1. Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1973). In his introduction McWilliams reinforces the idea of Los Angeles as "other," as different from the rest of the country. He reflects on his personal experiences from 1922 to 1951 when the region began to "make a real impact on national and world opinion" (xxi). [BACK]

2. Edmund Wilson, The Boys in the Back Room: Notes on California Novelists (San Francisco: Colt Press, 1941), 58. No wonder California writers, and artists too, felt excluded by an unsympathetic eastern critical establishment. For example, writing in 1931, Arthur Millier asked: "Where does the western [meaning California] artist come in? He certainly doesn't figure very largely in the press barrage from the East. What's the matter, is he no good? . . . Why wait for New York to o.k. our artists then? They live here, in our environment and express it as well as we let them. How about getting behind them and backing our own little Renaissance, right here?" ("American Renaissance Hailed as Paris Flops," Los Angeles Times , November 29, 1931, 16). [BACK]

3. See Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991). Kammen's most relevant observation in connection with California may be that the concept of invention applies more productively to "developing nations" than to "established ones" (693). Relative youth combined with phenomenal growth, as in California, carries with it significant social and cultural stress. Acquiring stability through the re-creation of the trappings of civilization as expeditiously as possible is a familiar remedial pattern. In such cases, there is no time to let the traditions appear "naturally." [BACK]

4. Dore Ashton, American Art since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 35. [BACK]

5. Victor Burgin, "Modernism in the Work of Art," in The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1986), 1. Our view of twentieth-century American art has largely been determined by the ascendancy of abstract expressionism and the concurrent rise of criticism as a separate intellectual discipline, the objective of which was to discover significant meaning in works of art. Greenberg's influential role in establishing the formalist model as both the objective and the measure of modernist art is also reprised in Hal Foster's essay "Re: Post," in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation , ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 189-91. [BACK]

6. Henry McBride, "Modern Art," Creative Art 6 , no. 3 (March 1930), Supplement 1; reprinted in Daniel Carton Rich, The Flow of Art: Essays and Criticisms of Henry McBride (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 262-66. For a contemporaneous view of art's liberation from "realistic and representational shackles," see Oliver M. Sayler, Revolt in the Arts (New York: Brentano's, 1930), 113-21. John Sloan, in Gist of Art (New York: American Artists Group, 1939), put it this way: "The ultra-modern movement is a medicine for the disease of imitating appearances" (44). And Sheldon Cheney, throughout A Primer of Modern Art (1924; New York: Tudor, 1939), defines modern art in terms of expressive form as opposed to representation and imitation (36). [BACK]

7. In Southern California, the inherent hostility between the conservative plein-air painters and the "progressives" (including regionalists and California watercolorists, as well as modernists) was played out in the Laguna Beach Art Association in the 1930s. By 1938, following a campaign to prevent Laguna from becoming an "artistic suburb" of Los Angeles, the modernists had been expelled and the art gallery shows had reverted to traditional landscapes and even Disney animation art. See Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, "Laguna Beach Art Association 1918-1955," in A History of the Laguna Art Museum 1918-1993 (Laguna Art Museum, 1993), 15-19. Acknowledging the political nature of the conflict, Arthur Millier wrote that "Americans should naturally rejoice to see their artists at last receiving the attention they deserve, [but] it is not necessary to be misled by the witchbaiting chorus against 'French Modernism' which is now in full blast" ("American Renaissance Hailed as Paris Flops" [as in note 2]). [BACK]

8. See Nancy Boas, The Society of Six: California Colorists (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1988). The central role of postimpressionist colorism in determining the "style" of early modernist painting in North America is convincingly asserted in Peter Motrin et al., The Advent of Modernism: Post-Impressionism and North American Art, 1900-1918 (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1986). Although the Society of Six did not come together until 1917 (and did not exhibit as a group until 1923), these artists clearly should be viewed as early modernists, despite the (typical) time lag for such developments in California. [BACK]

9. In a conversation with me, the artist Paul Carey (with whom Hagedorn shared a studio in San Francisco's "Monkey Block" building—at Montgomery and Washington Streets—in the 1920s) said Hagedorn turned down Scheyer's invitation to join the Blue Four. He described Hagedorn as among the first California artists influenced by German expressionism. Appropriately, Hagedorn is represented in the Scheyer bequest, now at the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena. [BACK]

10. The brochure for the Exhibition of Paintings of American Modernists is in the Stanton Macdonald-Wright papers, Archives of American Art. Beginning with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition there were opportunities to see modern art in California. Macdonald-Wright and Lucien Labaudt both organized important modernist exhibitions in the 1920s, drawing upon contacts on the East Coast and in France. Labaudt's correspondence with André Lhôte about the San Francisco exhibition is preserved in his papers at the Archives of American Art. [BACK]

11. Annita Delano to Sonia Delaunay, March 11, 1929, Annita Delano papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, roll 2999, frames 238-40. [BACK]

12. Delano, "Southwest Artist and Educator," interview by James V. Mink, 1971, 75 and 214-15, Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles. This information was brought to my attention by Richard Cándida Smith, formerly of the UCLA Oral History Program. [BACK]

13. Bonnie Clearwater, ed., West Coast Duchamp (Miami Beach, Fla.: Grassfield Press, 1991). Beginning with the acquisition of Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 by the San Francisco dealer Frederick C. Torrey in 1913, the authors skillfully trace Duchamp's influence on the developing West Coast art world. Through the Arensbergs, his work and ideas influenced the emerging modernist community from the 1920s to the time of his Pasadena retrospective. The most telling point for this discussion is that Duchamp "preferred to remain on the margins of the art world" (6). This attitude and position provide an analogue for the modernist activity that now appears most characteristic of California art. [BACK]

14. Danto's failure to mention the Ferus exhibition in his discussion of the chronology of Warhol's reception seems worth mentioning in this context. That Warhol's first one-person show took place in Los Angeles in 1962 is not just ignored; the "honor" is transferred to the Stable Gallery in New York, whose director, Eleanor Ward, is said to have given "him his first main show when no other dealer [emphasis mine] was willing to do that" ( Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992], 40). For Danto, it may be that an exhibition on the West Coast could not possibly be a "main show," one that figures in the meaningful "discourse" that conveys status and significance in the art world. History actually begins, then, only when the events are located in proper relation to the main stage and principal players. [BACK]

15. I interviewed Claire Falkenstein March 2 and 21, 1995, in her studio in Venice, California. The transcript of the interview is in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 7, 14, 21. Despite the community of contemporary artists that assembled in her Venice neighborhood in the early 1960s, Falkenstein claims to have few artist friends and no influences. She chose Los Angeles when she returned from Paris because of what she perceived as a freedom from the constraints of tradition unparalleled among large cities, particularly those with significant cultural growth and activity. In this respect she found (and still finds) Los Angeles more sympathetic than even San Francisco. The extent to which Falkenstein's ideas—and the development of her work—reflect her European experience and parallel the theories of Michel Tapié and the doctrine of Art Autre is examined in an important article by Michael Plante: "Sculpture's Autre , Falkenstein's Direct Metal Sculpture and the Art Autre Aesthetic," Art Journal 53, no. 4 (winter 1994): 66-72. [BACK]

16. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 24. [BACK]

1. David Hollinger, "The Knower and the Artificer," American Quarterly 39 (1987): 37. [BACK]

2. Daniel Joseph Singal, "Towards a Definition of American Modernism," American Quarterly 39 (1987): 8. [BACK]

3. In The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), Singal studies a small group of American intellectuals and writers from the South who made the transition from Victorian to modernist culture. Other historians, however, counter Singal's view of modernism as relativizing and skeptical; they find the basis of modernist philosophies in the belief that the operations of the universe are known and that this knowledge can be applied to social behavior. Brief expositions of modernism as a cultural system can be found in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, "The Name and Nature of Modernism," in Modernism, 1890-1930 , ed. Bradbury and McFarlane (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 20-49; and Bruce Robbins, "Modernism in History, Modernism in Power," in Modernism Reconsidered , ed. Robert Kiely (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 231-39. [BACK]

4. Henri Lefebvre, "Modernity and Modernism," in Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers , ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh et al. (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), 1-2. [BACK]

5. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 37, 80. [BACK]

6. The term "residual" refers to Raymond Williams's 1973 essay "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," New Left Review 82 (November-December 1973): 3-16. Williams modified Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony to explain continued cultural contests by postulating the existence of multiple worldviews in society. Residual cultures represented older ways of life that had not entirely died out but had lost legitimacy and power. Dominant and emergent cultures reflected the outlooks of those groups contending for power. [BACK]

7. Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso 1989), 38. [BACK]

8. Journal entry, May 2, 1928, Mabel Alvarez papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [BACK]

9. Arthur Millier, "Postsurrealism or Subjective Classicism: A Means to a Genuinely Contemporary Art," in Ferdinand Perret papers, Notebooks on California Artists, Lorser Feitelson file, roll 3856, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [BACK]

10. Wolfgang Paalen, "The New Image," Dyn , no. 1 (April-May 1942): 7-8. [BACK]

11. Ibid., 9. [BACK]

12. Ibid., 13, 15. [BACK]

13. Entry for December 10, 1918, Mabel Alvarez papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [BACK]

14. Diary entry March 18 [1919?], Mabel Alvarez papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [BACK]

15. Entry for June 8, 1919. [BACK]

16. In 1916 Ezra Pound proposed a distinction between perceptual and cognitive art that influenced poets and critics of the interwar period. Writing on the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound argued that artists who focus on the act of perception operate as receivers of impressions, from which they derive meaning. Such artists accept the external world as the dominant reality and see the human being as a product of circumstances. The artist who focuses on cognitive process directs "a certain fluid force against circumstance, as conceiving instead of merely reflecting and observing." External reality was a jumble of meaningless events until an intelligent mind imposed order through the creation of images. See Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970; first published 1916), 89-90. [BACK]

17. Journal entry, May 2, 1928, Mabel Alvarez papers (as in note 8). [BACK]

18. Biographical data on Sabato Rodia (also known as Simon Rodia) are based on David Johnston, "Towering Indifference," Los Angeles Times , Calendar Section, August 14, 1984; Jules Langsner, "Simon of Watts," Arts and Architecture (July 1951); Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts , exh. cat. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1962); Calvin Trillin, ''I Know I Want to Do Something," New Yorker , May 29, 1965; "The Watts Towers," pamphlet published by the Committee for Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts, ca. 1960; and Leon Whiteson, The Watts Towers of Los Angeles (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1989). [BACK]

19. Quoted in Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts , 11. [BACK]

20. Langsner, "Simon of Watts," 25. [BACK]

21. William C. Seitz, The Art of Assemblage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 6. [BACK]

22. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 72. [BACK]

23. Ibid., 77-78. [BACK]

24. See Jürgen Wissmann, "Collagen oder die Integration von Realität im Kunstwerk," in Immanente Ästhetik: Ästhetische Reflexion (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1966), 327-60, for the distinction between organic and constructed work in the development of modernism. [BACK]

