Beaux-Arts Revival
Witness to Metropolitan Growth
Like the Hollywood studio moguls, Hugo Ballin came to Los Angeles from New York City thinking that it offered an empty social and cultural terrain where he could realize his ambitions as an artist. He bought a Mediterranean style home in the Pacific Palisades an undeveloped, unincorporated area that at the time of his arrival looked more like the Tuscan countryside of Florence where he had trained as a young artist than the industrial metropolis he left behind. There he hoped to build his career as a filmmaker, bring his classical, refined style of painting to new audiences, and become an artistic and cultural luminary like the Renaissance masters he so admired. But Ballin could not anticipate how dramatically Los Angeles would change during the course of his life there. In the two decades after he moved to Los Angeles in 1920, Southern California’s economy, population, and physical geography grew faster than any other region in the United States. The explosive growth continued through the years of World War Two and into the postwar era, and the once pastoral area in which he settled was soon filled with houses and surrounded by sprawling suburban communities. Ballin, who had left the metropolis of New York to seek a new life in pastoral Los Angeles, had watched a metropolis grow up around him over the course of his life there.
Evolution of American Art
Ballin could also not have anticipated how much American art would change over the course of his career. Although he achieved precocious success in New York, the Beaux-Arts movement in which he came of age quickly went out of style as young artists began to experiment with more modern forms and techniques eager to reflect the dynamic changes occurring in American society. Ballin’s choice to pursue a career in film may indeed have been a way to avoid the trend towards modernism, allowing him to experiment with a new medium and bring his art to new audiences without fundamentally changing his classical style. Ballin remained committed to the “pre-Rafaelite” painting style that had earned him so much acclaim as a young artist throughout his career, but as this exhibit has shown, his experiences in Los Angeles did slowly and subtly change his ideas about art and audience. His work as a set designer and filmmaker left an enduring impact on his career as a painter, changing the way he constructed his pieces. The 1920s boom prompted him to change the way he used allegory in his work, abandoning the idealized female figures that he had featured so prominently in his early work in favor of more dynamic, “monumental men.” And despite his vocal critiques of the trend towards “eclectic public modernism,” he increasingly emphasized Southern California’s multiethnic heritage and celebrated the contributions of everyday Americans in his murals.
Comparing Ballin’s first murals in the Executive Chamber of the Wisconsin State Capitol in 1912 to those he painted thirty years later in Burbank City Hall captures the subtle shift in his style over the course of his career. The centerpiece of his murals in the Capitol was the panel, “The Spirit of Wisconsin,” featured five allegorical figures positioned on a single plane, each representative of the qualities that had been crucial to the state’s development and success. In The “Four Freedoms” mural in the City Council Chamber, by contrast, Ballin featured multiple figures on multiple planes and scales to create dimension and depth. Whereas the “Spirit of Wisconsin” used an idealized female figure to represent the state and other allegorical figures to represent “her attributes,” Ballin’s “Four Freedoms” mural featured everyday Americans to illustrate the freedoms “put into practice in everyday experience.” Although there are many similarities between the two pieces - most notably their lustrous color - and each conveyed a patriotic version of history that complemented the civic purposes of the institutions in which they were housed, they also reveal the progression of Ballin’s mural painting style.
Ballin's final commissions
Ballin continued to work prodigiously until his death in 1956, but returned to the ancient stories and classical motifs that had made him a rising star of the Beaux-Arts movement as a young man. In 1940, Ballin was awarded the National Academy of Design’s Thomas B. Clarke Prize for his work, “The Deposition,” which depicted Christ being removed from the cross, the same prize he had won some thirty-five years earlier as a young man. He continued to explore biblical stories and Christian motifs in commissions at the Carew Chapel in San Francisco and the Woodlawn Mausoleum in Santa Monica, where he told the story of Christ's life and death in a series of frescos, each of which complemented the imported Italian marble and granite featured throughout the interior of the building. He was hired by the City of Santa Monica to paint a mural for the lobby of their art museum and again by the City of Burbank in 1948 to paint a mural at their new Public Service Department Administration Building. Over the course of his career, Ballin he worked on over 100 films and published a dozen novels including The Woman at the Door, The Broken Key, and Dolce Far Niente, a satirical portrait of Santa Barbara society. When died of natural causes at the age of seventy-seven, he was in the process of painting murals for a Catholic Church in Hermosa Beach.
