ART REVIEW : A Socially Relevant Look at 1920s L.A.

The news media term the present economic turn-down a recession. In private, numerous citizens are inclined to cast it as a full-blown if low-level depression.

That is just one of several reasons why the Laguna Art Museum’s new exhibition seems particularly pertinent. Titled “Dream and Perspective: The American Scene in Southern California 1930-1945,” it shows how local art reacted to the era of the Great Depression.

The show is laced together with some 90 works by 43 artists whose names will give a gulp to nostalgic watchers and cock a puzzled eyebrow in the blank memories of those born yesterday. Who were Millard Sheets, Barse Miller, Phil Dike and Dan Lutz anyway? Whether half-forgotten or semi-remembered, these local heroes of the epoch had things in common with today’s artists.

They thought the times were too troubled to allow them the luxury of making art for its own sake. They rejected the reigning European modernist aesthetic in favor of something they thought would speak to the common folk--the Regionalism of Thomas Hart Benton and that crowd. They wanted something socially relevant.

When the great muralists Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueros worked here in the 1930s, the home boys were galvanized. Here was revolutionary art that had moved the masses of revolutionary Mexico. It was for them. Mexican artists like Jean Charlot and Alfred Ramos Martinez spread the word. Locals like Philip Guston (ne Goldstein) listened. When they tried applying their social consciences to the painting of government-sponsored WPA murals, it got them in trouble. Fletcher Martin’s proletarian “Mine Workers” was designed for a post office and rejected. Official muzzling of free artistic expression was on the march. Sounds familiar. No wonder Guston turned to abstraction.

The collective style the faithful came up with is now widely regarded as a slightly risible period piece. But when you try to imagine the way the world must have felt in that misery-encrusted time, the way they depicted it seems surprisingly apt. It was a distorted period.

They looked at the landscape and it was sunnier, cleaner and more laid back than is in these chaotic times. Loren Barton could still title his painting “Sunny Day at Balboa” with a straight face. Charles Payzant could watercolor a Wilshire Boulevard still low, gracious and optimistic with a zingy drive-in in the foreground and Bullocks Wilshire looming with easy majesty. Artists like Rex Brandt liked rural scenes that gave you that feeling of nature going its own way despite humankind’s troubles. Nothing upsets the surf or those languorous ocher hills between here and Santa Barbara.

But there is tension between uneasy human feeling and the fact that everything looks perfectly normal. In the painting, it comes out as a kind of general griminess in the atmosphere. Figures are exaggerated and a trifle grotesque, acting as people do under stress. Pleasure has a forced edge and relaxation dribbles off into mild anxiety.

If there is a masterpiece in this exhibition it is surely Sheets’ “Angel’s Flight,” a smartly realized composition looking down a series of tenement balconies at the steep path winding up the famous slope. Two attractive young women loll, dominating the composition. They don’t exactly look like hookers but everything about the tawdry scene makes you feel that part of their thoughts drift toward the idea of turning a trick to get a good dinner.

The same aura creeps over Phil Paradise’s nude “The Blue Kimono” and Elsie Palmer Payne’s empathic look at a black woman standing at a bus stop in dignified isolation. Racial incidents spread from L.A. to Orange County. You do a double take when you see the scene of Japanese Americans being loaded on buses for internment.

Mostly everything looks normal and respectable. Humor flourishes in Miller’s “Apparition Over Los Angeles,” a wonderful sendup of baroque religious painting showing evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson hovering over her Angelus Temple in Echo Park. Ben Messick’s wittily designed “Chess Players” looks like the old days in Westlake Park. Paradise’s “East 5th” is a Hopperesque scene of grizzled guys sitting around the lobby of a Skid Row hotel. They look a lot less dog-eared than the victims of our current epidemic of homelessness.

It must have been nicer then. Just look at Lee Blair’s railroad underpass with a river flowing beneath. Who are those people under the bridge? Don’t they have anywhere else to go? At that, it’s a prettier setting than the ones seen by today’s immigrant kids who live under freeway overpasses.

Like people anywhere, any time, these artists kept trying to tell themselves that maybe everything was going to be OK. After all, many of them came here from harder-hit parts of the country to find the promised land of Hollywood.

They weren’t alone. European artists came pouring in too, looking for film work. Phil Dike became Disney’s first color consultant. Funny. The woozy distortions of his own landscapes fit right into his designs for some of the scarier scenes in “Fantasia.” These artists didn’t really avoid Modernism, they just spontaneously joined the Expressionist branch. As to finding Valhalla in Hollywood, Edward Biberman reminds us of the strikes and Red-baiting of the time in “Water Hoses and Tear Gas.”

The exhibition was organized by curator Susan Anderson. It doesn’t have a catalogue, but not to worry. It appears in conjunction with the publishing of a chunky book on the subject, “American Scene Painting: California, 1930s and 1940s” (Westphal Publishing). That suggests another level of importance for this worthy exhibition.

Maybe Lotusland is finally going to overcome its reputation for lacking a sense of history. This exhibition is just one of a growing number of modest but significant shows that have been probing our artistic past from the Laguna Beach Permanent Wave Painters to the Cool School of the ‘60s.

In the end, that’s about a big city going through a late adolescent identity crisis, probing its past to try to understand its future.