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• 1 2018-07-19T21:58:38-07:00 Progressives, Socialists, Synchromists in Revolutionary Los Angeles 4 plain 2018-12-10T19:13:38-08:00 The arts and architecture in Los Angeles have always expressed the political alliances of the day.  Artists of all kinds, and architects--who are a blend of artist, engineer, and urban planner--have been participants in all of the cultural movements and power struggles in each regime. 
  
  The Arroyo-based "Boosters" created an aesthetic of Anti-Modernism for their patrons, the ruling Anglos of the Otis-Chandler regime.  This story is about artists and architects on the political-cultural left, and how they made oppositional places in Los Angeles through their participation in the revolutionary decades of the 1910s, 20s, and 30s US-Mexican Borderland. 
  
  At the periphery of the dominant Mission Revival aesthetic of the Booster's promotional propaganda, a series of fragmented but vigorous critical, "Progressive," socialist, feminist, modernist arts movements took place in the region. These were European- and East Coast-inspired avant-garde artists who "shadowed," in Sarah Schrank's words, the official Southern California Booster art regime.[note] 
  
  To identify with an avant-garde in the first decades of the 20th century also meant an embrace of modernism, which sought not only new forms of art (in all forms, visual, musical, literary) and even to transform culture and society. A bewildering variety of such avant-gardes branched apart, associated (or not) with scores of political ideologies, including anarchism, socialism, liberalism, communism, and fascism, and hundreds of varieties within those labels.
  
  In the United States, the mainstream left in culture and politics called themselves “progressives,” a term that usually overlapped with social democracy and feminism. In spite of the first Red Scare repression of 1917-21, and the disillusionment caused by the Great War itself, “progressive” arts and politics survived and even thrived in 1920s Los Angeles, aided by the emigration of many talented Europeans, and by the attractions of the rapidly expanding motion picture business, which was always hungry for creative artists of all kinds: writers, composers, performers, and of course visual artists.[note]
  
  Despite the dominance of right-wing Harrison Gray Otis and his allies, a Left did thrive in Pasadena.
  
  In architecture, the most important exception to the Craftsman craze was the work of the architect Irving Gill (1870-1936), who practically invented rectilinear modernism by himself from the model of the Spanish-Mexican adobe, prior to its independent arrival via Vienna and Frank Lloyd Wright’s students [note].
  
  Among the reformers in Pasadena were socialists and feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who was associated with Edward Bellamy’s “nationalist” clubs. They exchanged ideas about the coming reform of western society and
  
  one of the most important architectural landmarks in Los Angeles grew from this milieu: the Bradbury Building (George Wyman, 1893).
  
  Wyman’s daring design was inspired by the socialist utopia envisioned in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1889).
  
  Bellamy’s futuristic novel envisioned large apartment complexes with cooperative child care and cooking facilities that would allow women to pursue careers.
  
  Gilman’s leading argument as a founder of modern feminism: the structure of gendered work relations needed to change in order for women to win true equality. [note]
  
  The first fine-arts avant garde emerged in a decidedly Downtown context: the Art Student’s League, founded by a circle of regional Impressionists who also founded the California Art Club in the same year, 1906—the year of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. The organizers were Hanson Puthoff, trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the LA Times’s new art critic, Anthony Anderson.
  
  Puthoff, whose work is not well remembered on the global stage, did not innovate beyond a regional adaptation of Euro-American Impressionism to Southern California.
  
  adapted of Impressionism to the Southern California landscape, they welcomed more experimentation in the Art Student’s League, modeled after the original, in New York City, which had produced several strong innovations. These founding influences, Chicago, San Francisco and New York City, are typical of the implantation of new institutions in a new metropolis.
  
  Those institutions took place on the top two floors of the Blanchard Music and Art Building, (1899) at 233 South Broadway.
  
  The League moved again to 115 N. Main St and then to space on Spring Street, between Second and Third Sts, above the Lyceum Theater.[note]
  
  An important influence to emerge from the League was Stanton Macdonald-Wright,  one of the first Art Student’s League alumni. Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell had founded “Synchromism—an abstract painting movement based on the analogy between color and music—in Paris in 1913. The movement gained attention there and later in New York, where Macdonald-Wright became affiliated with Alfred Stieglitz and his legendary 291 Gallery.” Macdonald-Wright returned to Los Angeles in 1920, teaching at the Art Students League, and in 1923 becoming its director. Known for his “fiery rhetoric, aggressive intellectual probing, and sheer artistic talent,” MacDonald was also an institutional force, later a major regional presence as director the New Deal Arts program in the 1930s. Cross-pollination with the motion picture industry began immediately. The future director John Huston (1906-1987) studied at the League under Macdonald-Wright in 1923 and credited him with his “experimentalist” influence. [note]
  
  Modernists and “progressives” in the arts and politics at the beginning of the 20th century emerged from a Downtown milieu that was a wide-open profusion of race-ethnic diversity, class confrontations, heady Socialist “street speaking,” and appalling police repression. The Los Angeles City Council, frightened by the strength of the Left in the Downtown “red wards” and on the central public spaces of La Placita and Central Park, passed a series of ordinances blocking-off scores of blocks as “no speech zones,” spaces where naked class power literally suspended the First Amendment.[note]
  
  The socialists, feminists, and other reformers on the left enjoyed their headiest moment in 1911 when Socialist Job Harriman looked like the probable winner in that year’s mayoral election. Until, that is, the McNamara Brothers confessed to the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times and destroyed the credibility of Harriman’s campaign, leading to a crushing defeat for the Left in Los Angeles. Despite, or perhaps because of the extreme anti-left atmosphere that overtook Los Angeles during and after the Great War, progressives of many stripes settled again in Los Angeles during the 1920s, still hopeful of creating democratic movements to overcome the many injustices in this booming metropolis and beyond.