The Benton's "Unruly Assembly"

William A. Kermode, Spring, about 1925. Pomona College Collection, gift of Margaret Culley Hamilton and Mary Culley Lund

England-born John H. Culley (1864-1954) yearned for the wide open spaces of the American West. He became a rancher in New Mexico; returned to Europe for a late-middle-age stint fighting in the first World War; retired with family to Los Angeles. There he wrote a cowboy memoir, Cattle, Horses & Men of the Western Range (1940). Culley was also a pillar of the nascent L.A. art community. Appreciating the modernist revival of woodblock printing, he bought prints by the big names of German Expressionism and the Bauhaus: Kollwitz, Kirchner, Nolde, Pechstein, Kandinsky, Albers, et al. But his tastes were neither especially German nor especially conventional. Culley acquired artists working in woodblock from the major and minor schools of Europe, the U.S., and the Pacific Rim. 

Why woodblock prints only? (Plus a few linoleum cuts…) That is one mystery of the Culley collection. Another is why it landed at Pomona College. Culley's daughters Margaret and Mary donated the holding to Pomona in 1959. There does not seem to be any prior connection between the Culley family and the college. 

Because most of the collection is by little-known artists, it has not been shown as a group until now. The Benton Museum of Art's "An Unruly Assembly: Selections from the Culley Collection of Woodblock Prints" builds on a recent scholarly reappraisal of the trove. Occupying two rooms, the show includes 85 of the 187 prints in the Culley collection. It is accompanied by the collection's first catalog. The full collection is now online as well.

Frontispiece and title page of Culley's book. Katherine Field supplied woodcut illustrations

Vasily Kandinsky, Small Worlds VI, 1922

Installation view, "An Unruly Assembly"

Félix Vallotton, The Demonstration, 1893

Rockwell Kent, Imperishable, 1927

The blue-chip end of the collection has prints by Félix Vallotton, Aristide Maillol, and Rockwell Kent (Swiss, French, and American) as well as the famous Germans. But  maybe "An Unruly Assembly" is most engaging as a reminder that the German taste for modern woodcuts was as global as the French taste for plein-air painting. It offers a core sample of that under-appreciated production. 

Alexis Ousatchoff, Abstract Design II, 1925

Not everything stands up to the big names, but there were plenty of artists I'd like to see more of. One is Alexis Ousatchoff, a Russian "Little Master" of machine-age abstractions. The two prints here are barely the size of large postage stamps. I would say more about Ousatchoff, were it not that Wikipedia and Google have yet to be informed of his existence. 

Google AI draws a blank

Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, Self-Portrait, about 1934 

"Unruly Assembly" is just one of a quartet of provocative print/drawing shows now on view at the Benton. There's a group show of L.A. artists ("Line, Smudge, Shade: Contemporary Drawing in Our Los Angeles"); a mural installation of Manuel López's East Los Angeles views ("Art Hall Projects 1: Manuel López"); an origins-of-tech-art show ("Two-Way Stretch: Electronic Drawing in Early Animation and Computer"). All run through Jan. 4, 2026, with the López mural continuing through June 28, 2026.

Brittany Kiertzner, A Place to Plant, 2015. In "Line, Smudge, Shade" 

Stas Orlovski, Running Man (projected stop-motion animation), 2021. In "Line, Smudge, Shade"

Manuel López, small detail of Art Hall Projects mural (paintings and drawings on vinyl wallpaper), 2025