Like the Hollywood studio moguls, Hugo Ballin came to Los Angeles from New York City thinking that it offered an empty social and cultural terrain where he could realize his ambitions as an artist. He bought a Mediterranean style home in the Pacific Palisades an undeveloped, unincorporated area that at the time of his arrival looked more like the Tuscan countryside of Florence where he had trained as a young artist than the industrial metropolis he left behind. There he hoped to build his career as a filmmaker, bring his classical, refined style of painting to new audiences, and become an artistic and cultural luminary like the Renaissance masters he so admired. But Ballin could not anticipate how dramatically Los Angeles would change during the course of his life there. In the two decades after he moved to Los Angeles in 1920, Southern California’s economy, population, and physical geography grew faster than any other region in the United States. The explosive growth continued through the years of World War Two and into the postwar era, and the once pastoral area in which he settled was soon filled with houses and surrounded by sprawling suburban communities. Ballin, who had left the metropolis of New York to seek a new life in pastoral Los Angeles, had watched a metropolis grow up around him over the course of his life there.
Evolution of American Art
Ballin could also not have anticipated how much American art would change over the course of his career. Although he achieved precocious success in New York, the Beaux-Arts movement in which he came of age quickly went out of style as young artists began to experiment with more modern forms and techniques eager to reflect the dynamic changes occurring in American society. Ballin’s choice to pursue a career in film may indeed have been a way to avoid the trend towards modernism, allowing him to experiment with a new medium and bring his art to new audiences without fundamentally changing his classical style. Ballin remained committed to the “pre-Rafaelite” painting style that had earned him so much acclaim as a young artist throughout his career, but as this exhibit has shown, his experiences in Los Angeles did slowly and subtly change his ideas about art and audience. His work as a set designer and filmmaker left an enduring impact on his career as a painter, changing the way he constructed his pieces. The 1920s boom prompted him to change the way he used allegory in his work, abandoning the idealized female figures that he had featured so prominently in his early work in favor of more dynamic, “monumental men.” And despite his vocal critiques of the trend towards “eclectic public modernism,” he increasingly emphasized Southern California’s multiethnic heritage and celebrated the contributions of everyday Americans in his murals.
Comparing Ballin’s first murals in the Executive Chamber of the Wisconsin State Capitol in 1912 to those he painted thirty years later in Burbank City Hall captures the subtle shift in his style over the course of his career. The centerpiece of his murals in the Capitol was the panel, “The Spirit of Wisconsin,” featured five allegorical figures positioned on a single plane, each representative of the qualities that had been crucial to the state’s development and success. In The “Four Freedoms” mural in the City Council Chamber, by contrast, Ballin featured multiple figures on multiple planes and scales to create dimension and depth. Whereas the “Spirit of Wisconsin” used an idealized female figure to represent the state and other allegorical figures to represent “her attributes,” Ballin’s “Four Freedoms” mural featured everyday Americans to illustrate the freedoms “put into practice in everyday experience.” Although there are many similarities between the two pieces - most notably their lustrous color - and each conveyed a patriotic version of history that complemented the civic purposes of the institutions in which they were housed, they also reveal the progression of Ballin’s mural painting style.
Ballin's final commissions
Ballin continued to work prodigiously until his death in 1956, but returned to the ancient stories and classical motifs that had made him a rising star of the Beaux-Arts movement as a young man. In 1940, Ballin was awarded the National Academy of Design’s Thomas B. Clarke Prize for his work, “The Deposition,” which depicted Christ being removed from the cross, the same prize he had won some thirty-five years earlier as a young man. He continued to explore biblical stories and Christian motifs in commissions at the Carew Chapel in San Francisco and the Woodlawn Mausoleum in Santa Monica, where he told the story of Christ's life and death in a series of frescos, each of which complemented the imported Italian marble and granite featured throughout the interior of the building. He was hired by the City of Santa Monica to paint a mural for the lobby of their art museum and again by the City of Burbank in 1948 to paint a mural at their new Public Service Department Administration Building. Over the course of his career, Ballin he worked on over 100 films and published a dozen novels including The Woman at the Door, The Broken Key, and Dolce Far Niente, a satirical portrait of Santa Barbara society. When died of natural causes at the age of seventy-seven, he was in the process of painting murals for a Catholic Church in Hermosa Beach.
