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, 1950
Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967), 1990, 1950
" . . . The child of a merchant, Fischinger was born on 22 June 1900 in the village of Genhausen, Germany. Upon his completion of school at the age of fourteen, he apprenticed himself to an organ maker for a year and then worked as a draftsman for an architect. Relocating to Frankfurt in 1916, he supported himself as a tool designer while studying at night for an engineer's license, which he earned in 1922. Later that year he opened a film production shop in Munich in which he explored filmic techniques . . . he experimented with different media, including paper cutouts, tinted fluids and multi-colored wax.
"By 1928 Fischinger had settled in Berlin and was devising special effects for Fritz Lang at the U.F.A. Studios . . .
"The year was 1936 . . . Fischinger fled to Hollywood . . . abstract films condemed as depraved by the Nazis.
" . . . Fischinger traveled to New York in 1938 . . . won the support of Baroness Hilla von Rebay, curator of Solomon R. Guggenheim's collection . . .
"At the insistance of Hilla von Rebay, Fischinger briefly joined the Anthroposophic Society of Ding le Mei in the 1940s.
"Upon his return to Los Angeles in 1939, Fischinger obtained a position at the Disney Studios through Leopold Stokowski . . .
"During the late 1940s, Fischinger turned his attention to stereoptics. While reflecting the vogue for 3-D movies, his Stereo paintings stand distinctive as early ventures in Optical art . . .
"Typically diptychs, the Stereo paintings consisted of like but unidentical images that represented left and right visual data. When seen through a viewfinder, the two depictions would merge into a single figuration that advanced illusionistically toward the beholder . . .
[This wasn't far in advance of Bela Juelez's work at Bell Labs. KR]
" . . . He developed his Lumigraph, with its colored beams . . . in the 1950s . . .
"Long fascinated with the abstract play of pure colored lights, Fischinger . . . had experimented in Europe with a color-projection machine, In 1950, he brought his experiments to fruition with his remarkable Lumigraph, an apparatus resembling a piano that cast colored beams of light on a large white screen. While akin to the color organ that engineer-artist Charles Dockum of Altadena had earlier invented, Fischinger's Lumigraph was simpler and more compact, free of the complicated instrumentation that Dockum's required. Although the two artists were aware of one another's work-Hilla Rebay had at one time asked Dockum to spy on Fishinger-they seemed . . . uninterested in comparing notes.
"Among his friends . . . Leopold Stokowski and Edgar Varese, photographer and film historian Lou Jacobs, Jr., experimental filmmakers James and John Whitney, film director William Dieterle . . . At Disney Studios, Ub Iwerks, Robert McIntosh and Jules Engel . . . sculptor-designer Harry Bertoia and his wife Brigitta Valentiner (daughter of the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and with Blue Four dealer Galka Scheyer . . . U.C.L.A. librarian Kate Steinitz . . ."
Howard Warshaw (1920-1977), 1990, 1950, 1920, Foreword,
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" . . . Born in New York on 14 August 1920, Warshaw excelled in art as a youth and served as a cartoonist for his high school newspaper. At the age of fourteen, he began to take courses at the Pratt Art Institute, which he followed with studies at the Art Students League. There he trained with Homer Boss, a former pupil of Robert Henri, and with Howard Trafton, whom he credits with awakening him to what he termed "the history of graphic ideas."
" . . . [In the early 1940s]"Moving to Los Angeles where his parents had relocated, he supported himself as an animator at the Walt Disney Studio and painted in his spare time." [Selling several of his paintings to Vincent Price] . . . he returned to New York to focus . . . on his painting . . . "Back in Los Angeles at mid-decade, Warshaw obtained a job as an animator at the Warner Brothers Studio where he drew Bugs Bunny cartoons. His tenure at Warner's, however, was brief, as he had the good forturne to win again the support of Vincent Price. Not only did he live and work for a while at Price's Benedict Canyon estate, but in 1944 he enjoyed a one-man debut at the Little Gallery in Beverly Hills which Price ran with fellow actor George Macready. Located next to Del Haven's Bar on Santa Monica Boulevard . . . actors John Decker and John Barrymore, stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, and comedienne Fanny Brice, with whose son William Brice, Warshaw established a close working relationship. Also included in this social circle were Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Igor Stravinsky, and Eugene Berman, who became Warshaw's mentor in the 1940s.