25. Ernesto De Martino, Mondo popolare e magia in Lucania (Rome: Matera, 1975), 39. [BACK]

26. This summary is drawn from De Martino's Mondo popolare e magia in Lucania , particularly the first chapter, "Intorno a una storia del mondo popolare subalterno," and his La fine del mondo: Contributo all'analisi delle apocalissi culturali (Turin: Giulio Einauldi, 1977), 212-82. [BACK]

27. Ibid., 136. [BACK]

28. "Being," translated from the Italian word esserci , the word Italians use to translate the German philosophical term Dasein , often untranslated in English or translated as "Being-there)' Esserci refers to a being conscious of itself as a subject, whose most fundamental nature involves awareness that it has a relationship to Being. The quotations are from Ernesto De Martino, Il Mondo magico (Turin: Giulio Einauldi, 1948), 145. [BACK]

29. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (New York: Airmont, 1963), 209. [BACK]

30. Perry Anderson, "Modernity and Revolution," New Left Review 144 (March-April 1984): 96-113. [BACK]

31. Letter to Helen Lundeberg, December 11, 1947, Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, rolls 1103-4. [BACK]

1. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism, 1890-1930 (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 19, 27. [BACK]

2. For a discussion of the activities of the San Francisco Port of Embarkation, see Captain James W. Hamilton and First Lieutenant William J. Bolce, Jr., Gateway to Victory , (Stanford. Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1946). [BACK]

3. Editorial, San Francisco Chronicle , September 8, 1946. [BACK]

4. For more on the impact of the European émigrés in Los Angeles, see Paul J. Karlstrom "Modernism in Southern California, 1920-1956," in Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich, Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists, 1920-1956 ( Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1990), 13-42. [BACK]

5. Alfred Frankenstein, quoted in From Exposition to Exposition: Progressive and Conservative Northern California Painting, 1915-1939 , ed. Joseph Armstrong Baird, Jr. (Sacramento: Crocker Art Museum, 1981), 63. [BACK]

6. G. P. Hitchcock, "Annual Drunkenly Abstract," Montgomery Street Skylight z (November 2, 1945): 1. [BACK]

7. "The Role of the Artist in Wartime—Cultural Question Number One," Art Digest 16 (January 1, 1942): 14. [BACK]

8. Duncan Phillips, quoted in "The Role of the Artist," 14. [BACK]

9. Austin Warren, Rage for Order: Essays in Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948). Warren was referring to poetry, but his observations are equally applicable to the visual arts. [BACK]

10. Peter Krasnow, quoted in Susan Ehrlich, "Peter Krasnow (1887-1979)," in Karlstrom and Ehrlich, Turning the Tide , 74. [BACK]

11. Susan Larsen, "John McLaughlin," Art International 22 (January 1978): 8. [BACK]

12. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1975), 117-20. [BACK]

13. See Manny Farber, "Thomas Benton's War Paintings," New Republic (April 20, 1942): 542-43. [BACK]

14. See Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1989), 18o-95. [BACK]

15. Jack Rutberg, telephone interview by the author, June 8, 1992. [BACK]

16. For an insightful discussion of this image in art and literature, see Fussell, The Great War , 51-63. [BACK]

17. Cf. Eugene N. Anderson, "Essay," in Jack V. Rutberg, Hans Burkhardt: The War Paintings, a Catalogue Raisonné (Northridge: Santa Susana Press, California State University,, 1984), 30-31. [BACK]

18. Hans Burkhardt, interviewed by Colin Gardner, in Rutberg, Hans Burkhardt , 9. [BACK]

19. Jack Rutberg, telephone interview by the author, June 8, 1992; information based on Rut-berg's conversation with Burkhardt. [BACK]

20. Anderson, "Essay," 30. [BACK]

21 John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 181. [BACK]

22. Susan Klein [Landauer], "Elmer Bischoff," Issue (Fall 1985): 11. [BACK]

23. Clay Spohn, letter to Thomas Albright, April 1, 1976, unfilmed Clay Spohn papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [BACK]

24. Gerald Cullinan, "Blackout Business Proves Bright for Courvoisier," San Francisco Call-Bulletin , March 21, 1942. [BACK]

25. Titles for these Guerragraphs , whose whereabouts are for the most part unknown, include Fifth Column Listening Post, The Dictators , and Combat between Two War Machines . A checklist of the exhibition can be found in the Louise Sloss Ackerman Fine Arts Library, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Specifics about the paintings are from an article by Douglas MacAgy (see n. 26). [BACK]

26. See, for example, Douglas MacAgy, "Clay Spohn's War Machines," Circle 5 (1945): 38-43 (including Spohn's captions for the works discussed). [BACK]

27. Sidra Stich, Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), 125. [BACK]

28. In 1940 Spohn stated that "good art should intensify life. The bottom line is giving pleasure" (Oakland Museum Arts Research Bicentennial Document, November 24, 1940, Archives of California Art, Oakland Museum). [BACK]

29. Mary Fuller [McChesney], "Portrait: Clay Spohn," Art in America 51 (December 1963): 80. [BACK]

30. Rube Goldberg's Automatic Hitler Kicking Machine was among the feature attractions of his first solo exhibition in New York at John Pierpont Morgan's mansion, December 1942. [BACK]

31. Spohn began his career as an illustrator and editor for the Pelican , the humorous student magazine at the University of California at Berkeley; in the early 1920s he joined the New York Evening World as a staff cartoonist and illustrator. [BACK]

32. Clay Spohn, letter to Mary Fuller [McChesney], April 25, 1963, Clay Spohn papers, roll D-169, frame 1226, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [BACK]

33. See Michael Leonard, "The Dada and Surrealist Roots of Art in California," Art of California 5 (May 1992.): 8-12. [BACK]

34. Clay Spohn, letter to Mary Fuller McChesney, June 26, 1977, private collection. [BACK]

35. Fussell, Wartime (as in note 14), 235. [BACK]

36. John Dos Passos, "San Francisco Looks West: The City in Wartime," Harper's Magazine 188 (March 1944): 333. [BACK]

37. Rudolph S. Rauch, "Internment," Constitution 4 (Winter 1992): 35. [BACK]

38. Hamilton and Bolce, Gateway to Victory (as in note 2), 39. [BACK]

39. Indeed, there was a great demand for such diversion. The cartoon book enjoyed greater popularity than ever during the war, among civilians as well as the troops (see Fussell, Wartime , 250). The enormous popularity of Sawdust and Spangles , an exhibition Douglas MacAgy organized at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1942, further testifies to the need for wartime levity. Devoted to the theme of the circus, with sections on clowns, acrobats, "freaks," and the ring, the exhibition featured many of the Bay Area's leading modernists, including Adaline Kent, Madge Knight, Charles and Robert Howard, David Park, and of course Clay Spohn. See "Sawdust and Spangles in San Francisco," Art Digest 15 (May 1, 1942): 16. [BACK]

40. David Beasley, "Life of a Painter: Clay Spohn Remembered," Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 86 (Summer 1983): 201. [BACK]

41. Cullinan, "Blackout Business" (as in note 24). Another reviewer, however, took Spohn's designs seriously enough to report that they had been submitted to the War Office in Washington. See "Fantastic War Machines to Go on Display," Oakland Tribune , March 8, 1942. While it is highly unlikely that the War Machines were formally submitted to the government for consideration, Spohn recalls that military officials were nervous about them: "The Army and Navy people were there (one of each) as soon as the museum doors opened, just to check, I expect, that no important secrets or probable secret weapons were being shown. But when they saw the show was practically all based upon the imagination and a dream-like war they finally left—peacefully!'' (letter from Spohn to Thomas Albright, April 1, 1976, unfilmed papers of Clay Spohn, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). [BACK]

42. See "America's Newest Birds of War," section entitled "Streamline Designs for New War Machines," in Popular Mechanics 76 (December 1941): 26, 27. [BACK]

43. Saturday Evening Post 215 (December 26, 1942): front cover verso. [BACK]

44. Fuller, "Portrait" (as in note 29), 80. [BACK]

45. Fussell, Wartime (as in note 14), 13. [BACK]

46. Ibid., 14. [BACK]

47. See the essays by Max Kozloff, Eva Cockcroft, and David and Cecil Shapiro, in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate , ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Harper and Row, 1985); and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). [BACK]

48. See David Craven, "Abstract Expressionism, Automatism, and the Age of Automation," Art History 13 (March 1990): 72-103. [BACK]

49. See Philip Lamantia, "Letter from San Francisco," Horizon 93-94 (October 1947): 118-23; and, for a sensationalized account of the Bay Area's postwar anarchist movement, see Mildred Edie Brady, "The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy," Harper's Magazine 144 (April 1947): 312-22. [BACK]

50. Most of the better-known New York abstract expressionists were draftable—that is, they were between twenty and forty-five at the time of America's entry into the war—but were exempted for having either dependents or disabilities, physical or psychological. [BACK]

51. Hassel Smith explicitly denied that abstract expressionism was a product of postwar angst and disillusionment (annotations to an undated letter from Jeffrey Wechsler, Hassel Smith papers, roll 2008, frame 500, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). [BACK]

52. Douglas MacAgy, John Grillo: Oils and Watercolors (Berkeley: Daliel's Gallery, 1947), n.p. [BACK]

53. Leonard Woolf, quoted in Fussell, Wartime (as in note 14), 76 . [BACK]

54. For more on this aspect of the World War II military experience, see Fussell, Wartime , 75-78. [BACK]

55. Elmer Bischoff, lecture presented to the Oakland Museum, October 27, 1973, transcript in Archives of the Anne Bremer Memorial Library, San Francisco Art Institute. [BACK]

56. Fussell, Wartime , 66. [BACK]

57. George Stillman, interviewed by the author, July 12, 1988. [BACK]

58. Elmer Bischoff, interviewed by Paul Karlstrom, August 10, 1977, transcript in Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [BACK]

59. Douglas MacAgy, "The Contemporary Art School," Arts and Architecture 65 (November 1948): 25. [BACK]

60. Still's students recalled that he encouraged them to follow their personal whims and did not make value judgments about their work. Hubert Crehan, for example, remembered: "He was approachable on almost any subject so long as it had nothing to do with how to make a painting. Still was deft in turning aside such questions. . . . He decided to be the silent witness, keeping his own counsel, noncommittal" (Hubert Crehan, "Art Schools Smell Alike," San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle , October 4, 1970). For more on Still's teaching, see Mary Fuller McChesney, A Period of Exploration: San Francisco, 1945-1950 (Oakland Museum, 1973), 35-51. [BACK]

61. Clay Spohn, teaching notes for watercolor painting, California School of Fine Arts, summer session, June 22, 1948, unfilmed Clay Spohn papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [BACK]

