The modernist movement as it grew out of - or was associated with - the Art Students League of Los Angeles (ASL-LA), is the subject of a fascinating exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art - A Seed of Modernism: The Art Students League of Los Angeles, 1906-1953. The exhibit presents over 100 works of art from students and staff of the ASL-LA, which during its time was the third oldest art school in Los Angeles, and a hotbed for the modernist avant-garde until the school closed in the post WWII period.

The original Art Students League was founded in New York in 1875 by artists and students opposed to the stultifying conservatism of New York’s National Academy of Design, and by 1913, the proliferation of modernist ideas in American art lead to the founding of the Art Students League of Los Angeles. Just prior to the establishment of the League, artists trained in Europe’s great schools as well as those who were educated in East Coast academies, were making the trek to California - where they encountered two major dilemmas. Figuration in art was entirely overshadowed by landscape painting and conservative social forces in southern California were in opposition to drawing or painting the nude figure from life, as well as the display of nudes in works of art.

Counteracting this repressive environment, professional painter Hanson Duvall Puthuff (1875-1972), offered studio classes in 1903 where artists (male only at this point in time) could draw from nude models. In 1906 his classes were moved to the Blanchard building at Tenth and Figueroa in L.A., with the school eventually taking the name of the Art Students League of Los Angeles. Later the ASL-LA held its classes in a studio located on Main Street in downtown L.A., finally moving to a studio on Spring Street around 1923.

The forward momentum of Modernism in California not only opened the way for figuration in painting during the 1910s, it was inclusive of women - several of which became leading figure painters in the burgeoning California modernist movement. A number of these pioneering female artists are represented in the show; Helena Dunlap, Loren Barton, Luvena Buchanan Vysekal, and Mabel Alvarez amongst others.

Artist Stanton MacDonald-Wright assumed directorship of the ASL-LA in 1923, a position he would hold for nine years - and a term that represented the flowering of modernism in Los Angeles. While living in Paris from 1912-13, MacDonald-Wright met fellow American painter Morgan Russell (an early exponent of abstraction), and together they originated the movement known as “Synchromism”, which claimed color to be the basis of all form and expression in painting. MacDonald-Wright saw a reflection of his own modernist views in Asian art, which he was extremely interested in, and he encouraged Asian American ASL-LA students like Benji Okubo and Hideo Date (Hid-day-oh Dah-tay) to explore their heritage as a foundation for painting.

MacDonald-Wright stepped down as director of the ASL-LA in 1932, and afterwards a succession of talented artists directed the League, including the painter Lorser Feitelson and Benji Okubo. During this period the color theory ideas of MacDonald-Wright fused with the New Classicism/Post Surrealism of Feitelson and the Japanese art techniques of Okubo. But with world war looming, the experimentalist engine of modernism that was the ASL-LA, was about to fly apart.

At the outbreak of WWII, over 120,000 Japanese Americans in California were rounded up and shipped off to internment camps - which became the fate of Benji Okubo and fellow ASL-LA member, Hideo Date. Along with thousands of other detainees, Okubo and Date were sent to the Santa Anita Race Track in Southern California, where horse stables had been converted into temporary holding cells. From that degrading detention center, the two artists were sent to the Heart Mountain Detention Camp in Wyoming. As you would expect, the incarceration of the ASL-LA director caused havoc with the school, and it eventually disbanded, but not before Okubo and Date launched a branch of the Art Students League at the Heart Mountain detention center.

In the postwar period, painter Fred Sexton, a MacDonald-Wright protégé who had studied with the Art Students League in New York, attempted to revive the League in L.A. He ran the re-opened school from 1949 until 1953 - when it finally closed its doors permanently. I don’t know much about the waning years of the ASL-LA, but I suspect its demise had at least as much to do with the increasing conservatism in the country as it did with the ascendancy and dominance of non-figurative abstract art.

If you are unable to attend the exhibition you can acquire the exhibit catalog, which details the history of the ASL-LA along with the city’s modernist movement. A Seed of Modernism: Art Students League of Los Angeles, at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, in Pasadena, California, from January 20, 2008 until April 13, 2008.

