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
Barry M. Heisler Introduction
". . .
"Turning the Tide surveys twenty artists, who between the years of 1920 (the year that Stanton Macdonald-Wright organized Exhibition of Paintings of American Modernists at Exposition Park in Los Angeles) and 1956 (the year preceding the opening of the Ferus Gallery, whose artists, among them Edward Kienholz, Joe Goode, Ed Rusha, and Billy Al Bengston, gained Los Angeles its first international reputation) actively created modernist art in a climate of frighteningly conservative aesthetic taste . . ."
Paul J. Karlstrom Modernism in Southern California, 1920 -1956, Reflections on the Art and the Times
". . .
". . . A distinct ambivalence is reflected in most of the writing about the area - whether Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon (unfinished, 1939), Nathanael West's Day of the Locust (1939), Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One (1948), Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939), or the Los Angeles novels of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and John Fante. Running through the predominately negative literary view is a sense of the region's impermanence and artificiality. As much as the sunshine, palm trees, and orange groves . . .
". . .
"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 matter, 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 . . .
". . . In 1929, Annita Delano, a founding member of the UCLA art faculty, wrote to her friend Sonia Delaunay in Paris concerning the situation in Los Angeles:
""He [Stanton Macdonald-Wright] said to tell you he was hiding away in a cave in Santa Monica by the sea. I will tell you he's painting some splendid things . . . he is still interested profoundly in oriental art . . . In architecture here in Los Angeles there are a few leaders. Quite a number of buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright and some by his son. There are two men, R.M. Schindler and Richard Neutra who represent tendencies similar to Corbusier & Gropius . . . ""
""Then suddenly the car plunged into a tunnel and emerged into another world, a vast untidy, sub-urban world of filling stations and bill-boards, of low houses in gardens, of vacant lots and waste paper . . . Mile after mile they went . . . To right and left, between palms or pepper trees, or acacias, the streets of enormous residential quarters receded to the vanishing point.
CLASSY EATS.
MILE HIGH CONES.
JESUS SAVES.
HAMBURGERS.
"Five or six more turns brought the car to the top of the hill. Below and behind lay the plain, with the city like a map extending indefinitely into a pink haze . . . Before and to either hand were mountains - ridge after ridge as far as the eye could reach, a desiccated Scotland, empty under the blue desert sky."
- Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Harper and Row, 1939.
". . .
"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 heterogeneous 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 distinctive aesthetic and social point of view, distinguish Southern California's most interesting art. This has certainly been the case since 1960, and in the work of some of the best earlier artists - among them those in this exhibition - it seems to be equally true. Frank Gehry, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Larry Bell, Ed Ruscha-none of these well-known artists developed in a creative vacuum. Certainly, in retrospect, it seems no accident that it was at the Otis Art Institute where, from 1954 to 1958, Peter Voulkos's abstract expressionist ceramics destroyed one barrier between art and craft . . .
"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 eclecticism, 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 . . . p. 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. This is best seen by the 1960s in the work of Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, and David Hockney. And, in a far subtler way, it is evident in the light pieces and environments of Robert Irwin, DeWain Valentine, or James Turrell." p. 24
". . .
"The second unusual feature paradoxically stands in dramatic contrast to this general cultural environment: the presence of the spectacular group of European artists and intellectuals fleeing Hitler and the Nazi occupation, along with the group of both European and East Coast Americans who were in Hollywood to sell their various literary, dramatic, and musical skills. . . .
" . . . Many of the artists and literati who settled in Southern California during the 1940s actually liked their adopted home and pursued productive careers there, and the interaction of the traditions they represented and the lively world of mass culture in which they found themselves ultimately created an idiomatic Los Angeles art.
" . . .
"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 arts 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. 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 émigrés 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. In 1934, Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, and Knud Merrild founded Post-Surrealism as a home-grown Southern California . . . art movement . . . In a similar manner, the romantic Surrealism of Rico Lebrun and Eugene Berman (another set designer), provided another challenge for the indigenous Eucalyptus School." p. 28
[And whatever happened to Expressionism, Figural or German?
". . . the chief players seemed to have been Macdonald-Wright, Lorser Feitelson, Rico Lebrun, Man Ray, Knud Merrild, Hans Burkhardt, Oskar Fischinger, and by the very end of the forties, John McLaughlin. Also, in retrospect the work of Peter Krasnow, Helen Lundeberg, and Agnes Pelton . . .