62. Edward Corbett expressed the common feeling of disillusionment with science when he wrote: "Since learning that science is the tool of any grasping goof that comes along I've revised my notions of its usefulness. I'm now inclined to believe that science is the most dangerous discovery of man's intellect. In the name of scientific method, man can now behave completely without reference to his moral conscience. The makers of atomic weapons have shown us how this can be so" (undated notes, ca. late 1940s, unfilmed papers of Edward Corbett and Rosamond Walling Tirana Corbett, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). [BACK]

63. Richard Diebenkorn, quoted in Robert T. Buck, Jr., Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976 (Buffalo, N.Y.: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976), 12.; Edward Corbett, interviewed by Mary Fuller McChesney, May 16, 1966, transcript in private collection; Clyfford Still, quoted by Betty Freeman, undated notes, Betty Freeman papers, roll 4060, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [BACK]

64. Douglas MacAgy, "Contemporary Painting," lecture, Dominican College, San Rafael, Calif., February 17, 1947, transcript in Archives of the Anne Bremer Memorial Library, San Francisco Art Institute. [BACK]

65. Clyfford Still, quoted in Clyfford Still , ed. Henry Hopkins (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1976), 123-24. [BACK]

66. Jack Jefferson, quoted in McChesney, A Period of Exploration , 44. [BACK]

67. Ironically, Still's own work became more affirmative after 1950; his color brightened and he used less rough texturing. This shift may reflect in part Still's conservative politics (he supported Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist activities). See Susan Landauer, "Clyfford Still and Abstract Expressionism in San Francisco," in Clyfford Still: The Buffalo and San Francisco Collections , ed. Thomas Kellein (Munich: Prestel, 1992), 93. [BACK]

68. John Hultberg, quoted in Shirley Jacks, John Hultberg, Painter of the In-Between: Selected Paintings, 1953-1984 (Clinton, N.Y.: Fred L. Emerson Gallery, 1985), 33. [BACK]

69. On the war experience being "Norman Rockwellized," see Fussell, Wartime (as in note 14), 268. [BACK]

70. This drawing, now in a private collection, was initially created as an illustration for an edition of The Communist Manifesto published in 1947. For reasons unknown, it was rejected. Hassel Smith's and Robert McChesney's illustrations were, however, accepted; see The Communist Manifesto in Pictures (San Francisco: International Book Store, 1948). [BACK]

71. Edward Corbett, statement in San Francisco Art Association Bulletin (January 1951): n.p. [BACK]

72. Frank Lobdell, interviewed by the author, June 20, 1988. [BACK]

73. Caroline A. Jones dates Lobdell's expression of his painful wartime experience to the mid-1950s; see Jones, Frank Lobdell: Works, 1947-1992 (Stanford University Museum of Art, 1993), 6. [BACK]

74. See Jones, Frank Lobdell , 7. [BACK]

75. Walter Kuhlman, telephone interview by the author, February 15, 1991. [BACK]

76. For example, in a survey of American painting conducted in 1947, the Art Institute of Chicago found that an expressive abstraction, drawing some of its vocabulary from surrealism, could be seen from Louisville, Kentucky, to Walnut Creek, California. The institute's director, Daniel Carton Rich, reported: "Today, men and women throughout America are working vigorously with abstract means, attempting to convey their personal emotion through lines, colors, effects of light and texture rather than through transcriptions of nature" (Daniel Carton Rich, "Freedom of the Brush," Atlantic Monthly [February 1948]: 48). [BACK]

77. Harold Rosenberg, "Introduction to Six American Artists," Possibilities 1 (Winter 1947-48): 75. [BACK]

78. Mark Tobey, statement in Dorothy Miller, Fourteen Americans (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 24. [BACK]

79. Robert Motherwell, statement in Miller, Fourteen Americans , 36. [BACK]

80. In the view of the editors of Art Digest , San Francisco was more inclined toward abstraction than New York as early as 1941: "While the art trend in the East continues toward an assimilated union of modernism and conservatism, with middle-of-the-road works taking the bulk of exhibition honors, across the continent in San Francisco the more radical phases of aesthetic experience maintain their hold. Until stronger competition comes, San Francisco may well be called the capital of ultra-modern art in America" ("Abstraction Wins San Francisco Honor," Art Digest 15 [January 1, 1941]: 21). [BACK]

1. U.S. Congress, Committee on Public Works, Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, Rincon Annex murals, San Francisco, Hearing, 83rd Congress, first session, May 1, 1953, 1-87. [BACK]

2. Scudder's accomplishments in the Capitol, detailed in a thin volume entitled Memorial Addresses and Eulogies in the Congress of the United States on the Life and Contributions of Hubert Baxter Scudder (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), consist chiefly of water projects for his home district, though his successor, Representative Don Clausen, wrote in his introduction to the volume that Scudder's greatest achievement was "to put Sebastopol on the map." [BACK]

3. Though Refregier was accused of political radicalism, his figurative and narrative style was fundamentally conservative. While working on murals for the 1939-40 New York World's Fair with Philip Guston and others, Refregier wrote in his diary that the studio was "the closest to the Renaissance of anything, I am sure, that has ever happened before in the States," a paraphrase of Augustus Saint-Gaudens's similar remark about the gathering of artists that produced the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. Though the events depicted at Rincon Annex are occasionally provocative, the programmatic narrative remains academic and firmly rooted in Renaissance precedent. Refregier's diary is quoted in Francis V. O'Connor's introduction to Art for the Millions (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 22-23. For other post office projects, see Karal Ann Marling, Wall-to-Wall America: A Cultural History of Post Office Murals in the Great Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); and Marlene Park and Gerald E. Markowitz, Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). For the academic tradition, see Fikret K. Yegül, Gentlemen of Instinct and Breeding: Architecture at the American Academy in Rome, 1894-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). [BACK]

4. Dwight Clarke, William Tecumseh Sherman, Gold Rush Banker (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1969), 305; Victoria Post Ranney, ed., The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted , Vol. 5, The California Frontier, 1863-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Joshua Speed, Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln and Notes of a Visit to California (Louisville, Ky.: John P. Morton and Co., 1884), 65. [BACK]

5. Joseph Donohue Grant, Redwoods and Reminiscences (San Francisco: Save-the-Redwoods League and Menninger Foundation, 1973), 11. [BACK]

6. Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (New York: Random House, 1992). [BACK]

7. Mike Quin [pseud.], The Big Strike (Olema, Calif.: Olema Publishing Co., 1949). [BACK]

8. The material for such an inventory and appraisal is on index cards and in other primary sources in the National Archives. [BACK]

9. George Biddle, "Art under Five Years of Federal Patronage," American Scholar 9, no. 3 (Summer 1940): 333. [BACK]

10. William E McDonald, Federal Relief Administration and the Arts: The Origins and Administrative History of the Arts Projects of the Works Progress Administration (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1969), 359. For the academic tradition against which artists like Refregier were reacting, see the catalogue The American Renaissance, 1876-1917 (New York: Brooklyn Museum and Pantheon Books, 1979). [BACK]

11. Logan's campaign against un-American modernism resembles contemporary attacks against "degenerate" art in Germany. See the editorial "Art Is Sick" from Munich Illustrated Press (e.g., "Only when art returns to a proclamation of beauty and becomes once more a vehicle of sanity and naturalness, will it become possible to speak again of German art"), cited in Josephine Hancock Logan, Sanity in Art (Chicago: A. Kroch, 1937), as well as the illustrations of "good" versus "bad" art in the same volume. [BACK]

12. Gerald M. Monroe, "The Thirties: Art, Ideology, and the WPA," Art in America 63 , no. 6 (November-December 1975): 67. [BACK]

13. Biddle, "Art under Five Years of Federal Patronage," 335. [BACK]

14. The political controversy surrounding the Coit Tower project is related in Masha Zakheim Jewett, Coit Tower, San Francisco: Its History and Art (San Francisco: Volcano Press, 1983). [BACK]

15. Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 25. [BACK]

16. Joseph Danysh gives a personal account of how the Examiner doctored the photograph, in "The WPA and the Great Coit Tower Controversy," City of San Francisco 10, no. 30 (February 4, 1976): 20-21. [BACK]

17. Evelyn Seeley, "A Frescoed Tower Clangs Shut amid Gasps," Literary Digest 118, no. 8 (August 25, 1934): 24. [BACK]

18. Its official name changed to the Treasury Section of Fine Arts in 1938 and later to the Section of Fine Arts of the Public Buildings Administration of the Federal Works Agency. It died along with its director, Edward Bruce, in 1943. See Karal Ann Marling (as in note 3) for an anecdotal history of art controversies that preceded the Rincon Annex hearings. [BACK]

19. San Francisco Chronicle , November 15, 1942. [BACK]

20. Anton Refregier's account of his experiences working on the Rincon Annex murals is in a typed, undated [ca. 1949] manuscript in the ACA [American Contemporary Art] Gallery papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, roll D304, frames 1099—1106. [BACK]

21. Ibid., frame 1105 (p. 7). [BACK]

22. People's World , March 19, 1948; San Francisco Examiner , November 14, 1947. [BACK]

23. See San Francisco Examiner , April 16, 1948. [BACK]

24. Refregier account, frame 1104 (p. 6). [BACK]

25. Ibid. [BACK]

26. People's World , March 19, 1948. [BACK]

27. People's World , March 28, 1948. [BACK]

28. San Francisco Examiner , October 26, 1948. [BACK]

29. George E Sherman, "Dick Nixon: Art Commissar," Nation 176, no. 2 (January 10, 1953): 21. [BACK]

30. Dondero is quoted in Mathew Josephson, "The Vandals Are Here: Art Is Not for Burning," Nation 177, no. 13 (September 26, 1953): 244. [BACK]

31. "The intellectual-moral achievements of the Roosevelt-Truman era are now to be liquidated; its paintings along with its social plans are to be consigned to the rubbish heap. The 'inquisition' of New Deal artists and their works was begun promptly after the conservatives took over in 1953, with Anton Refregier as first defendant" (ibid., 247). [BACK]

32. See Logan (as in note 11), and catalogues for the Society of Western Artists in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [BACK]

33. Official art in California, at least prior to the Second World War, was often promotional; thus it must be understood in terms of what was not depicted. The Edenic image of the state was designed to attract as many desirable immigrants as possible. [BACK]

34. Charles White's papers are in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [BACK]

35. People's World , September 2, 1947. Refregier taught classes at the Labor School while working on the Rincon Annex murals. [BACK]

36. Gustoh's reasoning was equivocal. See Congressional Record (as in note 1), 20. [BACK]

37. Congressional Record , 29-33. [BACK]

38. Refregier's assistant, Louise Gilbert, concluded a letter of June 25, 1953, to the San Francisco Chronicle by saying, "The most charitable thing to be said of Rep. Hubert Scudder, who aired the mistaken charges against the murals in Congress, is that he has never seen them." [BACK]