[ UPDATE - Gee Vaucher's exhibit, Introspective, will be on display in Los Angeles from April 12 through May 3, 2008 at Track 16 Gallery. ]

Mostly known for the remarkable graphics she produced for the late 70’s British anarchist punk band Crass, Gee Vaucher continues to create extraordinarily insightful imagery that strips away society’s veneer to reveal hidden truths. Introspective, her current exhibit at the Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco, gives further evidence of her importance as a socially conscious artist for our time. Vaucher’s exhibit opened on Dec. 14, 2007, and surprisingly… San Francisco’s local NBC affiliate dropped-in to cover the opening. Click here to view NBC’s slideshow of the event, which gives a pretty good visual summation of the evening as well as showcasing the quality of Vaucher’s art.

Vaucher’s proficiency at drawing serves as the rock solid foundation for her art, and she calls upon traditional skills to create her complex paintings. Even as a young art student, it was clear that Vaucher had a natural talent for figurative realism, but possessing and utilizing time-honored methods does not necessarily lead to conventional artworks - and one would be mistaken to call Vaucher’s works “conservative.” Another misjudgment would be to accept the commonly held view of punk aesthetics as minimalist, crude, mindless, and intentionally designed to repulse. Vaucher’s early works for Crass were intellectually sophisticated, technically well crafted, and dare I say - beautiful. Full of narrative and profound meaning, they wielded a social critique as pertinent today as when they first appeared decades ago. If at times Vaucher’s works seem a bit obscure in a surrealist manner, they are always clear in communicating a love of humanity and utter contempt for despotism.

Vaucher visited Los Angeles in 2000 for a limited speaking tour, where I was fortunate enough to exchange a few brief words with her on the subject of art and politics. Many people have assumed that her works were, and are, pure assemblages of photographic materials. As she explained to me, much of her work isn’t photomontage or collage at all - but hand drawn imagery created in pencil and water based gouache paint.

The painting Who Do They Think They’re Fooling? - You?, now on view at the Jack Hanley Gallery, is a perfect example of Vaucher’s didactic method and hyperrealist technique. Created in 1980 as cover art for the 7″ Crass single, Bloody Revolutions, Vaucher based her artwork on a famous photo of the Sex Pistols, but the members of the mock band presented in her painting consisted of the Queen of England, Pope John Paul II, the Statue of Liberty, and Margaret Thatcher. If the Pistols were a rock ‘n roll swindle, Vaucher was telling us, then the icons in her artwork represented the ultimate ruling class con job.

Yo! What Happened to Peace? is a traveling antiwar poster exhibit in which several of my artworks are included, so I’m thrilled to learn that Yo! organizer and curator, John Carr, has arranged a collaboration with Gee Vaucher and the Jack Hanley Gallery. On Jan. 17, 18 and 19, artists from the Yo! project will work in partnership with Gee Vaucher and Penny Rimbaud (also from Crass), to present a Yo! print exhibit and live poster screen printing event at the gallery. Artists involved in the Yo! show will bring their own silkscreens to the gallery, making posters to be given away to guests at the gallery. Some of the artists scheduled to participate in the screen printing event include Winston Smith, Art Hazelwood, Doug Minkler, Eric Drooker, Mear One, Favianna Rodriguez, and a host of others.

Gee Vaucher: Introspective, at the Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco, Dec. 14, 2007 through January 19, 2008. The Gallery is located at: 395 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94103.

For the last month or so, posters that look as if they were made from stencils have been appearing on city streets from Los Angeles to New York City. Giving the impression of having been created with black spray-paint and a cut-out template, the grim face on the poster is imperfect with its fuzzy edges and runny paint drips. The image looks like a thousand other stencil visual renderings you’ve seen on urban walls and sidewalks. However, the red stenciled letters make it clear this is not social commentary from an underground artist. The street poster’s minimalist message reads: “Stallone. Rambo. In Theaters January 25.”

While the promotional drive for Rambo IV began with faux stencil posters placed directly on city streets, it quickly escalated into a flood of posters used on the sides of buses and on illuminated bus benches as the release date of the film drew closer. That bilge like Rambo IV can be publicized through “guerilla marketing” does not bode well for the future of street art. This is certainly not the first instance of street art aesthetics being used for commercial purposes, but the campaign for Stallone’s film unquestionably represents a sophisticated and well co-coordinated expansion of the trend.

The motivations of those who use the street for art and the promulgation of ideas is very different from those who want to capture every available public space as a platform for marketing products. While some artists have been handsomely rewarded for selling their supposed “street cred” to corporate advertisers, others resist turning over the methods and influence of street art to commercial branding and big business. It is my fervent hope that the implacable anticommercial forces will win this, and every other battle, in the new year.