". . . As early as the 1920s (and concurrent with the first appearance of the modernists), there arose a group of conservative landscape painters whose work, especially in watercolor, showed characteristics that came to be associated with the California School . . . Millard Sheets . . . [without traditions and styles, there was only Southern California to inspire . . .]
". . . Macdonald-Wright and Feitelson should share credit as the pioneering figures in California art . . . Macdonald-Wright's notion of color harmony, developed with Morgan Russell in Paris about 1913, actually had much in common with Symbolist correspondences between the arts (music and painting), not to mention the contemporary work of the Orphists and Futurists . . . after retuning to Los Angeles in 1919, Macdonald-Wright experimented with color wheels and a color machine, collaborating with ceramicist and movie special effects pioneer Albert King . . . " p. 29
Gail Levin Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 1910-1925 George Braziller: NY, 1978
". . . Susan Ehrlich finds . . . in the strong black and white contrasts, eccentric perspectives, off-balance shapes and figure ground reversals-an instability that recalls film noir . . . . A similar echo of film noir may be encountered in the work of June Wayne and others, such as Jules Engel, working in and around the film industry . . .
"Rico Lebrun was a major figure in Los Angeles art who, through his own teaching at the Jepson School and through his students Howard Warshaw and William Brice, set the tone for the late 1940s and 1950s. This "tone" was highly moral and subjective, involving a strong narrative quality in which drawing and other academic devices are enlisted in the service of humanism . . . he produced at least one important work with cinema in mind (as did Huxley, Brecht, Schoenberg, Man Ray . . .) . . ." p. 30
". . . Danish emigrant Knud Merrild . . . [ as a house painter, his] abstractions incorporated both the colors and material of commercial paint . . . Merrild deserves recognition for anticipating Jackson Pollock with his "flux" paintings of the late 1930s and 1940s. Equally interesting . . . was Merrild's assemblage activity in which he selected and combined various materials to create three-dimensional constructions . . .
". . . Man Ray, an internationalist and American founder of Dada who spent the forties in Hollywood as a refugee from occupied Paris . . . he contributed Ruth, Roses and Revolvers, a script for a segment of the 1946 film Dreams That Money Can't Buy . . ." p. 33
[Other participants in the project were Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Ferdinand Leger, Alexander Calder, John Cage, and Darius Milhaud.]
"Among those who attended Man Ray's exhibit at the Copley Gallery in 1948 were: Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, George Antheil, Igor Stravinsky, Leopold Stokowski, Josef von Sternberg, Luis Bunuel, Jean Renoir, Otto Preminger, René Clair, Edward G. Robinson, Fanny Brice, Harpo Marx, Feitelson, Lundeberg, Merrild, Berman, Krasnow, Henry Lee McFee, George Biddle, Hans Hofmann, Isamu Noguchi, Matta, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning]
". . . John McLaughlin was . . . working by the early 1950s in a . . . reductive manner . . .
"What the younger generation of California artists-among them Tony DeLap, Ron Davis, Ed Moses, Fletcher Benton-came to admire about McLaughlin, 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 . . . " p. 33
"And yet McLaughlin preserved a letter from Stanton Macdonald-Wright, "You are most kind to send me the S.F. paper clipping of [critic Alfred] Frankenstein-I hadn't seen it but he has been nice to me for some time-I'm looking forward to meeting him sometime in San Francisco-Let me add that Mrs Wright & I are sorry you two don't live nearer this center of contagion (or is it "infection") I'm sure we have much in common."
". . . 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
". . . Oskar Fishinger . . . arrived from Germany in 1936 with a reputation for abstract film animation . . .
". . . An underlying attitude of exploration, seeking new and different means to express ideas about sound, color, shapes, and movement, is seen in a variety of artists of the 1940s-ranging from Stanton Macdonald-Wright to Fischinger and the Whitney brothers, James and John." p. 35
". . .
"James and John Whitney . . . wandered even further from tradition in creating their audio-visual music. Feeling that music was too dominant in Fischinger's non-objective films, they invented a "pendulum system" to transcribe sounds directly. This optical printing and pendulum composition was the basis for their revolutionary Five Abstract Film Exercises. When first screened in Los Angeles and New York, the films, seen as shockingly radical, were described as electronic music and neon images, "from the science fiction future."' p. 36 William Moritz You Can't Get Then From Now, The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art Journal, 29 Summer, 1981: 27-35.