39. To indicate the international furor caused by the hearings, Mathew Josephson noted that even "the London Times voiced its disgust at this latest atrocity of the American heresy hunters" (Josephson [as in note 30], 247). [BACK]

40. Letter from Julian Huxley to Anton Refregier, April 18, 1953. [BACK]

41. The Archives of American Art has the papers of the museum directors Walter Heil and Thomas Cart Howe, as well as the Chronicle art critic Alfred Frankenstein, all of which may contain further information on the Rincon Annex controversy. [BACK]

42. Congressional Record , 61. [BACK]

43. Ibid., 64. In response to Representative Scudder's resolution, Dr. Morley organized the Citizen's Committee to Protect the Rincon Annex Murals. [BACK]

44. San Francisco Examiner , June 11, 1953. [BACK]

45. Editorial, San Francisco Examiner , May 18, 1953. [BACK]

46. McKinzie (as in note 15), 176. [BACK]

47. Congressional Record , 56. Representative Maillard rejoined that "an artist is entitled to a certain amount of license as far as portrayal is concerned" and that "you are not asking the artist to put on the wall a photographic representation." [BACK]

48. Henry Miller wrote of Hiler's murals: "Though the decor was distinctly Freudian, it was also gay, stimulating, and superlatively healthy." See Stephen A. Haller, "From the Outside In: Art and Architecture in the Bathhouse," California History 64, no. 4 (Fall 1985): 283; and Steven Gelber, "Working to Prosperity: California's New Deal Murals," California History 58, no. 2 (Summer 1979). [BACK]

49. Representative Will E. Neal felt that "the pictures represent the cartoonist's way of doing things" and were therefore most dangerous to impressionable minds ( Congressional Record , 59). [BACK]

50. San Francisco Chronicle , March 8, 1952. [BACK]

51. Mathews's little magazine Philopolis contains numerous articles (many written by Mathews himself) that approvingly cite the "natural" subjugation or extermination of the weaker races by the stronger. [BACK]

52. Gertrude Atherton, California: An Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1914), 30. [BACK]

53. Congressional Record , 43. [BACK]

54. Ibid. [BACK]

55. Refregier (as in note 20), frame 1106. [BACK]

56. Congressional Record , 69. [BACK]

57. Emmy Lou Packard's papers are in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [BACK]

58. Douglas Frantz, From the Ground Up: The Business of Building in the Age of Money (New York: Holt, 1991). Frantz implies that Haas was unhappy with the final product. [BACK]

1. Francis M. Naumann, ''Frederick C. Torrey and Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, " in West Coast Duchamp , ed. Bonnie C. Clearwater (Miami Beach, Fla.: Grassfield Press, 1991). This essay by Naumann corrects previous accounts of the provenance of this painting. [BACK]

2. Naumann, 21. [BACK]

3. Official catalogue of the Department of Fine Art, Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco: Wahlgreen Co., 1915). [BACK]

4. Gottardo Piazzoni, quoted in Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era , ed. Henry Hopkins (San Francisco Museum of Art, 1977), 22. [BACK]

5. Paul J. Karlstrom, "San Francisco," Archives of American Art Journal 16, no. 2 (1976): 24-25, and "West Coast," Archives of American Art Journal 24, no. 4 (1984): 39-40. [BACK]

6. Hassel Smith, Chronology, written December 10, 1987, quoted in Hassel Smith (Belmont, Calif.: College of Notre Dame, Weigand Art Gallery, 1988), 27. [BACK]

7. Galka Scheyer, collective letter to the Blue Four, October 19, 1925, in Galka Scheyer Blue Four Archive, Oakland Museum. [BACK]

8. William Clapp, letter to Galka Scheyer, June 23, 1935, in Galka Scheyer Blue Four Archive. [BACK]

9. Howard Putzel, in Galka Scheyer Blue Four Archive. [BACK]

10. Diego Rivera, statement in The Blue Four , exh. cat. (San Francisco: California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1931), n.p. [BACK]

11. Maynard Dixon, cited in Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (New York Stein and Day, 1963), 285. [BACK]

12. Kenneth Callahan, letter in the Town Crier (Seattle), May 21, 1932. [BACK]

13. George Biddle, letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, May 9, 1933, quoted in Biddle, An American Artist's Story (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939), 268. [BACK]

14. Shifra M. Goldman, "Siqueiros and Three Early Murals in Los Angeles," Art Journal 33, no. 4 (Summer 1974): 321-27. [BACK]

15. Glenn Wessels, in San Francisco Argonaut , July 13, 1934. [BACK]

16. In 1930 Matisse also visited San Francisco. The three artists did not meet in the City by the Bay, but it is interesting to speculate on the discourse that might have taken place if they had. [BACK]

17. Hans Hofmann offered to the University of California at Berkeley a donation of forty-seven paintings, selected by Erle Loran with my assistance. They represent the artist's work from 1935 to 1965. Hofmann also proffered a quarter of a million dollars on the condition that a proper art museum be constructed on the Berkeley campus; this gift was a major inducement to the establishment of the University Art Museum. [BACK]

18. Alfred Neumeyer, letter to Pierre Matisse, September 17, 1940, Mills College Archive. [BACK]

19. Lyonel Feininger, letter to Alois J. Schardt, February 5, 1942, Mills College Archive. [BACK]

20. Neumeyer, press release, Mills College, Oakland, California, summer 1937, Mills College Archive. [BACK]

21. Feininger, letter to Alfred Frankenstein, October 15, 1937, Mills College Archive. [BACK]

22. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, letter to Alfred Neumeyer, April 4, 1938, Mills College Archive. [BACK]

23. Alice Schoelkopf, letter to Alfred Neumeyer, October 14, 1940, Mills College Archive. [BACK]

24. Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: An Experiment in Totality (New York: Harper, 1950), 180-82. [BACK]

25. Fernand Léger, quoted in André Warnod, "America Isn't a Country—It's a World," Architectural Forum (April 1946): 54. [BACK]

26. Léger, quoted in Warnod, 62. [BACK]

27. Léger, quoted in Charlotte Kotik, "Léger and America," in Léger (Buffalo, N.Y.: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 198z), 52. [BACK]

28. James Grote Van Derpool, letter to Alfred Neumeyer, November 5, 1941, Mills College Archive. [BACK]

29. Peter Selz, "The Years in America," in Carla Schulz-Hoffman and Judith C. Weiss, Max Beckmann Retrospective (Saint Louis, Mo.: Saint Louis Art Museum; and Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1948), 167. [BACK]

30. Nathan Oliveira, afterword to Peter Selz, Max Beckmann — Portrait of the Artist (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 108. [BACK]

1. Because Mexican twentieth-century art incorporates the country's indigenous past into its aesthetic, there has been a tendency to exclude Mexican and Latin American art in general from the modernist discourse, given that modernism has been viewed exclusively as a European and North American movement. Yet these premises of the ''other" in themselves offer new possibilities for exploring the modernist aesthetic. Moreover, the term "modernism" was first used in Latin America during the final two decades of the nineteenth century. The first important twentieth-century literary movement in Latin America is "Modernismo," its origin marked by the 1888 publication of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío's book Azul . [BACK]

2. The contributions of the major Mexican muralists have been thoroughly covered in Laurence P. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University, of New Mexico Press, 1989). [BACK]

3. William C. Agee, "Walter Pach and Modernism: A Sampler from New York, Paris, and Mexico City," Archives of American Art Journal 28, no. 3 (1988): 2-10; and Nancy Malloy, Discovering Modernism: Selections from the Walter Pach Papers , exh. cat., February 15-April 13, 1990, New York Regional Center, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [BACK]

4. Walter Pach papers, roll 532, frames 682-85. [BACK]

5. Walter Pach papers, roll 4219, frames 82-87, letter dated June 9, 1943. [BACK]

6. Alson Clarke and Garrett Hale made painting trips to Mexico in 1922, 1925, and 1931. They showed the works they produced on these trips in local galleries according to Alson Clarke, Jr., interviewed by Margarita Nieto, September 6, 1990. [BACK]

7. See Mildred Constantine, Tina Modotti: A Fragile Life (New York: Rizzoli, 1983). A more recent and thorough source is Elena Poniatowska's Tinísima (Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1992). [BACK]

8. Ramos Martínez was the subject of a major exhibition in October 1991 at the Louis Stern Gallery, Beverly Hills, California. The illustrated catalogue accompanying the show included essays by Jean Stern, María Ramos Bolster, and Margarita Nieto. Because of this show, a major retrospective of Ramos's work was organized in 1992 at the Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico, D.F.; its catalogue included essays by Louis Stern, Margarita Nieto, and others. See also Margarita Nieto, "Art without Borders: Alfredo Ramos Martínez," Antiques and Fine Arts (November-December 1991). [BACK]

9. Jean Charlot's contributions to the art history of Mexico have been covered in part in Mexico en la obra de Jean Charlot , a catalogue for an exhibition at the Colegio de San Ildefonso (Mexico, D.F.), spring 1994. [BACK]

1. Holland's other publications include "The Function of Functionalism," Architect and Engineer 125 (August 1936): 25-32, and "Nudism and Modern Architecture," Architect and Engineer 128 (March 1937): 39-42. [BACK]

2. Leicester B. Holland, "Exaggeration of Functionalism in Current Architecture Criticised by Savant," Southwest Builder and Contractor 88 (August 14, 1936): 19. [BACK]

3. See Esther McCoy, Irving Gill, 1870-1936 (Los Angeles County Museum, 1958), and "Irving Gill," in her Five California Architects (New York: Reinhold, 1960), 59-101. [BACK]

4. McCoy, Five California Architects , 71, 73; William H. Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects: Progressive and Academic ideals at the Turn of the Century , vol. 3 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), 256-58. [BACK]

5. McCoy, Five California Architects , 97. [BACK]

6. David Gebhard, "Irving Gill," in California Design, 1910 , ed. Timothy J. Anderson, Eudorah M. Moore, and Robert W. Winter (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1980), 112-18. [BACK]

7. Joseph Bell, From the Stone Age to the Space Age (New York: National Concrete Masonry Association, 1969), 1-32. [BACK]

8. "Concrete Grave Stones," Concrete 10 (January 1910): 43; "An Architect of Bird Residences," Popular Mechanics 21 (March 1914): 371; "Ornamental Dog Kennel Made of Concrete," Popular Mechanics 21 (January 1914): 105; "Concrete Shipbuilding Industry Organizing,'' Southwest Builder and Contractor 53 (January 17, 1919): 78; "Plan for Twelve-Suite Apartment House of Stucco Construction," Concrete 10 (April 1910): 65. [BACK]

9. Francis S. Onderdonk, "Ferro-Concrete and Design," Architecture 57 (May 1928): 241. [BACK]

10. "Beats Edison Concrete House," Southwest Builder and Contractor 26 (May 6, 1911): 21. [BACK]

