CAC History ~ American Art Review, March 1996

Three Creators of Artist's Alley

by David T. Leary, Ph.D.

Copyright Pending

THREE CREATORS OF ARTISTS’ ALLEY
At the twentieth century’s start, Southern California was dotted with colonies of one sort or another. Although settlements devoted to social or spiritual causes have drawn considerable attention, those inspired by the arts, particularly the graphic arts, were certainly to be found. So perhaps it is no great surprise that an artists’ colony flourished in Alhambra during the 1920’s and 1930’s; moreover, that its story lives on, turning up in old-timers’ reminiscences and newspaper feature pieces.

Still, Alhambra hardly seems a likely place. It was a quiet, middle-class community, roughly seven miles east of Los Angeles, with a population which grew from nine thousand in 1920 to thirty-nine thousand in 1940. It had a temperate climate and a good view of the San Gabriel Mountains to the north, yet there was nothing uniquely picturesque or highly cultural about it.
Nor was the colony itself especially prepossessing at first glance. Situated principally along a cul-de-sac—Champion Place on the map, “Artists’ Alley” in popular lore—it did overlook an arroyo and enjoy the shade of lofty eucalyptus trees. But there were just three or four studios altogether, with barely a half-dozen working occupants, if that, on any given occasion.

All this invites questions: for instance, why Alhambra? And scrutinizing the colony’s three pioneers in terms of what they had in common, especially the impulse to create, suggests answers. Obviously, the approach speaks to the matter of creativity—not only to the phenomenon itself, but also to its necessary adjuncts, domain and field. A widely held belief is that creators work in one domain or another, and that their accomplishment is judged by a field which knows the particular domain. Furthermore, the approach suggests how or why art colonies get a start at all. Despite their prevalence both in the United States and abroad, the literature about them, though valuable, tends to be more individually descriptive than collectively analytic. Then, too, the approach demonstrates that Southern California really did have a presentable cultural life during the twentieth century’s opening decades, despite the skeptics. One only needs to remember the population’s size was nowhere near today’s and building an urban infrastructure took priority.

Who were the three artists, however—the pioneering creators?

Victor Clyde Forsythe (1885-1962) was the earliest arrival. He was born in Orange, California, but inasmuch as his family had been in Tombstone, Arizona at the time of the notorious gunfight at the OK Corral, he really had roots in the Old West. Young Forsythe grew up in central Los Angeles and attended Harvard Military School, where he showed a flair for cartooning. He had instruction at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design and was briefly an artist on William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner.

In 1904, having already left school, he headed to New York for study at the Art Students League and the next year got a steady job on Hearst’s New York Evening Journal. Marriage to Cotta Owen followed, as did increasing celebrity and income. In 1910 the popular cartoonist George Herriman joined the Journal, a fact which may have precipitated Forsythe’s departure. Whatever the case, he landed on his feet, moving to the New York Evening World, with which he was associated for over two decades.

Forsythe did illustrations for such magazines as Collier’s and Redbook. During World War I, he painted patriotic posters: “And They Thought We Couldn’t Fight,” for the Fifth Liberty Loan Drive, won considerable attention. Yet comic strips were his strong point. “Joe Jinks,” started in 1918, may have been the best known, but “Way Out West,” begun in 1933, was perhaps closer to his heart because of its geographic content.

In 1920, dropping illustration but retaining the comics, Forsythe returned permanently to California and began easel painting in earnest. By 1922 he was living in Alhambra, first on S. Wilson Ave. (now Atlantic Blvd.), then, two years later, on N. Almansor St. The Almansor St. property was close to what became “Artists’ Alley.” Nevertheless, about 1935 he moved some two miles northeast, into adjacent San Marino, living first on St. Alban’s Rd., then on Ramiro Rd. And for the summertime, he kept a studio at Big Bear Lake, in the San Bernardino Mountains not too far east of Los Angeles.

Giving up commercial art entirely in 1938, he continued at the easel. The dry spaces of the Southwest had been his great subject, and when he died in 1962, he was regarded as one of the notable “Desert Painters.”

Frank Tenney Johnson (1874-1939) was the second arrival. He was born near Council Bluffs, Iowa, literally in sight of Westerning wayfarers. The family moved to the area of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Johnson attended school, though with scant interest. Then, just in his mid-teens, he began frequenting Milwaukee’s Layton Art Gallery and soon left school and home for a career in art.

Combining native talent, local instruction, and jobs in commercial art, he slowly made his way. He was in New York for a time in 1895, studying at the Art Students League. The next year, he married Vinnie Reeve Francis. He and Vinnie moved to New York in 1902, where he attended the New York School of Art and won increasingly profitable illustration assignments.
Perhaps prompted by his Council Bluffs memories, Johnson took greater and greater interest in the West. He made his first trip there in 1904, significantly to Colorado and the Navajo Country. More and more he became a “Western” illustrator. It was about this time, also, that his celebrated nocturnes emerged.

