The curriculum hardly sounds radical. But in a period when the norm was pretty, picturesque landscape paintings derived from decades-old French precedents, the infusion of a grittier Realism, akin to New York's Ashcan School, spoke to an incipient refusal of establishment codes.
Rex Slinkard's large, untitled male nude is the most arresting picture from the show's earliest period -- an erotic composition rendered in sensuous slathers of oil paint. Impressionist it's not.
Slinkard was extravagantly talented, but his death at age 30 in the 1918 influenza pandemic cut short a potentially influential career. Enter Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Returning to L.A. from Paris after making some of the first fully abstract paintings by an American artist, he became the school's director.
Macdonald-Wright was its most historically memorable instructor, at least until his Parisian colleague Morgan Russell arrived for a brief tenure in 1931, and Lorser Feitelson began classes in 1932. In Paris in the early teens, Macdonald-Wright and Russell concocted a form of rhythmic abstraction in which pure color was the visual equivalent of music and sound. A muscular drawing style derived from Michelangelo provided the armature -- and an unnecessary, even distracting historical pedigree.
In Los Angeles the emphasis on color assumed a more personal, often dynamic role.
The Symbolist undercurrent that runs through early American Modern art strove for distinctive individual expression. Chromatic splendor fit that bill. Nicholas Brigante's 1931 "Porcelain and Oranges" -- perhaps the most beautiful in the exhibition -- is emblematic.
Like Cezanne, Brigante created a tabletop still life that echoes a natural landscape, while arranging fruit, napkins, a vase, two porcelain Foo dogs and other elements to open a Cubist space of shifting planes. Luxurious color carries the work, seamlessly uniting its disparate parts. The checkered table runners, in complementary violet and golden orange, twist the space like a visual strand of DNA, while a transparent amethyst vase puts a mysterious void at the center of an extravagantly fertile image.
"Porcelain and Oranges" is a watercolor. That medium stands out as key to achievements in American Modernist painting, including works by Georgia O'Keeffe and Charles Demuth in the first half of the 20th century and Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis in the second half. As a vehicle for fluid, transparent color, it's ideal. Here, its relationship to Japanese and Chinese brush painting is significant.