11. Frank Lloyd Wright, "A Fireproof House for $5000," Ladies Home Journal 24 (April 1907): 24; Russell Sturgis, "The Larkin Building in Buffalo," Architectural Record 15 (April 1908): 310-21; "Unity Temple and Unity House, Oak Park, Ill.," Inland Architect and News Record 52 (December 1908): 77. [BACK]

12. Frederick Squires, "Houses at Forest Hills Garden," Concrete-Cement Age 6 (January 1915): 3-8; 53-56. [BACK]

13. Francis S. Onderdonk, The Ferro-Concrete Style (New York: Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1928), 5. [BACK]

14. C. W. Whitney, "Ransome Construction in California," Architect and Engineer 12 (April 1908): 49-57; "Tribute to Ernest L. Ransome," Architect and Engineer 49 (April 1917): 101-2. [BACK]

15. "Early Reinforced Concrete Construction," The Builder and Contractor , no. 1106 (June 4, 1914): 1; David Gebhard and Harriette Von Breton, Architecture in California, 1868-1968 (Santa Barbara: The Art Galleries, 1968), 16, fig. 37. [BACK]

16. Harris C. Allen, "The Influence of Concrete on Design in California," Journal of the American Institute of Architects 16 (October 1928): 389. [BACK]

17. Pacific Concrete Machinery Company advertisement, Los Angeles Builder and Contractor (February 1906): 5; Concrete House Building Company advertisement, Los Angeles Builder and Contractor , no. 568 (January 14, 1904): 8. [BACK]

18. Charles E Whittlesey, "Reinforced Concrete Construction—Why I Believe in It," Architect and Engineer 12 (March 1908): 37-67. [BACK]

19. Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey, "Some Concrete Country Homes on the Pacific Coast—Concrete Residence of G. W. Wattles, Hollywood, Cal.," Concrete 10 (February 1910): 42-43; Arthur B. Benton, Contract Notice for the A. M. McClaughry House, Sierra Madre, a "12 room reinforced concrete residence" ( Southwest Contractor and Manufacturer 4 [April 30, 1910]: 6). [BACK]

20. "Monolithic Concrete House Built by Los Angeles Man," Concrete 10 (October 1910): 35. [BACK]

21. "New Reinforced Concrete Residence Construction," Southwest Contractor and Manufacturer 4 (January 1, 1910): 14. [BACK]

22. Roger Hatheway and John Chase, "Irving Gill and the Aiken System," in Concrete in California (Los Angeles: Carpenters/Contractors Cooperation Committee of Southern California, 1990), 21. [BACK]

23. "Trying to Solve the Problem of Fireproof Construction for Small Residences," Southwest Contractor and Manufacturer 6 (April 15, 1911): 18-19. [BACK]

24. Southwest Builder and Contractor , the Los Angeles trade journal, published a series of ten articles (vols. 56-58, November 12, 1920-September 2, 1921) presenting various concrete hollow-wall systems then in use in Los Angeles. [BACK]

25. Homer M. Hadley, "Some Observations on Architectural Concrete," Architect and Engineer (February 1931): 51-52. [BACK]

26. Bertha H. Smith, "Creating an American Style of Architecture," House and Garden 26 (July 1914): 19. [BACK]

27. "Hollow Clay Blocks for Residential Construction," Southwest Contractor and Manufacturer 4 (November 13, 1909): 14-16; "Hollow Tile Popular for Residential Construction," Southwest Contractor and Manufacturer 4 (January 8, 1910): 14-15; "Growth of the Hollow Tile Industry," Southwest Builder and Contractor 53 (January 17, 1919): 7. [BACK]

28. Roger Hatheway and John Chase, "Irving Gill and the Aiken System" (as in note 22), 22-29. [BACK]

29. Esther McCoy, "Irving Gill," in Five California Architects (as in note 4), 75, 79. [BACK]

30. Gill, however, as late as 1919 advocated the Aiken system. See "Pre-cast Walls for the Concrete House," Keith's Magazine 38 (October 1917): 223-26. [BACK]

31. "Concrete Curves and Cubes," Independent 75 (August 28, 1913): 515. [BACK]

32. "Garden Apartment Houses of the West," Touchstone 5 (April 1919): 24. [BACK]

33. Maxwell Armfield, An Artist in America (London: Methuen, 1925), 75-76. [BACK]

34. Irving J. Gill, "The Home of the Future: The New Architecture of the West: Small Homes for a Great Country," Craftsman 30 (May 1916): 148, 151. [BACK]

35. Bertha H. Smith, "Creating an American Style of Architecture" (as in note 26), 18. [BACK]

36. Gill, "The Home of the Future," 142. [BACK]

37. Leicester B. Holland, "The Function of Functionalism" (as in note 1), 27. [BACK]

38. Holland, "Exaggeration of Functionalism in Current Architecture Criticised by Savant" (as in note 2), 19. [BACK]

1. Lorser Feitelson, interviewed by Fiddle Danieli, Los Angeles Art Community, Group Portrait, Oral History Program, University of California at Los Angeles Art Library, 1982, 12. I have taken the liberty of streamlining this anecdote, without altering its intended significance. [BACK]

2. Arthur Millier, "New Developments in Southern California Painting," American Magazine of Art 37 , no. 5 (May 1934): 241. [BACK]

3. Feitelson interview, UCLA, 4. [BACK]

4. Hans Burkhardt, interviewed by Einstein (no first name given), Los Angeles Art Community, Group Portrait, Oral History Program, UCLA Art Library, 1982, 42. [BACK]

5. Edward Biberman, interviewed by Emily Corey, Los Angeles Art Community, Group Portrait, Oral History Program, UCLA Art Library, 1977, 75-77. [BACK]

6. Millier, ''New Developments," 243. [BACK]

7. Thomas Hart Benton, An Artist in America (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1937), 47, 48. [BACK]

8. Feitelson interview, UCLA, 3. [BACK]

9. Marsden Hartley, "Rex Slinkard," in Adventures in the Arts (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), 94. This essay was originally published in the catalogue of the 1919 Rex Slinkard Memorial Exhibition , Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art, Exposition Park. It was also reprinted in the 1929 Slinkard Memorial Exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles Museum. [BACK]

10. Peyton Boswell, "Notes on Painting and Sculpture," Vanity Fair (March 1922): 15. [BACK]

11. Edward Weston, quoted in the introduction to Merle Armitage, Warren Newcombe (New York: E. Weyhe, 1932), n.p. [BACK]

1. William Copley, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dealer," in Paris—New York (Paris: Centre national d'art et culture Georges Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, 1979), 6. [BACK]

2. In 1944 Morley, with Sidney Janis, organized another important survey, Abstract and Surrealist Art in the United States . She was also responsible for organizing or bringing to San Francisco many monographic exhibitions of work by surrealists, including that of Ernst, Arshile Gorky, Charles Howard, Madge Knight, André Masson, Matta, Isamu Noguchi, Onslow-Ford, Wolfgang Paalen, Kay Sage, Clay Spohn, and Tanguy. In 1935, moreover, she organized the first museum exhibition of Los Angeles Post-Surrealism, which traveled to the Brooklyn Museum the following year. Douglas MacAgy, who later directed the California School of Fine Arts and championed abstract expressionism, worked under Morley during this period. He was then a champion of surrealism and highly supportive of the Bay Area artists Charles Howard and Clay Spohn. [BACK]

3. On the relationship between surrealism and World Wars I and II, see Sidra Stich, Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art (University Art Museum, University of California at Berkeley, 1990); and William S. Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1964), 211. By the late 1920s, the surrealists found it difficult to remain in an isolated world of ideas, aloof from political action. Many of them admitted then that social revolution was essential, that the revolution of the mind and spirit could not cope independently with problems related to social revolution, but only in cooperation. Breton and some of the other surrealists joined the Communist Party in 1927, and in the second manifesto of 1929, surrealism was defined as a political revolution. [BACK]

4. As the cultural historian Michael Meyer has noted, "Los Angeles typified and typifies modernity in its mobility and artificiality . . . . Everything and everybody is uprooted and imported . . . the intellectual elite of European culture, ever enriching, contradicting, and reinforcing the latest level of indigenous achievement and establishment" ("Traditional and Popular Culture: Los Angeles in the 1940s," Southern California Quarterly 69, no. 4 [Winter 1987]: 293-94). [BACK]

5. See Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, "Hollywood Conversations: Duchamp and the Arensbergs," in West Coast Duchamp , ed. Bonnie Clearwater (Miami Beach, Fla.: Grassfield Press, 1991), 24-45, for a discussion of the Arensberg collection and its importance to the artistic development of Southern California. Through this collection many artists had direct contact with dada and surrealist art. Though the extent to which the collection fueled surrealist experimentation in Southern California has not been determined, its works by Duchamp, Ernst, Magritte, Miró, Mondrian, Brancusi, Calder, and Dalí, among others, may have influenced the direction Feitelson's art would soon take. [BACK]

6. In this the Post-Surrealists were thematically allied with the late surrealist artists such as Onslow-Ford and Matta. [BACK]

7. Diane Moran, "Helen Lundeberg," in Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg: A Retrospective Exhibition (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 24. Feitelson introduced his students to diverse directions: classical working methods, such as master drawing techniques, and instruction in art history: the art of the Renaissance, Mannerism, cubism, futurism, and surrealism. He also took them to see the Arensberg collection. [BACK]

8. Diane Moran, "Post-Surrealism: The Art of Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg," Arts 57 (December 1982): 128. [BACK]

9. As Whitney Chadwick has observed, the surrealist attitude toward women was always ambivalent. See her complete treatment of this subject, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985). [BACK]

10. See Susan Ehrlich, Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists, 1920-1956 , exh. brochure (Laguna Art Museum, 1991), n.p. See also Joseph E. Young, "Helen Lundeberg: An American Independent," Art International 15 (September 1971): 47. [BACK]

11. Young, "Helen Lundeberg: An American Independent," 46. [BACK]

12. Susan Ehrlich, "Knud Merrild," in Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich, Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists, 1920-1956 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1990), 138-41. [BACK]

13. Victoria Dailey, "Knud Merrild: Change and Chance," in Knud Merrild (Los Angeles: Steve Turner Gallery, 1991), 10. [BACK]

14. Jules Langsner, Knud Merrild: 1894-1954 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1965), 5. [BACK]

15. Other artists who exhibited with the Post-Surrealists were Helen Klokke, Ethel Evans, Etienne Ret, Harold Lehman, and Elizabeth Mills. See Moran, "Post-Surrealism: The Art of Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg" (as in note 7), 125. [BACK]

16. Feitelson wielded considerable political power himself as supervisor of murals, paintings, and sculpture for the Southern California Federal Art Project. [BACK]

17. The ideal the surrealists sought was to transcend social and economic approaches to experience and to function independent of, though side by side with, political revolution so that the experiments of the inner life could continue. [BACK]

