Beginning in the late 1980s and continuing well into the 1990s, a number of academics, critics, and curators turned to the question of California modernism asking, in short, if there was such a thing and, if so, to what did it owe its unique place in the annals of American art. Anne Bartlett Ayres, Bram Dijkstra, Susan Ehrlich, Paul Karlstrom, Susan Landauer, Peter Selz, and Richard Cándida Smith, among others, suggested, in a generous collection of books, essays, and exhibitions that not only did California modern art reveal a distinctive form and content but that it was far closer to the vanguard of American modernism than had previously been recognized. Some of the critical questions asked include: was it geography that made California modernism distinct? Was it Mexico’s proximity? The peculiar institutional forms the art world has taken here? The specific socio-economic context? California’s isolation? Its provincialism? No consensus was ever reached beyond agreement that there was indeed a set of creative ideas alive and actively producing cultural artifacts in twentieth-century California that were modern and regionally distinctive.

This conversation was exposed to a wider public in October 2000 when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000, a celebration of California’s sesquicentennial and the largest show the museum had ever organized. Running a history of California art alongside a social and cultural history of the state, the exhibition highlighted many of California’s best-known moderns alongside landscape painters and a wide variety of architectural, pop-cultural, and ephemeral forms. The purpose of the show was to simultaneously popularize the museum and offer an ethnically diverse representation of California’s rich visual and cultural landscape. Panned by critics for littering a museum space with pop-culture ephemera, not to mention breaking with art history’s canonical fetishism, Made in California was nevertheless wildly popular with a public who delighted in its inclusion of the historical “everyday” (cars, surfboards, bathing suits). Indeed, there seemed to be something spectacularly specific to California: a twentieth-century coming-of-age; an interplay of high and low culture; a history of radical social protest; an interface of materials that were just so familiar. The exhibition, whatever the criticism, was exciting, inclusive, and modern, both in the literal “of our time” sense and the self-referential, pluralistic art-theoretical sense. Most recently, works by Cécile Whiting (Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), Daniel Widener (Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), and myself (Sarah Schrank, Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) have oriented the discussion of California modernism toward the social and political concerns of cultural production, tying modern art’s production and reception, and particularly that of Los Angeles, to urban, racial, and sexual politics, pondering the limitations and possibilities of a politicized modernism in a fraught, restrictive, and often highly commercial art scene.

With The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century, Richard Cándida Smith engages the current interest in the politics of California modernism that he stimulated with his important 1995 work Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (Berkeley: University of California Press). In his new book, Cándida Smith focuses on the possibilities for democratic access to the modernist conversation, asking how artists navigated the institutions that control the resources and discourses upon which they rely to forge professional identities and careers. The struggle between innovation and provincialism that underlay much of the criticism of the Made in California show is one that has haunted California’s art institutions for a hundred years and one that has, according to Cándida Smith, reshaped the nature of modern art in the state. At the center of The Modern Moves West is the irony that while California’s art institutions lagged behind the state’s exemplary university system and Hollywood’s culture industry, the startling lack of support for the fine arts forced artists to the social and economic margins, leading them, ultimately, to articulate a more progressive and inclusive modernist vision than might otherwise have formed. The idea that California’s provincialism created much-needed room for artists to explore new expressive forms in ways that New York or Paris’s tight-knit network of patrons and collectors stifled it has been argued elsewhere; Cándida Smith’s innovation is to position this perceived freedom alongside mid-century modernist thought to see how artists engaged or rejected a set of intellectual and artistic concerns to push their way into museums and galleries. As he argues in the introduction, “in peripheral locations like California in the mid-twentieth century where resources were often exceptionally limited, choices frequently generated protests against the inherent limitations of the criteria used, a challenge that intensified as artists, curators, and critics from marginalized social groups worked to break the barriers preventing their full participation in the profession” (3). Underlying much of Cándida Smith’s analysis is an effort to locate the artistic challenges that democratize the seemingly impenetrable thicket of art theory and professional culture.

