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| Edward Biberman, Slow Curve, 1945. Collection of Sandra and Bram Dijkstra |
The Huntington is presenting a compact show of 19 American paintings from the Sandra and Bram Dijkstra collection. The selection is loosely organized around artists who participated in the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Depression-era infrastructure program that (among other things) paid artists to create murals for public buildings. Though many of the artists here were associated with the WPA, the paintings on view are easel size, spanning portraits, landscapes, and surrealism. Like much of the art being made today, they react to the inequities of capitalism, geopolitics, and land use.
In that category is Edward Biberman's Slow Curve. There is film noir quality to the crumbling road, somewhere near Mulholland, and the blue L.A. sky (Biberman's brother Herbert was a blacklisted screenwriter). The plane is an emblem of So. Cal.'s thriving aerospace industry and the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
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| Raphael Soyer, Girl in a Red Sweater, about 1938 |
The artists range from "underappreciated" to downright obscure. Raphael Soyer is one of the better known artists in the show. His
Girl in a Red Sweater shows his ability to make small portraits of ordinary people compelling and enigmatic.
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| Installation view, "Art for the People" |
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| Helen Forbes, A Vale in Death Valley, 1939 |
A visionary landscape is by Helen Forbes (1891-1945), an artist otherwise unknown to me. Forbes produced WPA murals for post offices
in Monrovia and several other California cities. She would have been aware of Georgia O'Keeffe but sought out even starker scenery, such as Death Valley and Mono Lake. As far as I can tell, her first and only retrospective opened at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor—in 1931.
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| Harry Sternberg, Woman and War, 1940 |
Harry Sternberg's politics turned sharply left after meeting Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in 1934. Like many Americans, Sternberg expressed anti-fascist themes in the visual language of surrealism, though something of that European movement was lost in translation.
Woman and War is a fascinating hot mess, a queasy anticipation of atrocities to come.
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| Rico Lebrun, Vertical Composition, 1945 |
The show includes two Dijkstra gifts to the Huntington collection: Charles White's
Soldier and Rico Lebrun's
Vertical Composition, the latter
just recently announced. Once upon a time, Lebrun's fame eclipsed that of all the other artists in the show. MoMA considered him L.A.'s great Abstract Expressionist and included him in group shows as early as 1942. The nominal subject of
Vertical Composition is farm machinery ravaged by California wildfires. The label records Bram Dijkstra's reading of the painting: "the horrors of the Holocaust and the monstrous weapons that had been placed into the hands of humanity… [which] have broken the axle of civilization."
"Art for the People: WPA-Era Paintings from the Dijkstra Collection" runs through March 18, 2024 in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. It previously appeared at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, and the Oceanside Museum of Art.
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| Palmer Schoppe, On the Beach, 1941 |
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