18. Arturo Schwarz, Man Ray: The Rigour of Imagination (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 74, 75. [BACK]

19. Jules Langsner, "About Man Ray: An Introduction," in the exh. cat. Man Ray (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1966), 9. Like Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp was an important presence in Los Angeles during the period, through the patronage of Walter and Louise Arensberg. Duchamp and Man Ray had been the catalysts of the Arensbergs' New York salon, which was the unofficial center of the New York dada movement in the teens. The Arensbergs revered and were deeply committed to Duchamp. His work, including Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 , made up the core of their extensive and renowned art collection (Naomi Gorse, "Hollywood Conversations: Duchamp and the Arensbergs," in West Coast Duchamp [as in note 5], 25). Duchamp's influence also extended to Northern California artists in the 1940s through Clay Spohn, who taught at the California School of Fine Arts during the period and had met Duchamp in the 1920s in Paris through Charles Howard. When Duchamp participated in the 1949 "Western Round Table on Modern Art" in San Francisco, Spohn reconnected with him. A few months later Spohn created his Museum of Unknown and Little-Known Objects , a neodada installation of discrete objects at the California School of Fine Arts. [BACK]

20. Schwarz, Man Ray: The Rigour of Imagination , 74. [BACK]

21. Ibid.; and Merry Foresta, "Exile in Paradise: Man Ray in Hollywood, 1940-1951," in National Museum of American Art, The Art of Perpetual Motif (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989), 285. [BACK]

22. Foresta, "Exile in Paradise," 297. [BACK]

23. This was the interpretation of the work by Susan Ehrlich in her essay "Man Ray," in Forty Years of California Assemblage (Wight Art Gallery, University of California at Los Angeles, 1989), 188. [BACK]

24. Fortune or chance was a popular theme with surrealist artists during the period. Many of their works alluded to the difficulties they faced in escaping from occupied France. [BACK]

25. Man Ray exhibited at the Pasadena Art Institute; the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art; the Circle Gallery; and the Modern Institute of Art. [BACK]

26. Foresta, "Exile in Paradise," 304; and Copley, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dealer" (as in note 1), 32. [BACK]

27. Charles Howard, quoted in Abstract and Surrealist American Art (Art Institute of Chicago, 1947), 16. [BACK]

28. According to the art historian Sidra Stich, "In Surrealist depictions, turbulence and frenzy, not logic and control, rule the universe. The illusion of harmony and ultimate or primal stasis is disclaimed, and a conception of human dominance, especially of reason as a regulating power, is torn asunder. Instead, a struggle between order and chaos is represented in which the dark forces of rupture and the vitality of the unknown reveal new or alternative possibilities" ( Anxious Visions [as in note 3], 108). [BACK]

29. For more about the Howard family, see Stacey Moss, The Howards: First Family of Bay Area Modernism (Oakland Museum, 1988), 7. See also Susan M. Anderson, Pursuit of the Marvelous: Stanley William Hayter, Charles Howard, Gordon Onslow Ford (Laguna Art Museum, 1990), and Douglas Dreishpoon, "Some Thoughts on the Enigmatic Charles Howard," in Drama of the Mind: Charles Howard, 1899-1978 (New York: Hirschl and Adler Galleries, 1993). [BACK]

30. Edmund Burke, Philosophical Treatise into the Origins of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 73. See also Linda Dalrymple Henderson, "Mysticism, Romanticism, and the Fourth Dimension," in The Spiritual Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986), 221. [BACK]

31. Gerald Cullinan, "Novel Exhibition Reflects Reactions of San Francisco Artists to Total," San Francisco Call-Bulletin , January 10, 1942. [BACK]

32. Sidney Peterson, manuscript, ca. 1940, the Oakland Museum Art Library and Archives of California Art, n.p. [BACK]

33. Basil Taylor, introduction to Charles Howard (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1956), 9. [BACK]

34. Howard was at the center of the circle of Bay Area modernists that included Adaline Kent, Robert Howard, Madge Knight, and Clay Spohn, all of whom took a surrealist approach. Until his arrival in the Bay Area few other artists were experimenting with surrealism: Matthew Barnes and Lucien Labaudt were prominent among them. [BACK]

35. Douglas MacAgy, "A Margin of Chaos," Circle 10 (Summer 1948): 41. [BACK]

36. Howard's impact on the art of California during the early 1940s may have been as important as Man Ray's but possibly not as far-reaching. It has indirectly influenced diverse artistic generations, however—even such contemporary artists as Wally Hedrick and Jeremy Anderson, whose sense of form was molded by the organic abstraction of Bay Area artists such as Howard, Adaline Kent, and Robert Howard. [BACK]

37. See Rebecca Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era (San Francisco: City Lights, 1990), 25-56, for an in-depth look at the Bay Area during the 1950s and the Beat poets and artists. [BACK]

38. Wolfgang Paalen spoke of San Francisco in these terms. Quoted in Amy Winter, "Dynaton—the Painter/Philosophers," in Dynaton Before and Beyond (Malibu: Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 1992), 16. [BACK]

39. Lee Mullican, interviewed by Joann Phillips, Los Angeles Art Community, Group Portrait, Oral History Program, University of California at Los Angeles, 1977, 90. See also Mullican, interviewed by Paul Karlstrom, May 1992-March 1993, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. For more on the Dynaton, see Winter, Dynaton Before and Beyond . [BACK]

40. Matta and Onslow-Ford wanted to show the interrelationship between the perceived world and the higher dimensions. See Gordon Onslow-Ford, Towards a New Subject in Painting (San Francisco Museum of Art, 1948); and Anderson, Pursuit of the Marvelous (as in note 29), for more thorough discussions of the interaction between Matta and Onslow-Ford. [BACK]

41. See Martica Sawin, "'The Third Man,' or Automatism American Style," Art Journal 47, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 184. In Paris in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the war, Onslow-Ford created chance patterns by freely pouring Ripolin enamel on canvas laid on the ground and watching the colors run together, sometimes peeling off layers to enhance the illusion of depth. These paintings, which he called coulages (from the French verb "to pour" or "to flow"), predated by some years both Knud Merrild's and Jackson Pollock's poured paintings. The exploration of chance in automatic processes had been central to surrealism's inception. [BACK]

42. See Henderson, "Mysticism" (as in note 30), 229; and Anderson, Pursuit of the Marvelous , for more about the contribution of later surrealism. [BACK]

43. See Marica Sawin, "'The Third Man,'" 181—86; and The Interpretive Link: Abstract Surrealism into Abstract Expressionism (Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1986). [BACK]

44. In Mexico until the late 1940s Onslow-Ford created inner psychological dramas or journeys through vast cosmic landscapes in which beings, or personnages , having a reality of their own, interacted. Although the paintings, like the personnages , underwent changes over a period of several years, they can be seen as a continuum of transformative imagery striving to express the cosmic interrelatedness of all things. [BACK]

45. Henry Hopkins, "Visionaries," Antiques and Fine Art 9, no. 3 (March/April 1992): 76. [BACK]

46. Robert Motherwell, quoted by Sylvia Fink, "Dynaton Revisited," in the exh. cat. California: Five Footnotes to Modern Art History (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1977), 36. [BACK]

47. The writer and poet Jacqueline Johnson, married to Onslow-Ford, also participated in the group, contributing an essay for the catalogue Dynaton 1951 (San Francisco Museum of Art, 1951), published to accompany the exhibition. [BACK]

48. Paalen essay in Dynaton 1951 , 26. [BACK]

49. Ibid. [BACK]

50. The viewer's encounter with the artwork was intrinsic to the Dynaton as advanced by the theories of Paalen. According to Lee Mullican, Time magazine published an article on Paalen that was widely quoted: "Paalen put the future of Modern Art into focus when he suggested that, just as the spectator may question the painting , in turn, the painting may examine the viewer, and as well ask, 'what do you represent? '" (Mullican, interview as in note 39, 65-66). [BACK]

51. Lee Mullican, "Thoughts on the Dynaton, 1976," in California: Five Footnotes , 41. [BACK]

52. Ibid., 36, 39. [BACK]

53. Gordon Onslow-Ford, interviewed by Ted Lindberg, March 26, 1984, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 41. [BACK]

54. California has always been more open to the influence of Mexico and the Pacific Rim than to that of New York or Europe. The art and philosophy of Eastern religions and pre-Columbian and Mexican native cultures have consistently informed art-making in the state. [BACK]

55. While frontier living usually lacks the energetic intensity of city life, popular culture and the film industry in Southern California have provided some of the same dynamics. Moreover, the sense of being outsiders on a cultural frontier has more closely bound artists and intellectuals together in the region. "Low culture" and the freedom to experiment fostered an environment in which artists less concerned than those in the East with the stature of their work created a less self-conscious art. Popular culture and fine art merged and distinctions between art categories and media dissolved. Experimentation in the region has been the rule rather than the exception, and hybrids of opposing styles have been not only possible but natural. Los Angeles thus has been hailed as the prototypical postmodern city. See Paul J. Karlstrom, "Modernism in Southern California, 1920-1956: Reflections on the Art and the Times," in Karlstrom and Ehrlich, Turning the Tide (as in note 12), 13-42. [BACK]

56. The European surrealists had been the first generation of artists to grow up on cinema. In the beginning the movies had helped shape surrealism; later, the direction of influence was reversed. Surrealism in the arts affected not only the underground film scene in California (the films of Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner, for example) but the entire film industry in Southern California and popular culture as a whole. [BACK]

57. Glenn Wessels, Art Digest (October 15, 1934): 17. [BACK]

58. California gave birth to Post-Surrealism in an egalitarian and didactic era in American culture. Although the region may have been surrealist by bent, it was striving less for absolute freedom or political liberty than for democratic and economic equilibrium. While surrealism posited a radical break with all tradition and institutional structure, 1930s Post-Surrealism paradoxically embraced the American Scene and the objectives of the federal art projects. Aspects of Post-Surrealism fall within the parameters of American regionalism, though the movement indisputably belongs to the modernist dialogue. [BACK]

59. Jules Langsner, Man Ray (as in note 19), 9. [BACK]

60. For a complete discussion of the art of Los Angeles artists of the 1960s and 1970s, see Charles Desmarais, Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph, 1960-1980 (Laguna Art Museum, 1992). [BACK]

61. Jules Langsner, "Permanence and Change in the Art of Lorser Feitelson," Art International 7 (September 1963): 75. [BACK]

62. Ibid. [BACK]

63. In particular, John McLaughlin, in his search for absolute void, created an aesthetics of the desert and sea, of emptiness and absolute stillness. [BACK]