[Whose son, Michael Whitney, lived in Ocean Park in the 1970s?]
Hans Burkhardt (b. 1904), 1990
"Born to an impoverished carpenter and a laundress in Basel, Switzerland on 20 December 1904, Burkhardt was abandoned by his father at the age of three, witnessed his mother die of tuberculosis three years later, and was subsequently placed in an orphanage. After completing his schooling at fifteen, he apprenticed himself to a gardener and spent the next few years in this trade.
"In 1924 Burkhardt immigrated to New York City where he worked as a furniture decorator. Wishing to further himself in this craft, he took courses in design at the Cooper Union School. Four years later, he began to train with artist Arshile Gorky in private tutorials which intermittently spanned a decade . . . By 1937, Burkhardt had grown disenchanted with life in New York and moved to Los Angeles. Supporting himself as a furniture refinisher, he painted evenings and weekends, and built a house on the side of a cliff in Laurel Canyon where he and his wife still live.
"During the 1930s, Burkhardt painted in a Cubist vein indebted to Picasso by way of Gorky. Then, at the turn of the decade, he began to create Expressionist works in which he decried the carnage in Europe . . . The amalgamation of weapon and beast recalls Picasso's Guernica horse and looks forward to Rico Lebrun's Crucifixion soldiers . . .
"While Burkhardt frequently railed against social evils, he also applauded West Coast life in a number of handsome abstractions . . . By the Sea of 1945 evokes a casual day at the beach. An azure sky, warmed by the sun, greets the cool Pacific in which Burkhardt regularly swam.
". . .
"In 1959 Burkhardt began to teach, initiating a distinguished career that included positions at California State University at Long Beach, the University of Southern California, the University of California at Los Angeles, Chouinard Art Institute, and California State University at Northridge.
". . .
"Since 1982 his work has appeared in a series of one-man shows at the Jack Rutberg Gallery in Los Angeles.
"Through his painterly, impassioned works, Burkhardt has served as a West Coast master of Abstract Expressionism. Not only did he help to forge that aesthetic during its early stages of growth, but he enriched it with his distinctive vision. He extended Action Painting into the realm of political protest where few of his peers . . . were willing to tread . . . he prefigured the Neo-Expressionist course of artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Julian Schnabel, and Markus Lupertz. On the other hand, he foreshadowed the bright geocentric expressions of Carlos Almarez, Frank Romero, Astrid Preston, and Joe Fay.
Grace Clements (1905-1968), 1990
"An ardent proponent of modernism, artist and critic Grace Clements sought to awaken Los Angeles of the 1930s and 1940s to vanguard modes of expression. Born in Oakland on June 8, 1905, Clements trained in New York from 1925 to 1930 with Kenneth Hays Miller and Boardman Robinson. In 1931, she moved to Los Angeles and shortly thereafter received a solo show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art . . .
"More socially conscious than the other Post-Surrealists, who held art apart from politics, Clements applied the movement's tenets to the contemporary scene. In the March 1936 issue of Art Front, a vehicle of the American Artists' Congress to which she belonged, she published an article entitled New Content - New Form in which she castigated "ivory tower" formalism and Surrealist automatism and argued for an art that addressed social issues in a language which the public could understand . . . Opposed to naturalism, which merely mimicked appearance, she advised artists to emulate techniques of the movies such as filmic montage.
". . .
"During the years of the Depression, Clements served as a painter and muralist on the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. With Helen Lundeberg she painted murals in Venice High School and fashioned a series of mosaics for Bancroft Junior High School in Los Angeles and the Municipal Airport of Long Beach . . ."
"She corresponded with Peter and Rose Krasnow after she had left Southern California in the late 1940s."
Jules Engel, 1990
"Born in Budapest, Hungary, raised in Illinois, moved to Los Angeles in 1937 to work as an animator for Disney. During World War II he enlisted in the Motion Picture Unit of the Air Force. Afterwards, in 1947, he formed United Productions of America (UPA), where he helped to created Gerald McBoing-Boing, Madeleine, and Mr. Magoo.
