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The Mating Dance of LA Arts and Architecture: 1900s-1950s

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The Los Angeles arts were forged in this furnace at the beginning of the 20th century.  A spectrum of artistic engagement grew up in the midst of upheavals throughout the century.  Every strand of artistic engagement was implicated in some way with the string of crises and conflicts of this half-century era:  The Mexican Revolution in 1910, the Great War; the Russian Revolution of 1917; the First Red Scare of 1919-23; the Boom of the 1920s; the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Second World War.  Each of these conflicts took a specific shape in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles shaped those global conflicts as a weighty contributing actor.  By the end of this half-century, a mighty  metropolis had emerged as a military-industrial suburban landscape, clothed in the aesthetic of Modernism, which had been tamed, commercialized, commodified, and corrupted.  The new rebellion to this aesthetic power would arise at mid-century, which is the story of the following essay.

The "arts" in this period can be divided between dominant and oppositional: The most visible where the regime-supporting arts aligned with the massive investment in promoting the region for in-migration and real estate development.  On the other side were a series of alternative, modernist, independent movements, what can be seen as an avant garde. The relationship between these two poles of right and left, of conservatism and radicalism, were complex and even symbiotic.  The ruling class of any era and its artistic avant garde engage in an ironic "mating dance" (Tom Wolfe's memorable metaphor) in which the most innovative artists seek and depend on the patronage of the wealthy strata--those most invested in the status quo.  Thus, many alternative, rebellious artistic movements are co-opted and tamed by the status quo, and this principle can be extended to the mass media, which has a voracious appetite for innovation.  

This page has paths:

  1. The Fine Art of Rebellion: Southern California Avant-Gardes, 1900-2000 Phil Ethington
  2. structured media gallery test Curtis Fletcher
  3. Narrative Essays Phil Ethington

Contents of this path:

  1. Art and Industrial Oligarchy, 1880-1915
  2. Progressives, Socialists, Synchromists in Revolutionary Los Angeles
  3. From Vienna to Chicago to Los Angeles: The Formation of Southern California Modernism, 1890s-1920s
  4. Taking Place: Mexico and the Counterrevolution in Los Angeles in the 1920s
  5. The Bohemian Left in the 1920s
  6. Enter Julius Shulman and John Entenza: Arts & Architecture in the 1930s-1940s
  7. Cold War Consumer Landscapes: Of Suburbs, Grocery Stores and Shopping Malls, 1930s-1950s

This page has tags:

  1. 1950s Phil Ethington