64. During the early years of Douglas MacAgy's directorship at the school, before the arrival of Still, numerous faculty members had worked in a semiabstract or surrealist style. MacAgy's wife, Jermayne MacAgy, who was acting director of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor during the war period, showed Jackson Pollock in 1945 and Rothko in 1946—both artists were then making paintings heavily influenced by surrealism. These exhibitions had an impact on Bay Area art. For example, Elmer Bischoff's 1946 painting The Girls of Jermayne MacAgy was reminiscent of Rothko's Slow Swirl by the Edge of the Sea . Rothko taught summer sessions at the California School of Fine Arts in 1947 and 1949. His positive attitude toward surrealism helped offset some of Still's negativity. See Michael Leonard, "A History of Painting at the California School of Fine Arts, 1940-1960," master's thesis, San Francisco State University, 1985, 42 and 50-56 passim. [BACK]

65. Susan Landauer, "Clyfford Still and Abstract Expressionism in San Francisco," in Michael Auping et al., Clyfford Still (Munich: Prestel, 1992), 97. According to Landauer, in a letter to me, July 29, 1990, when the prominent printmaker Stanley William Hayter introduced surrealist automatic principles and thought to Bay Area artists in 1948 through a series of public lectures and classes at the California School of Fine Arts, John Hultberg and Frank Lobdell walked out of his painting class. Although Hayter and his teachings were still very much in favor in New York at this time, he was apparently not very popular at the school. Even so, it is likely that Hayter inspired artists in the Bay Area to visually and graphically express wartime horrors. The artist Reuben Kadish was one of those who studied with Hayter in 1940 at the California School of Fine Arts. See Anderson, Pursuit of the Marvelous (as in note 29), 14-25, for more about Hayter's California contribution. [BACK]

66. Among the other friends of the Dynaton artists were Richard Bowman, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Lamantia, Harry Partch, Alan Watts, Adaline Kent, Robert Howard, Charles Howard, and Stanley William Hayter. [BACK]

67. Artists who exhibited their work at the Six Gallery include Deborah Remington, Peter Shoemaker, David Simpson, Leo Vallador, Sonia Gechtoff, William Morehouse, Sandra Carlson, and Harvard King. [BACK]

68. Anderson, Pursuit of the Marvelous (as in note 29), 35. [BACK]

1. William Moritz, "Americans and Paris," in Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919-1945 , ed. Jan-Christopher Horak (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). Clifford Howard, the Hollywood correspondent for the British magazine Close Up (3, no. 1 [July 1928]: 74), reports that the recently opened Filmarte was the third such art film cinema in Hollywood. [BACK]

2. Alexander Walker, Rudolph Valentino (New York: Stein and Day, 1976), 34; Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1975), 108-13. All information about Nazimova's Salomé was corroborated in my interviews with Samson DeBrier, 1973-75. [BACK]

3. Exact dating of early films can be difficult. Nazimova's Salomé was screened long before its official premiere. Robert E. Sherwood declared the film ( Life 80, no. 2071 [July 13, 1922]: 22.) "exceptional in every noteworthy sense of the word" and observed that "the persons responsible deserve the whole-souled gratitude of everyone who believes in the possibilities of the movies as an art." After the official premiere, Sherwood noted ( Life 81, no. 2099 [January 2.5, 1923]: 24) that the film had been waiting eight months for a distributor. Similarly, Warren Newcombe's Enchanted City played for a week at the Rivoli Theatre in New York as a novelty item on the vaudeville program before the feature; it received extravagant praise, including an editorial (unheard-of for a short) in Motion Picture World 54, no. 5 (February 4, 1922): 492, claiming the film ''has demonstrated that the surface of picture possibilities has only been scratched and that the field of endeavor is limited solely by human imagination." Despite dozens of favorable reviews, it was some eight months before The Enchanted City received official distribution and a formal premiere, at Grauman's Rialto Theatre in Los Angeles October 17, 1922 ( Motion Picture News 26, no. 19 [November 4, 1922]: 2314). Newcombe may have shot The Enchanted City in New York, since he had offices there, but he had also been working on Hollywood features such as the Rudolph Valentino Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse prior to that, and certainly after 1925 lived and worked exclusively in Los Angeles, considering himself a "Los Angeles painter." [BACK]

4. Documents on Warren Newcombe are in the Ferdinand Perret papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, roll 3861. [BACK]

5. Brian Taves, Robert Florey: The French Expressionist (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987). [BACK]

6. Boris Deutsch, "Autobiographical Sketch," Jewish Community Press , November 18, 1938. The Skirball Museum of Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles has an album of clippings about Deutsch's painting from 1926 to 1947 that contains this article. This and other Deutsch clippings are also in the Ferdinand Perret papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, roll 3855. [BACK]

7. "Lullaby or Nightmare?" Los Angeles Record 32, no. 10631 (March 7, 1929): 2A. A copy of this article is in the Boris Deutsch papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [BACK]

8. Demons from Hell, from Alexander Granovsky's production of Avrom Goldfadn's Tenth Commandment , wore facial makeup similar to that of the demons in Lullaby ; see Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 228. Even if Deutsch had not seen the modernist expressionist productions of the Vilna Troupe before he fled Russia, Michael Visaroff would certainly have been familiar with this new trend in Soviet Yiddish theater as well as the New York Yiddish Art Theater (Sandrow, 50). [BACK]

9. "Postsurrealism, the Supermodern: From California Comes an Answer to Old World Innovators," Literary Digest 122, no. 2 (July 11, 1936): 23. [BACK]

10. Stuart Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay (Boston: Alyson, 1990), 74-75, 86-87. [BACK]

11. Most relevant documents pertaining to the life and works of Maya Deren were published in a multivolume set: The Legend of Maya Deren (New York: Anthology Film Archive, 1984). [BACK]

12. Lynne Fauley Emery, Black Dance firm 1619 to Today (Princeton, N.J.: Dance Horizons, 1988), 252-55. [BACK]

13. William Moritz, "Towards a Visual Music," Cantrills Filmnotes , nos. 47-48 (August 1985): 35-42. [BACK]

14. Robert Pike, The Genius of Busby Berkeley (Reseda, Calif.: Creative Film Society, 1973). [BACK]

15. William Moritz, "The Films of Oskar Fischinger," Film Culture 58-60 (1974): 37-188. [BACK]

16. William Moritz, "Fischinger at Disney, or Oskar in the Mousetrap," Millimeter 5, no. 2 (February 1977): 25-28, 65-67. [BACK]

17. William Moritz, "You Can't Get Then from Now," Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art Journal 29 (Summer 1981): 26-40, 70-72. Joan Lukach, Hilla Rebay: In Search of the Spirit in Art (New York: Braziller, 1983), gives a good picture of Baroness Rebay's achievement in furthering abstract art and creating the Guggenheim Museum; since the book was produced under the auspices of the museum and the Hilla Rebay Foundation, however, the many documents quoted are carefully excerpted to avoid any suggestion of Rebay's sudden mood shifts, petulant and vituperative rants, and outrageous demands. In the section dealing with visual music, pages 211-25, there are numerous factual errors. For example, Viking Eggeling's Diagonal Symphony was made in 1924; Oskar Fischinger's Study No. 7 dates from 1931 and his Composition in Blue from 1935; he hoped to make a film, not for John Ford, but for Henry Ford (that is, the Ford Motors Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair), and his Motion Painting No. 1 is not a silent film. [BACK]

18. Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors (New York: Viking, 1968), 86-87. [BACK]

19. Frank Judson and Jake Zeitlin were among the sponsors of the Southern California Film Society, which held morning screenings of unusual art films and early silents at the Filmarte Theatre during the late 1930s. [BACK]

20. Jack Quigg, "Fantastic Canvases: Lloyd Shows Thirty-five Paintings," Hollywood Citizen News , January 16, 1953, 2. [BACK]

21. Moritz, "You Can't Get Then from Now" (as in note 17), 35-40. [BACK]

22. Moritz, "Towards a Visual Music" (as in note 13), 40-42. The documents quoted here are in the archive of the Dockum Research Laboratory, Altadena, California, Greta Dockum, curator. [BACK]

23. Memo from Jack Donahue to Jean Hersholt, in the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California. [BACK]

24. James Broughton, "Experimental Film in San Francisco," in Rolling Renaissance: San Francisco Underground Art in Celebration, 1945-1968 (San Francisco: Intersection, 1976), 25-26. [BACK]

25. Frank Stauffacher's papers have been acquired by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. His brother, Jack Stauffacher, was interviewed by Paul Karlstrom on February 8, 1993, for the Archives of American Art oral history program. [BACK]

26. James Broughton, Coming Unbuttoned: A Memoir (San Francisco: City Lights, 1993), 85-100. [BACK]

27. Sara Kathryn Arledge, "The Experimental Film: A New Art in Transition," Arizona Quarterly 3, no. 2 (Summer 1947): 101-12. [BACK]

28. Frank Stauffacher, ed., Art in Cinema , exh. cat. (San Francisco Museum of Art, 1947). This also appeared later as an Arno reprint. [BACK]

29. Lewis Jacobs, "Experimental Cinema in America (Part 1: 1921-1941)," Hollywood Quarterly 3, no. 2 (Winter 1947): 111-24; and "Experimental Cinema, Part 2: The Postwar Revival," Hollywood Quarterly 3, no. 3 (Spring 1948): 278-92. The two parts were reprinted in Experiment in the Film , ed. Roger Manvell (London: Grey Walls Press, 1949), 113-52. [BACK]

30. William Moritz, "Abstract Film and Color Music," in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985 , exh. cat. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York: Abbeville, 1986), 296-311. Key documents on Pollock in California can be found in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, including interviews with Manuel Tolegian, February 12, 1965, and Frederick Schwankovsky, March 1, 1965, both by Betty Hoag. I interviewed Tony Smith in 1977 and Palmer Schoppe (an art student with Pollock in New York who visited Wilfred's studio with him) in 1985. [BACK]

31. A copy of this booklet is in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Frederick Schwankovsky papers, roll LA7, beginning at frame 754. [BACK]

32. William Moritz, "United Productions of America: Reminiscing 30 Years Later," ASIFA [Association Internationale du Film d'Animation] Canada Bulletin 12 no. 3 (December 1984): 14-22. [BACK]

1. Heyman, "Perspective on Seeing Straight," 60. [BACK]

2. In most large cities by the early 1900s amateur photography enthusiasts gathered together in camera clubs, which provided technical support, social activities, and juried exhibitions. [BACK]

3. William Mortensen, "Venus and Vulcan," Camera Craft (May 1934): 206. Mortensen contributed five installments of this article from March to July 1934. [BACK]

4. Ansel Adams, Book Review, Creative Art (May 1933): 386. [BACK]

5. The Daybooks of Edward Weston: Two Volumes in One , vol. 1, Mexico ; vol. 2, California , ed. Nancy Newhall (New York: Aperture Foundation, 1981), 2:174. [BACK]

6. Ibid., 1:8. [BACK]

7. An ardent proponent of avant-garde art, Galka Scheyer introduced European works to the Oakland area, including constructivist and abstract paintings plus works by the Blue Four; organized lectures and exhibitions; and proposed purchases to the Oakland City Council while continuing to teach at Anna Head, a private girls' school in Berkeley. [BACK]