Tracing modernism’s migration as a coherent set of intellectual concerns from Europe to the United States and from New York to California, each chapter examines how California artists located at the margins of the mainstream art world engaged with conceptual ideas of individual autonomy, artistic reproducibility, subjectivity, and form. Cándida Smith then assesses to what extent the artist in question made it across the gauntlet of an inherently elitist system of gate-keeping criteria, enjoying professional success, causing controversy, or working in obscurity. Identifying assemblage as California’s best, if not unique, contribution to American modernism, Cándida Smith begins with Simon Rodia, the builder of the Watts Towers and the most marginalized of all his examples, as an instance of how modernist ideals could be translated and personalized by the most unassimilated and least versed in modernist discourse. Indeed, much of Rodia’s mythology is attached to his untrained, organic genius. Cándida Smith then follows California assemblage artists from San Francisco (Jay DeFeo), to Los Angeles (Noah Purifoy) and, finally, to the Tijuana-San Diego border and the 1990s in-Site public art projects, touching on other artists along the way. Throughout, Smith makes a case for “modernism from below” by focusing on artists who, by virtue of their gender, race, social class, or nationality, fall outside the usual vista of professional possibilities afforded those in the American art world’s economic and political mainstream.

One of the most important points that Cándida Smith raises in The Modern Moves West is that California’s rich modernist legacy was shaped by the state’s remarkable commitment to higher education and, most significantly, the wide public accessibility of its education system. (This is especially poignant now when the recent economic crisis has laid bare the disastrous effects of chipping away at California’s public schools, a process begun in the wake of 1978’s Proposition 13.) The founding of art departments and art schools in northern and southern California created accessible spaces that fostered young talent and provided an entrée to contemporary conversations about art that were far in advance of those taking shape in most of California’s museums and galleries. Moreover, women had an important role to play in art education, teaching at most levels of the state’s college-level curriculum. This helped make room for young female artists like DeFeo, who emerged in the 1950s a countercultural icon, objectified and sexualized, but less than she might have been in more commercial art circles. DeFeo’s paintings, notorious for their immense weight and lengthy execution, were respected for their powerful reflections on mystical spiritual traditions and the human psyche. The physical heaviness of her paintings, balanced by their cerebral themes, contributed to the contemporary modernist conversation by highlighting the sculptural possibilities of paint and pointing to the importance of surface, a new avenue of exploration in the mid-twentieth century. She produced brilliant paintings like The Rose (1958–66) and The Jewel (1959), and by the end of her life DeFeo was a highly regarded practitioner of her craft on the West Coast, an achievement Cándida Smith implies would have been unlikely elsewhere.

DeFeo’s professional shift from margin to center is repeated in Cándida Smith’s discussion of Betye Saar, an African American assemblage artist best known for powerful compositions employing racist kitsch to highlight the viciousness of black cultural stereotypes. He suggests that the peculiarities of the California context permitted her to produce social protest art addressing racial injustice and succeed financially as a professional artist because of the regional interest in artwork that, ultimately, turned inward. In balancing social protest and individual self-reflection, Saar oriented a sharp commentary on American racism toward an exploration of the self: “The juxtaposition of images in Saar’s assemblages asks viewers to reflect on their own interpretative responses to the individual images as an indicator of how much the stereotyping process has made them part of a social structure built on degradation and violence. . . . Saar like most other California-based assemblagists redirected the political message, which in her work is both pointed and explicit, into a zone of spiritual reflection that pointed toward greater reverence for all with whom we share the world” (149).