Ballin also continued to express his distaste for the work of his peers until the end of his career. In 1949, he wrote a castigating manifesto about the “Insanity in Modern Art” for Design magazine in which he declared that “much that is classified as ‘modern art’ isn’t art at all.” His essay was paired with another by Eduard Buk-Ulreich, also a European-trained American mural artist, who praised the “reorientation” occurring in American art as a marker of progress “toward a new renaissance.” Ballin, by contrast, argued that, “every representational art from that hour of Romanesque and Gothic grace was an attempt at realism” and that the turn towards Abstract, Primitive and Surrealist styles had resulted from artists who went on an “aesthetic binge of resentment.” These inferior talents, Ballin claimed:
“… went berserk. They were going to set the art world on fire. They cared nothing for heritage, skill or refinement. They could not be logical. They had not been trained in any way. They could not do anything as well as it had been done. They were going to shout that realism had had its day and was over.”
Instead of seeing the new styles of painting that emerged over the course of his career as innovative, original or progressive, Ballin described modern art as a “contemptible racket” and welcomed the “complete downfall of those demented unrealities of Picasso and his cohorts.”1 Ballin would likely have been outraged to know that Picasso spent the 1950s painting reinterpretations of classic works by Goya, Velazquez and other Renaissance masters.
Embedded in Ballin’s disdainful critique of “The Insanity in Modern Art” was a defense of his enduring commitment to his classical training and his own unwillingness to adapt his style in his forty-plus years as a professional artist. That defensiveness, in combination with return to his Beaux-Arts roots in his later works, gives credence to the notion that Ballin never changed, that his artistic style and the hierarchical ideals about art, taste and culture that he expressed in the early days as an artist remained unaltered over the course of his career. But Hugo Ballin was not entirely aloof to contemporary trends; indeed, for ten years he abandoned his career as a painter to work in the more popular, trendy medium of film. As this exhibit has shown, his years in Los Angeles and the work of other artists there did have an impact on his evolution as an artist and the subtle changes in his style in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Undoubtedly, those subtle shifts were in part the result of pragmatic choices he made to please his commissioners: as his source of patronage shifted from wealthy elites to film goers to corporate sponsors to the public art programs of the New Deal, Ballin adapted his artistic style accordingly. But after achieving acclaim at such a young age, Ballin also worked throughout his career to retain his prestige in the art world, the subtle shifts in his style also part on his ongoing quest to reconcile his classical training with emergent artistic trends so that he could maintain his reputation as a leader among American artists.
Embedded in Ballin’s disdainful critique of “The Insanity in Modern Art” was a defense of his enduring commitment to his classical training and his own unwillingness to adapt his style in his forty-plus years as a professional artist. That defensiveness, in combination with return to his Beaux-Arts roots in his later works, gives credence to the notion that Ballin never changed, that his artistic style and the hierarchical ideals about art, taste and culture that he expressed in the early days as an artist remained unaltered over the course of his career. But Hugo Ballin was not entirely aloof to contemporary trends; indeed, for ten years he abandoned his career as a painter to work in the more popular, trendy medium of film. As this exhibit has shown, his years in Los Angeles and the work of other artists there did have an impact on his evolution as an artist and the subtle changes in his style in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Undoubtedly, those subtle shifts were in part the result of pragmatic choices he made to please his commissioners: as his source of patronage shifted from wealthy elites to film goers to corporate sponsors to the public art programs of the New Deal, Ballin adapted his artistic style accordingly. But after achieving acclaim at such a young age, Ballin also worked throughout his career to retain his prestige in the art world, the subtle shifts in his style also part on his ongoing quest to reconcile his classical training with emergent artistic trends so that he could maintain his reputation as a leader among American artists.
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