Made in California: Art.

Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity,

1900-2000

The looks Angeles County Museum of Art

looks Angeles, California

October 22 2000-February 25 2001

Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity.

1900-2000

edited by means of Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein

and Ilene Susan Fort

Berkeley: University of California Pres 2000

351 pp/$4000 (sb) $6000 (hb)

Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity 1900-2000" is single of the most ambitious exhibitions single in kind can imagine. California is with equal reason huge, its population so diverse and its influence to such a degree great that the idea of a exhibit attempting to critically organize 100 years of artmaking appears unimaginable--but the Los Angeles shire Museum of Art (LACMA) has done just that. Since 1994 the museum's curators have been assembling and organizing the region's overwhelming artistic and cultural output and have be built uped a very interesting, albeit frustrating, exhibition.

The idea that anyone could digest like a massive amount of artwork and cultural ephemera is ridiculous, if it were not that to their credit, the curators have systematically separated the exhibition into five separate displays each covering a 20-year duration. Each two-decade period is assigned an overarching theme giving it a broad historical overview while serving to limit and liquefy the curatorial scope. One puzzle present throughout the exhibition is the lack of explanatory sentence for individual works, especially those that are not well known. The exhibition is accompanied by means of a beautiful catalog that will continue to inform extended after the show has clos allowing an in-depth reading and contemplation of this immense delineate The catalog provides a general overview with about discussion of individual works, however unfortunately the lesser-known pieces are somewhat explanationed over and suffer from the omission. The real vigor of the catalog lies in the crack essays by Sheri Bernstein and Howard Fox and the insightful and e ntertaining opus according to Richard Rodriguez. The writings chronicle the century's artmaking in a for the greatest part linear fashion, helping to clarify the overwhelming enslave matter. The Rodriguez piece is by dint of itself wonderful and, like thus much artwork from California, it is the pair highly personal and yet speaks to our shared American cultural experience.

Section common was "Selling California 1900-1920." The century's first sum of two units decades were marked by a population explosion that was to a large station encouraged and funded by railroad and real estate interests. The Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads sponsored trips to southern California for artists in exchange for scenic photographs and paintings that were then exhibited in the companies' rail stations across the fatherland A tradition of imagery emphasizing natural beauty was promot on Pictorialist photographers and the "California Impressionist" plein air painters, whose work was in commercial demand. The rising Arts and Crafts manner of moving further encouraged outsiders to view California as an eden of protestant work ethic values--rugged individualism and handcraftsmanship versus the eclecticism and industrialization of the East Coast. Southern California was a predominately heterogeneous region, reflecting the ethnic make-up of mid-western states. These sum of two units major aspects of California--immense, untamed natur al beauty and a homogenous, white population--provided the major thrust of the popular depiction of the state.

Imagery in Section single in kind included the dreamy Pictorial landscape photography of Anne Brigman, Karl Struss and others. Brigman's The secluded Pine (c. 1908) epitomizes this photographic mode of expression The image shows a wind-swept pine bending painfully over a rocky precipice. A bare woman is sitting at the base of the tree and leaning with it, her head nestl in her arm in a soft-focus allegory of humankind bending to the will of the natural world. This work is contrasted with the documentary photographs of Arnold Genthe whose golden-toned images portray the everyday, albeit exotic, world of San Francisco's Chinese community. over the exhibition are display cases of ephemera as it is as orange crate labels and postcards depicting California's wealthy agriculture. A preponderance of uniformly unpopulated nature paintings by means of California Impressionists Granville Redmond, stay Rose, William Wendt and others further encourage the idea of California as a place of lay open unspoiled land with great potential and prosperity.

Section sum of two units was entitled "Contested Eden 1920-1940" through 1920 Los Angeles had become California's largest city and with that distinction came the urban point in disputes familiar to other big American cities. Massive immigration from Mexico, China and Japan created tensions with the now-established former mid-westerners. Images of urban California, which had been relatively rare before, became more belonging to all and the rise of Modernism brought a sharper edg pattern and contemporary subject matter to art made after 1920 The geometric designs and architecture of Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler and the paintings of urban life from Phil Dyke, Diego Rivera, Millard Sheets and Bernard Zakheim overtook the Arts and Crafts and plein air phraseologys in contemporary art.