"His painting are described as abstractly noir rather than the poised cubism of Neutra, Schindler, Soriano and Ain, more deconstructive or Gehry-like.
"Since 1969, Engel has served as founding chair of the Department of Animation and Experimental Film at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia . . . "
Lorser Feitelson (1898-1978), 1990
". . . Like Krasnow and Macdonald-Wright, Feitelson learned to paint at an early age . . . After seeing the Armory Show in 1913, where the works of Cezanne, Matisse, Gleizes, and DuChamp impressed him . . . Extended stays in Paris between 1919 and 1927 . . . despite his success, Feitelson, like Merrild, Krasnow, and Macdonald-Wright, felt dissatisfied with the quality of life in Manhattan, and thus ventured to Los Angeles in November 1927."
". . .
". . . From 1937 to 1943, he brought art to the public as Southern California supervisor of the Federal Art Project's easel painting, sculpture, and mural division. . . .
". . . In 1944 he joined the faculty of the Art Center School . . . where he arranged a screening of Oskar Fischinger's films and a Stanton Macdonald-Wright retrospective . . .
". . . In November 1948 . . . one of Feitelson's Federal Art Project murals and one painted by Lundeberg [his wife] under his aegis were accused of being Communist-inspired . . .
". . . In 1951 . . . The municipal exhibition in Griffith Park for which he was the juror was attacked by right-wing factions as being Communistic . . . he . . . castigated Councilman Harold Harby who had denounced the art as "stinkweed stuff" . . .
Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967), 1990
". . . 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 condemned 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 insistence 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.]
". . . 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 . . .
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 aquatic 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 his 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. "California for color, American earth for form," exulted Krasnow 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 compromise 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.]
Stanton Macdonald-Wright [1890-1973], 1990
"Creator of a modernist style based on pure, spectral color, Stanton Macdonald-Wright served as an early American pioneer of chromatic abstraction. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia on 8 July 1890, he developed an interest in art in his childhood when, after turning five, he took private painting instruction. In 1900 he moved with his family to Santa Monica, California, where he boasted dismissal from several schools. Courting adventure, he sailed the Pacific as a deck hand, stopping for a while on Maui to savor rustic existence.
"Back in Los Angeles in 1904, Macdonald-Wright took courses at the Art Students League in downtown Los Angeles with Warren T. Hedges, a one-time colleague of Ash Can painter Robert Henri. Three years later, still itching with wanderlust and wishing to study abroad, he married and traveled with his bride to France. Settling in Paris, he took courses at the Sorbonne and sampled classes at the Academie Colorossi, the Academie Julien, and the Ecole des Beaux Arts.
"By 1910 his work had attained showcase stature and was accepted to the Salon d'Automne; two years later it gained entry into the prestigious Salon des Independents. Between the two shows, Macdonald-Wright befriended American artist Morgan Russell, with whom he developed a close working relationship. Together they investigated the serpentine rhythms of Michelangelo, the broken brushwork of the Impressionists, and the spatial plasticity of Cezanne. At the same time they responded to Matisse and Picasso, whose work they encountered at Gertrude Stein's salon. While absorbing the lessons of these masters they studied the color theories of Chevreul, Helmholtz and Rood and took classes from the Canadian colorist Percyval Tudor-Hart. The latter formulated a scheme of chromatic triads by which works could be keyed to a dominant chord. Additionally, he compared painting with music, relating, for instance, luminosity, saturation, and hue to musical pitch, volume, and tone.
"Convinced of color's preemptive importance, Russell and Macdonald-Wright developed a movement predicated on hue. Naming it Synchromism, meaning "with color," they introduced it in 1913 at Der Neue Kunstsalon in Munich and at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris.
"Like the contemporary Orphist movement with which it has been compared, Synchromism joined the fragmented forms of the Cubists with the brilliant hues of the Fauves. Importantly, however, it pushed the Fauve revolt further by liberating color from formal depiction. Freed from the burden of representation, color, in theory, could work independently as the prime agent of formal expression.