8. Daybooks of Edward Weston , 2:151. [BACK]

9. Ibid., 2:146. [BACK]

10. Ibid., 2:147. Weston does not seem to recognize that Paul Strand had presented these ideas in his 1923 lecture to the Clarence White School. [BACK]

11. Willard Van Dyke, "Unpublished Autobiography," 52; collection of CCP, courtesy of Barbara M. Van Dyke. [BACK]

12. Ibid., 54. [BACK]

13. Willard Van Dyke, transcript of a lecture given at the Oakland Museum, July 14, 1978, 5. [BACK]

14. James Alinder, "The Preston Holder Story," Exposure 13, no. 1 (February 1975): 4. [BACK]

15. Undated letter from Willard Van Dyke to Edward Weston, envelope postmarked September 8, 1933; collection of CCP, courtesy of Barbara M. Van Dyke. See also Willard Van Dyke's introduction to Weston's 1933 show at 683 Brockhurst and his article on Dorothea Lange's documentary style, "The Photographs of Dorothea Lange," Camera Craft 41 (October 1934): 461-67. Mary Alinder believes that Adams's typewriter was the one used and that he may have been the author; in my opinion, however, Adams, in his writing style at this time, simplified and overstated for emphasis in teaching. Imogen Cunningham states unequivocally, "In the main, the person who started this was Willard. I've been told that Ansel Adams claims he started it, but I would swear on my last penny that it was Willard who did it" (University of California Oral History, Regional Cultural History Project, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, 1961, 11). This uncertainty of authorship reflects the imperfect recollections of the artists themselves; moreover, the manifesto was essentially a consensus document. [BACK]

16. Daybooks of Edward Weston , 2:246. [BACK]

17. Adams, quoted in Ira Latour, "West Coast Photography: Does It Really Exist?" Photography [London] (May 1960): 20-25. Van Dyke credits a West Coast aesthetic as the goal of his photography in a 1934 statement for his show at 683 Brockhurst. [BACK]

18. Ansel Adams, unpublished typescript statement in the collection of Amy Conger, found also in the papers of Beaumont Newhall. This four-page piece appears to have been a draft to introduce the f.64 show at Adams's Geary Street gallery. [BACK]

19. San Francisco Chronicle , November 27, 1932, Music and Art Section. [BACK]

20. The Seattle Times announced the Group f.64 exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum on October 1, 1933, in the Art Museum column. [BACK]

21. Review, Spectator 54, no. 13 (November 4, 1933): 16. Naomi Rosenblum points out that "objective" is the very word Strand used in 1917 to discuss the new realist style. [BACK]

22. The Mills College exhibition, February 11-28, 1934, included work by Lavenson, Cunningham, Van Dyke, Adams, and Weston, as well as Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White. It was reviewed in "A Record of Actuality," San Francisco Argonaut , March 8, 1934. [BACK]

23. Undated letter from Edward Weston to Willard Van Dyke, envelope postmarked January 27, 1933; collection of CCP, courtesy of Barbara M. Van Dyke. "The f.64 exhibition shows up well at Denny-Watrous. They wish to give us another (free) week, O.K.?" He adds, "I do not want to hold up the group." [BACK]

24. Sigismund Blumann, "The F.64 Group Exhibition," Camera Craft 40 (May 1933): 199-200. [BACK]

25. Albert Jourdan, "Sidelight #16: The Impurities of Purism," American Photography 29 (June 1935): 348-56. [BACK]

26. John Paul Edwards, "Group f 64," Camera Craft 42 (March 1935): 107-12. [BACK]

27. Roger Sturtevant, transcript of interview on his collection and on Dorothea Lange (with whom he shared a studio at one time), the Oakland Museum, February 1977, 1-5. Although Sturtevant was unable to locate this set of pictures at the time he gave his photographic archive to the Oakland Museum, I have seen some of them in Michael Wilson's collection and also at the J. Paul Getty Museum. [BACK]

28. Van Dyke, "Autobiography," 32. [BACK]

29. Ibid., 50. [BACK]

30. Statement printed on the 683 gallery stationery; courtesy of Barbara M. Van Dyke. [BACK]

31. Camera Club Notes, Camera Craft 40 (September 1933): 388. [BACK]

32. Van Dyke, "Autobiography," 50. Curiously, the word "Salon" suggests the pictorial tradition they wanted to leave behind. [BACK]

33. Ibid., 48. Although Van Dyke writes of this period, Naomi Rosenblum told me about another account of Van Dyke's decision to leave the Shell Company and commit himself to photography, one that was related by William Alexander in Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 130-44. In that interview Alexander notes that Van Dyke was radicalized when, after trying to organize a union at Shell, he was forced to choose between working a sixty-hour week and losing his job. Recently, when he compiled material for his autobiography, Van Dyke recalled the influence of Edward Weston; it is likely that both Weston and the circumstances at Shell led to his choosing photography. [BACK]

34. Laverne Mae Dicker, "Laura Adams Armer, California Photographer," California Historical Society Quarterly (Summer 1977): 139. [BACK]

35. Imogen Cunningham, University of California Oral History, Regional Cultural History Project, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, 100-104. [BACK]

36. Daybooks of Edward Weston , 2:4. Imogen Cunningham papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, no roll number. [BACK]

37. Daybooks of Edward Weston , 2:141. Years later Noskowiak moved away and worked for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Public Works of Art Project. [BACK]

38. The letters Consuelo Kanaga wrote to Albert Bender, in the Bender Collection, Mills College Library, Oakland, generally refer to her mental state, not her photographic activities. I am grateful to Barbara Millstein of the Brooklyn Museum, curator of the 1992 Kanaga exhibition and author of the accompanying catalogue, for suggesting this source to me as well as sharing many of her valuable insights on Kanaga. [BACK]

39. "A Visit with Consuelo Kanaga, from the Icehouse," Camera 35 (December 1972): 53. Kanaga recalled beginning in photography at the San Francisco Chronicle : "When I started on the newspaper, I learned just the fundamentals of printing and developing; no nuances. Everything had to be sharp, etched on the glass plates. The editor would look up and down the row to see the sharp cut line. And, if anything wasn't so sharp he'd say, 'what's the matter, losing your eyesight?'" Then, with her interest in photography whetted, she joined the California Camera Club, where she met many "wonderful" people, including Dorothea Lange, the innovative documentary photographer of San Francisco depression-era street scenes. Lange later described Kanaga as ''unconventional with great courage and an ability to go anywhere and do anything" (interview with Dorothea Lange by S. Reiss, University of California Oral History, Regional Cultural History Project, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, 1968, 87). [BACK]

40. See Susan Ehrens, Alma Lavenson: Photographs (Berkeley, Calif.: Wildwood Arts, 1990), 5. [BACK]

41. Ibid., 90. [BACK]

42. Ibid., 4. [BACK]

43. Charis Wilson, in "Founders of Photography" symposium transcript, the Oakland Museum, March 9, 1986, 9. [BACK]

44. Imogen Cunningham, lecture at the Oakland Museum, 1974, author's notes. [BACK]

45. Wilson, in "Founders of Photography," 2. [BACK]

46. Ibid. [BACK]

47. Ibid., 5. [BACK]

48. Daybooks of Edward Weston , 2: 267. [BACK]

49. Ibid., 2:243. [BACK]

50. Ibid. [BACK]

51. For a compelling discussion of the breakup, see Michel Oren, "On the Impurity of Group f. 64 Photography," History of Photography (Summer 1991): 119-27. [BACK]

52. Letter from Mary Jeannette Edwards to Edward Weston, undated but probably 1935; Edward Weston Archive, collection of CCP. [BACK]

53. Letter from Mary Jeannette Edwards to Edward Weston, August 3, 1935; collection of CCP. [BACK]

54. Imogen Cunningham, quoted in Latour, "West Coast Photography" (as in note 17), 62. [BACK]

1. In particular, see Joseph Armstrong Baird, Jr., Northern California Art: An Interpretive Bibliography (privately published, 1977); James D. Hart, A Companion to California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 579-91; Nancy D. W. Moure, Dictionary of Art and Artists in Southern California before 1930 (Los Angeles: privately printed, 1975), xv-xix; Caroline A. Jones, Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950-1965 (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 182-91; Edan Milton Hughes, Artists in California , 2d ed. (San Francisco: Hughes Publishing Company, 1989), 3-10; Bonnie Clearwater, ed., West Coast Duchamp (Miami Beach, Fla.: Grassfield Press, 1991), 102-5; Bram Dijkstra et al., San Diego Artists (Encinitas, Calif.: Artra Publishing, 1988), 11-23. Additionally, Whitney Chadwick generously shared an unpublished chronology of surrealist activity in California with me, for which I am grateful. [BACK]

2. The numerous contributions of Kevin Starr merit special mention here, in particular Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). This chronology also draws upon the following sources: Richard Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Steven A. Nash, Facing Eden: 100 Years of Landscape Art in the Bay Area (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Patricia Trenton, ed., Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Pacific Dream,: Currents of Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art, 1934-1957 , ed. Susan Ehrlich (Los Angeles: UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 1995); Burton Benedict The Anthropology of World's Fairs: San Francisco's Panama Pacific International Exposition of 191?? (Berkeley: Scolar Press, 1983); Ruth Lilly Westphal, ed., Plein Air Painters of California: The Southland (Irvine, Calif.: Westphal Publishing, 1982), and Plein Air Painters of California: The North (Irvine, Calif.: Westphal Publishing, 1986); John Russell Taylor, Strangers in Paradise (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983); Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich, Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists, 1920-1956 (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1990); Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980: An Illustrated History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986); David Gebhard and Harriette von Breton, L.A. in the 1930s, 1931-1941 (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1975); Sally B. Woodbridge, California Architecture (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1988); Peter Plagens, Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974); Henry T. Hopkins, Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1977); Christina Orr-Cahall, ed., The Art of California: Selected Works from the Collection of the Oakland Museum (Oakland Museum, 1984); Susan M. Anderson, Regionalism: The California View (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1988); Laurence P. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989); Paolo Polledri, ed., Visionary San Francisco (Munich: Prestel, 1990); Patricia Trenton and William H. Gerdts, eds., California Light, 1900-1930 (Laguna Beach Art Museum, 1990); Rebecca Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era (San Francisco: City Lights, 1990); Therese Thau Heyman, ed., Seeing Straight: The f.64 Revolution in Photography (Oakland, Calif.: Oakland Museum, and Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992); Thomas Weston Fels, Therese Heyman, David Travis, and Derrick Cartwright, Watkins to Weston: 101 Years of California Photography (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1992); Jonathan Spaulding, Ansel Adams and the American Landscape (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); and Susan Landaner, The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press; and Laguna Beach, Calif.: Laguna Art Museum, 1996). [BACK]