Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Visual Arts
Although the earliest European artists were trained cartographers accompanying Western
explorers, their images of California as an island show more imagination than scientific
rigor. This mythologizing tendency continued throughout the Gold Rush era, as Western
artists alternated between caricatures of Wild West debauchery and manifest-destiny pro-
paganda urging pioneers to settle the golden West. The completion of the Transcontinental
Railroad in 1869 brought an influx of romantic painters, who produced epic California
wilderness landscapes. After the 20th century arrived, 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 and Imogen Cunningham in San Francisco. Berkeley-based Dorothea Lange
turned her unflinching lens on the plight of Californian migrant workers in the Great De-
pression and Japanese Americans forced to enter internment camps during WWII, produ-
cing poignant documentary photos.
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 San Francisco-born sculptor Richard
Serra captured urban aesthetics in massive, rusting monoliths resembling ship prows and
industrial Stonehenges. Meanwhile, pop artists captured the ethos of conspicuous con-
sumerism, through Wayne Thiebaud's gumball machines, British émigré David Hockney's
LA pools, and above all, Ed Ruscha's studies of SoCal pop culture. In the Bay Area, artists
showed their love for rough-and-readymade 1950s Beat collage, '60s psychedelic rock
posters from Fillmore concerts, earthy '70s funk and beautiful-mess punk, and '80s graffiti
art.
Today's California contemporary art scene brings all these influences together with
muralist-led social commentary, an obsessive dedication to craft and a new-media milieu
pierced by cutting-edge technology. LA's Museum of Contemporary Art puts on provocat-
ive and avant-garde shows, as does LACMA's Broad Contemporary Art Museum, San
Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego,