" . . .
" . . . Images of abandoned buildings, animal skulls . . . expressed the war era's despondency . . . he received national coverage in 1950 issues of Time and Life magazines. . . .
"Helping Warshaw earn this acclaim was his prize-winnning gouache . . . Wrecked Automobiles. A seminal piece . . . [moves away from] the neo-romantic ethos of Berman toward the Cubo-Expressionistic style of Lebrun. Overlapped and fragmented shapes, a moody palette of somber hues peppered with sharp tonal contrasts, and a post-Cubist structure of shifting planes . . .Warshaw . . . replaces Lebrun's theological icons with modern-day subject matter . . . the industrial waste of twentieth-century mass production. From a tangled heap of detritus-inspired by a junk yard near Pomona-a phantom cab emerges, riding the pile of fenders and hoods like a metallic ghost . . .
"With its focus on the automobile the painting betokens Los Angeles living, legendary then as now for its private transportation. It belongs . . . to a series in which the artist explored the parameters of the region's vehicular culture. Related depictions of traffic signals and roadway disasters, some blurred as if seen from a passing car, were meant to invoke automotive travel and the signage on which it relies . . . [In 1950] art critic, Jules Langsner, "Strongly influenced by the semantics of Alfred Korzybski, Warshaw is interested in the visual symbols which play such an important part in our life. In this vast and sprawling city, where one lives on wheels, driving constantly during the normal day, highway markings, traffic lights, wig-wags and striped curbs are silent guardians of our survival."
"Additionally, Langsner reports, Warshaw was swayed by John Dewey, whose view of reality as an ongoing process he tried to convey in this series. While Warshaw's absorption with process seems to relate to Action Painting, it springs from different intentions. For Warshaw, process entailed a description of the external world rather than an athletic display or a cathartic release of emotion. Intellectual in his approach, he sought complete formal control and therefore rejected spontaneous handling and its courting of chance. Thus, while flux was central to his conceptions, it expressed itself not through free-wheeling gestures but by overlays and dissolves that held points in common with motion pictures . . .
"A filmic quality come to the fore . . . overlays of substance and shadow maintain cinematic analogies, as does its sequenced imagery, or what the artist termed "transactional figuration." "If one is thinking of observing the world in time, then those intervals [of space] change; they're not consistent . . . cubism . . . says, "I'm examining this by turning it over and looking at both sides of it, and the space goes with it" . . . If the vision of the observer is shifting, then everything shifts, not just some object in an otherwise static world."
". . . Warshaw portrays on canvas the shadowed projections of his subjective truths. Moreover, by holding mutable figures in a spatial grid, he invoked at once the flux of the world and his aesthetic constraints upon it. Concerned with signification . . . "There's a relationship between the fact of the painting and the references the painting makes to the experience out of which it grew that's not unlike memory . . . The memory is an overtone, a referential something that isn't here but which one must think about. And one thinks about it relative to the present moment . . . It is the present moment of the past."
"In the tethering of the past to the present, Warshaw refused to conform to the modernist mandate of novelty. Newness, as such was less crucial to him than bonding with history: "[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."
"It was thus through this chain of graphic ideas, which he learned from Trafton and found confirmed in Lebrun, that Warshow avowed and updated his ties with the past. While affirming his Cubist legacy with fragmented imagery, he linked it to current issues and themes. His cinematic treatment of form, his exposition of signification, his existential incertitude, and his recognition of modern-day life, conditioned by the automobile . . .
" . . .
" . . . Warshaw accepted a teaching position at the newly-established University of California in Santa Barbara where he settled permanently in 1956.
". . . he illustrated covers for Center Magazine, a publication of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and for Psychology Today. . . .
"During the early fifties Warshaw became involved with mural painting . . . Wyle Laboratories in El Segundo, California . . . University of California campuses at Santa Barbara, San Diego, Los Angeles and Riverside as well as the Santa Barbara Public Library . . .
""Faith, belief, religion . . . exist for me in the life of painting without conflicting with my sense of reason . . . life is an animating spirit requiring material substance as a vehicle of its expression. I believe this same spirit of human life can animate such inert things as colored earth ground in linseed oil. I believe further that such animation may achieve a state of grace."" p. 156