"To justify an art of pure color divorced from depiction, Russell and Macdonald-Wright invoked the example of music. Like Tudor-Hart, the Orphists, and Vasily Kandinsky, they allied the two arts metaphorically, pointing to their shared expressive and formal traits. In the catalogue for their 1913 Munich show, they argued that painting equaled music in its sublimity: "Mankind has until now always tried to satisfy its need for the highest spiritual exaltation only in music. Only tones have been able to grip us and transport us to the highest realms. Whenever man had a desire for heavenly intoxication, he turned to music. Yet color is just as capable as music of providing us with the highest ecstasies and delights."
[Note the similarities to Charles Seeger's analogies between language and music.]
"These high ambitions inspired the artists to exhibit their works in London, Milan, and Warsaw in 1913 and in New York the following year. With the onset of the First World War, Macdonald-Wright fled to London where he roomed with his brother Willard Huntington Wright, an editor for Smart Set magazine, whom he assisted in writing books on art. In 1916 he sailed to New York where he mingled in vanguard circles and participated in The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters. Subsequent shows at progressive New York galleries, including Alfred Stieglitz's 291, served to secure his East Coast reputation.
"The artist, however, despite his success, felt uneasy with life in Manhattan. Thus, he left New York in 1918 and returned to Southern California. Inspired by the mountains and valleys surrounding his home, he trained his pictorial gaze on the verdant outdoors. In the process, he lightened his palette with streaks of white that invoked Santa Monica's damp coastal air.
"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 a negative voids, but as resonant regions of light in accord with their Eastern models.
"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 . . .
"[By the early thirties] . . . he had grown disenchanted with Synchromism, which he felt had become too scholastic. Turning to the Orient for inspiration he delved into Asian calligraphy and studied the tenets of Tao and Zen. His infatuation with the Far East reveals itself in a series of murals that he conceived for the Santa Monica Library (1933-1935) as well as his private easel paintings which, more often than not, revolved around Buddhist myth.
"From 1935 to 1942 Macdonald-Wright served as director of the Southern California division of the Federal Art Project under the Works Progress Administration. While performing his bureaucratic duties, he developed architectural murals in Southgate, Santa Monica, and Long Beach and perfected a mosaic compound that he termed Petrachrome. When the Art Project disbanded in 1942, he joined the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles where he taught classes in Eastern aesthetics and art history for the next twelve years [1954].
". . .
Knud Merrild [1894-1954], 1990
". . . 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 less 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 allegiance 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
Lee Mullican (b. 1919), 1990
"Born in Chickasha, Oklahoma on 2 December 1919, Mullican developed an interest in art in his teens which he nurtured with coursework at universities in Texas and Oklahoma. Subsequently, he trained for a year at the Kansas City Art Institute and earned his diploma in 1942. Later that year he entered the Army Corps of Engineers. Serving as a topographic draftsman in the California desert, the South Pacific, and Japan, he constructed maps and photomosaics from aerial photographs . . .
". . . Mullican . . . settled in Los Angeles [in 1952].
". . . In 1954 he joined Rachel Rosenthal's Instant Theater . . .
". . .
"A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960 enabled the artist to stay in Rome (where he established a friendship with Rico Lebrun) . . . By 1961, he was back in Los Angeles, conducting summer school classes at the University of Southern California, enjoying a retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, and joining the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles where he currently teaches.
". . . In 1980 Mullican was awarded a thirty-year retrospective at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery in Barnsdall Park, and eight year later enjoyed a two-man show with his son Matt . . . at the University of New Mexico. At the close of the 1980s, he was honored with a retrospective at the Heritage Museum in Santa Monica . . ." p. 146
Henrietta Shore [1880-1963], 1990
"Shore . . . realizes a fusion of her own ego with a deep universality . . . When she paints a flower she IS that flower, when she draws a rock she IS that rock." [Edward Weston, 1933]
"The youngest of seven children, Shore was born in Toronto, Canada on 22 January 1880. In her early teens she decided to become an artist when in a prophetic moment she perceived herself and nature to be intimately wed: "I was on my way home from school and saw myself reflected in a puddle. It was the first time I had seen my image completely surrounded by nature, and I suddenly had an overwhelming sense of belonging to it-of actually being part of every tree and flower. I was filled with a desire to tell what I felt through painting."
"After this revelation, Shore embarked upon a concerted study of painting, training first with Toronto artist Laura Muntz and then with William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri in New York City. Henri's vitalist views, which regarded art as a spiritual force . . .
