The Art of the City

Modernism, Censorship, and the Emergence of Los Angeles’s Postwar Scene

In the 1920s Los Angeles was one of the first American cities to establish a civic body overseeing art and urban aesthetics. Elite art clubs, like the California Art Club and Artland, organized fund-raising drives and helped the Municipal Art Commission articulate an identifiable aesthetic for the city. But the city was unsuccessful in building any major art institutions or achieving international cultural status during the 1920s.

“The economic and social conditions of the 1930s proved the civic aspirations of the 1920s too exclusively Anglo-Saxon and bourgeois to fully withstand the challenge of multiethnic modernism”. From 1948 to 1951, Los Angeles hosted a remarkable art program of festivals, community centers, galleries, and children’s classes, all sponsored by the publicly funded Municipal Art Department. Instead of supporting one art center, founded on the principles and ideologies of elite Angelinos, the new program promised to “give” in every community area. But the 1950s were still stuck in prejudice and very narrow mind of the cities officials and the “bourgeois”. A good example of this attitude is illustrated by the fuss that was made over the installation the sculpture “The Family” by Bernard Rosenthal in front of the Police Department Building.

It was in this context of artistic struggle and repression that the major art scenes of the 1960s would develop. The city council’s efforts to eradicate modern art backfired by pushing young artist out of mainstream art forums and into alternative and underground scenes. It was in the coffeehouses of Venice that the beats took hold. Both Venice and the Ferus Gallery (La Cienega Boulevard, 1957) served as spaces to counteract the effect of sprawl and isolation. The most famous resident of Venice was writer Lawrence Lipton who wrote in 1959, The Holy Barbarians. It was interpreted as a guidebook to coolness, a veritable how-to guide to becoming a beatnik. Venice received an influx of cultural voyeurs. The coffeehouses displaying paintings and sculptures attracted the attention of the Los Angeles Police and no permits were given to the coffee shops. They than had to close, which added to the publicity generated by Lipton’s book. Artist is those times were creating a style of art critics described as junk art, often freestanding objects and sometimes entire rooms created from the materials gathered from the trash, the beach, or the street...the art forms that made Los Angeles famous developed out of the artists marginality.

In 1967 New York Times referenced the La Cienega gallery strip as “West Coast Madison Avenue”. Ferus was bought in 1958 by New York entrepreneur Irving Blum and soon lost it’s cooperative feel and became a successful commercial enterprise. The artwork on La Cienega changed from deeply personal junk sculpture and assemblage to a commercially successful art movement that both celebrated and critiqued the very consumer culture that the original Ferus artist tried to contest. Los Angeles still hosts an active art culture in the shadow of the city’s corporate cultural institutions…the trick is to get off the freeway and to find them.