Cándida Smith’s chapter on Purifoy, “Learning from the Watts Towers,” is especially compelling for its attention to an artist who blended modern artistic practice and political commitment, community engagement and personal exile into a creative life grounded in a pronounced sense of place: at the foot of the Watts Towers and in the southern California desert town of Joshua Tree. The first full-time African American student to attend the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, Purifoy explored abstract painting and sculpture in the 1950s and built himself a community of black bohemians, musicians, and artists. Drawing on his earlier undergraduate study of social work, Purifoy took the job as the director of the Watts Towers Art Center in 1964, merging his concern for social problems with artistic practice. Studying the young students at work, Purifoy formulated (together with co-worker Judson Powell) a theory of “creative process” by which art education could serve as a strategy for positive identity formation and knowledge acquisition. Teaching art classes at the Center in the midst of the 1965 Watts uprising was a formative experience for Purifoy who, together with other assemblage artists, gathered the debris of the riot and shaped sculptures that appeared in a local exhibition at Markham Junior High, Sixty-Six Signs of Neon. According to Cándida Smith, Purifoy “exhibited them as elegant artworks that were also eyewitnesses to, and products of, the heat of the community’s anger” (165). Spending the 1970s and 1980s working for the California Arts Council designing art-in-education programs, Purifoy ultimately found himself alienated from the professional art world. Cándida Smith suggests that the experience of working for a state office that increasingly dismissed community activism in favor of corporate art models left such a sour taste in Purifoy’s mouth that he not only quit the field of art education but also stopped making his own art. From 1989 to 2004, however, Purifoy lived in a trailer in Joshua Tree and immersed himself in a second wind of art activity that continued until his death. Here, Cándida Smith beautifully describes Purifoy’s sculpture garden of modernist assemblages cast against the surreal landscape of the Mojave Desert.

Isolated, alone, often using donated materials, working on a vertical plane as well as a horizontal one, functioning outside the professional art world, Purifoy appears to be channeling Rodia who, in The Modern Moves West, haunts California artists like the phantom of moderns past. There is no doubt similarity in both artists’ relation to place, form, and material; and there is no question that Purifoy was deeply affected by Rodia’s legacy of immense beauty and focused labor: seven towers of metal and cement encrusted with broken tile, 7-Up and Milk of Magnesia bottles, shells, found objects, and imprinted with Rodia’s initials, tools, and signature emblem, a heart. As Cándida Smith writes, “like Rodia’s Watts Towers, Purifoy’s desert sculpture park is both elegant and bewildering in the number of references and in the lushness of the visual imagination. As viewers walk though the site, they face gallows, witches, African warriors, crucifixes, bathtubs, bed frames, PVC pipe, bicycle wheels. Many of these pieces are quickly thrown-together visual jokes, but many others, like the objects he plated with melted lead and then covered with multicolored lumps of splattered metal, are elegantly crafted works that cannot be translated into a simple verbal counterpart” (181). While the material relationship to Rodia is clear, it is here that I must gently chide Cándida Smith for making Rodia representative of an art discourse of which he was never a part. The Watts Towers, irresistibly metaphoric though they are, serve as an awkward representative of modernism that, as Cándida Smith himself points out, is tied to a set of institutional conventions about form, perspective, and reproducibility to which Rodia was never privy. As much as Rodia’s towers engage place, material, and surface, all elements in mid-century modern art (especially California assemblage), they are overwhelmingly an exercise in monumentality. They are a reflection of the artist’s efforts to do something grand and be part of a historical timeline reaching back to the ancients and forward toward a distant future. Unlike the other artists in The Modern Moves West who consciously engaged with the questions and theories of modernist art practice, Rodia worked entirely outside the parameters of the profession and never made it inside.

In many ways, the key organizing theme that threads Cándida Smith’s delicate argument through each chapter is that of space and the fascinating and challenging ways all the artists discussed use it to connect their artwork to a vision of the broader world. The spatial elements of modern art, particularly protest art in the public realm, are neatly addressed in the final chapter on contemporary art along the United States-Mexico border. Here, Cándida Smith complicates his story in a most satisfying way by considering the implications of protest art in a transnational context, when art institutions too have to struggle with issues of language, borders, and nationhood in order to engage artists, upending (if only temporarily) their privileged, institutional status.

The Modern Moves West is not an introductory text to the topic of California modernism, but its meticulous research and thoughtful argument will reward the diligent reader with a sophisticated contemplation of the relationship of theory to practice in a specific regional context.