize on intuition. In its responsiveness to chance, Merrild felt that his technique was paradigmatic of life. His courting of chance allies him with Dada as does his oath of alligiance to Nature's fortuitous ways: "Everything seems to depend on the whim or law of chance, accidental judgement by accidental authority and forced cause. And by chance and accident we live or die. To reflect this I attempt a personal intuitive expression."{early 1940s}
" . . .
" . . . Merrild foreshadowed Pollock's progression from archetypal imagery to free-form abstraction, . . . and also predicted his use of housepainter's tools and enamels.
[In the early 1950s, Merrild writes] "I am seeking art, perhaps, only to realize that it does not exist in itself. It exists only in the abstract, in different individuals' perceptions. Such perceptions must be deeply experienced and lived by, to keep it alive in its ever-changing flux, idea, belief, perception - all is flux . . ."
[And again] "We can then start afresh to be transformed in the "flux' . . . To place oneself in the realm of flux affords joy and liberation . . . In the abstract we are of all things and of all mankind."
" . . . Merrild . . . approached the unknown with enthusiasm and not . . . with existential angst.
" . . ." p. 142