Travel Reference
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manifest-destiny propaganda urging pioneers to settle the golden West. The completion of
the transcontinental railroad in 1869 brought an influx of romantic painters, who painted
epic California wilderness landscapes. In the early 20th century, homegrown colonies of
California impressionist plein air painters emerged at Laguna Beach and Carmel-by-the-
Sea.
With the invention of photography, the improbable truth of California's landscape and
its inhabitants was revealed. Pirkle Jones saw expressive potential in California landscape
photography after WWII, while San Francisco-born Ansel Adams' sublime photographs
had already started doing justice to Yosemite. Adams founded Group f/64 with Edward
Weston from Carmel and Imogen Cunningham in San Francisco. Berkeley-based Dorothea
Lange turned her unflinching lens on the plight of Californian migrant workers in the
Great Depression, and Japanese Americans forced to enter internment camps in WWII.
As the postwar American West became crisscrossed with freeways and divided into
planned communities, Californian painters captured the abstract forms of manufactured
landscapes on canvas. In San Francisco, Richard Diebenkorn and David Park became lead-
ing proponents of Bay Area Figurative Art, while sculptor Richard Serra captured urban
aesthetics in massive, rusting monoliths resembling ship prows and industrial Stone-
henges. Pop artists captured SoCal's ethos of conspicuous consumerism through Wayne
Thiebaud's still-life gumball machines, British émigré David Hockney's acrylic paintings
and Ed Ruscha's canvas and film studies.
To see coastal California's contemporary art at its most experimental, browse the SoCal
gallery scenes in Downtown LA and Culver City, then check out San Francisco's Mission
District and SOMA neighborhood.
During the Great Depression, murals came to define Californian cityscapes. Mexican mur-
alists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco sparked an out-
pouring of murals across LA that today number in the thousands.
 
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