"In 1913, beguiled by travels along the Pacific Coast, Shore immigrated to Los Angeles. By the following year she had established herself within the art community and was earning commendations from Los Angeles Times critic Anthony Anderson. This recognition, buttressed by silver medals in 1914 and 1915 at the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego, encouraged her to join with her friend Helena Dunlap and a few other artists in founding the Los Angeles Modern Art Society in 1916 . . .
". . . [She returned to New York in 1920 where she remained for three years] . . .
". . . "To be true to nature one must abstract. Nature does not waste her forms. If you would know the clouds-then study the rocks. Flowers, shells, rocks, trees, mountains, hills-all have the same forms within themselves used with endless variety."
"In her aim to express universals in nature, Shore reveals her Symbolist roots. As such she shows an accord with Symbolist heirs Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky as well as with the American modernists Arthur Dove and Georgia O'Keeffe. Like Dove and O'Keeffe, Shore felt an intuitive bond with nature, whose vitalism she aimed to evoke in synoptic pictorial form. . . .
"It also relates to the ethos of Agnes Pelton and Edward Weston who harbored similar aspirations . . . Allies in spirit, Shore and Weston shared a purist aesthetic that sought to portray quintessentials in nature . . .
". . .
"Back in Southern California in 1923, Shore operated a diner, the Studio Inn, where she displayed her works . . . In 1927, she was awarded one-woman shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and at the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego. The next year brought solo exhibitions at the Brick Row Gallery and Jake Zeitlin's Bookstore in Los Angeles . . . By [1931], Shore, following Weston's example, had moved from Los Angeles to the Northern California coast town of Carmel.
" . . . Work in the mid-1930s on murals in Santa Cruz and Monterey for the Treasury Relief Arts Project . . . ."
Howard Warshaw [1920-1977], 1990
". . .
". . . 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-winning 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 Warshaw 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
June Wayne [b. 1918-2011], 1990
"Raised in Chicago by her single, working mother and her grandmother, Wayne displayed as a child precocious talents in art and a passionate love of learning. With characteristic self-reliance, she taught herself to paint and in 1935 made her artistic debut at Chicago's Boulevard Gallery. Two years later, at nineteen, she was managing Marshall Field's art galleries and by 1938 was working as an easel painter on the Federal Art Project.
"In 1939 Wayne moved to New York City, lured by a post in the fashion industry as a jewelry designer. After the outbreak of World War II, she travelled to Southern California where she studied technical drawing at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. This training, which led to a certificate in production illustration, sparked her interest in optics which she explored in her paintings and prints of the postwar years.
"After her California sojourn Wayne worked as a writer for a radio station in Chicago and then returned to Los Angeles in 1946. She soon became a prominent figure within the art community. Gravitating toward the circle of artists, writers and designers around Arts and Architecture magazine she counted among her friends Charles and Ray Eames, John Entenza, Rico Lebrun, Jules Engel, Peter Krasnow, Lorser Feitelson, and Jules Langsner.
"In 1947 Wayne delved into the field of lithography, a medium which she would rapidly earn international fame. Collaborating with printmaker Lynton Kistler, she produced a distinguished body of work . . .
". . . figures . . . mix references to brain cells and optical fibers with a trumpet, a fortress, a mole, and a scale of justice [all] inspired by Franz Kafka's books. Strung next to one another, they form a serpentine chain of allusions. In obliging the eye to follow their sinuous trail, they challenge the mind to decipher the meaning of their arcane codes.
". . .
"The Dark One [1950] . . . alludes to the "human predicament" via its titular figure which personifies the atom bomb. Incarnating the new technology. the Dark One stands half human being, half steely machine . . .
"The sixties opened with Wayne winning a Ford Foundation grant and becoming the founding director of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. Legendary in its own time, Tamarind garnered world renown for its superb craftsmanship . . .
"In 1970 Wayne formed the Tamarind Institute at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque . . . designed tapestries, wrote and hosted a television show (1972), and produced the . . . film Four Stones for Kanemitsu, which was nominated for an Academy Award . . .
". . . Wayne has played a prominent role in the art community. Beginning in 1951, when she appeared at City Hall to oppose the Red-baiting of artists shown in the All-City Municipal Festival in Griffith Park, she has actively championed artist's rights."