There were trips as far as California in 1912, 1918, and 1921. Then, in 1922, without giving up their New York base, the couple leased a residence in Alhambra, on S. Fourth St., keeping it until 1926, when they moved into their own home on Champion Pl. A third geographic dimension was added in 1932, when they established themselves at Rimrock Ranch, just west of Cody, Wyoming. For the next several years, they spent summers there, while keeping places in New York and California.

Tragedy struck, however. Johnson contracted meningitis, and he died at the very start of 1939. Along with Frederic Remington and Charles Marion Russell, he had been one of an artistic triumvirate celebrating the Old West. Now, all three men were gone.

Jack Wilkinson Smith (1873-1949) was the third on the scene. He was born in New Jersey, but the family moved to Michigan about 1886 and Smith, by this time an aspiring artist, dropped out of school, worked his way to Chicago, got into commercial art, and also attended the Chicago Art Institute. Still in commercial art, he found his way to Lexington, Kentucky, where a one-man show of his work drew cartoonist Winsor McCay’s attention. Through McCay, Smith got a place on the Cincinnati Enquirer. He studied at the Cincinnati Academy of Art, and in 1898, during the Spanish-American War, reportedly was in Cuba doing combat sketches. Later that year, he married Emma B. Troup, whom he had met in Lexington.

Smith began painting the West before he actually saw the West and, indeed, managed to sell some pieces. Encouraged, he and his wife moved to Los Angeles about 1906 where, except for a time in Oregon, they spent well over a decade. Then, in 1926 they settled in Alhambra, buying the property immediately south of Frank Tenney Johnson’s new home. It was there, on “Artists’ Alley,” that they dwelt till Jack’s death.

Even so, the couple traveled tirelessly through the Far West, visiting scenic locales which became easel painting subjects. The travel was not always carefree, as Smith once pointed out to his sister. On a sketching jaunt below Mt. Whitney, about eight miles from Lone Pine, the battery of the Smiths’ car failed. It was a good hike to anywhere, but fortunately a local mechanic, out to show a visiting girlfriend the nearby snow, happened along. Jack and Emma ended up coasting back to town.

There were rewards, nonetheless. At his death in early 1949, Smith was widely praised as one of California’s leading landscape painters. It would take a few additional years before he was identified as a “California Impressionist.”

So much for biographic basics. Now, what about the kind of work the three turned out? In terms of creativity, the domain they occupied?

All three got started in commercial art—cartooning, illustrating, advertising—whereby they satisfied the expectations of editors or writers, say, but not necessarily their own nor those of the academy. Research does show that working to fit the expectations of others, the heart of what they were doing, stifles creativity. In any case they all began “serious” painting, with moves to the West Coast, to Alhambra, distinctly part of this. Each undertook a transition, albeit not an abrupt nor irreversible one.

Clyde Forsythe had roamed the Southland deserts in his youth, and they still lured him, as did the prospect of making them his subject. “I wanted to paint seriously,” he said in the context of his move, “so I just started in, and I’ve been at it ever since.” He was doing what he wanted to do, which he sensed is what everyone does best. He stayed with the comics until 1938, nonetheless, “so as to eat regularly.”

Although Frank Tenney Johnson was probably beginning to distance himself from commercial work by 1912, the meaningful separation did not come till 1922. This was the year he and his wife first settled in Alhambra, in effect satisfying his boyhood longing to “join the westward march of civilization.” Still, he turned out commercial art as late as 1932.

It was much the same with Jack Wilkinson Smith. “Whatever I see that interests me I want to paint,” he said. On the West Coast he found the freedom to do just that. In addition he was satisfying a craving both for wilderness and for work outdoors. He kept his hand in commercial lithography, however, so as not to compromise the easel painting.

All three took the West as subject, and this made sense: the West had fascinated Americans from America’s start. Philosophers, for instance, conceived it as civilization’s inevitable destination. Statesmen viewed its occupation as evidence of national fulfillment. Social thinkers looked on its endless acres as a safety valve. And all the while, ordinary folk just settled there.

Meantime, the West inspired cultural endeavor. Artists George Catlin and Alfred Jacob Miller, for example, saw and documented it. Mark Twain turned his Nevada and California experiences into writing that won the world’s heart. By contrast, and much to Twain’s disgust, James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier fiction drew international acclaim pretty much on the strength of vivid imagining. And here is a point.

The West—or rather the Frontier West—somehow assumed a life of its own in America’s mind. That life was mythic in many ways, tending to neglect the variety of folk who really occupied the frontier or the hard conditions they often faced. But Forsythe and Johnson and Smith grew up with the phenomenon, drew from it, and helped sustain it. If Forsythe’s prospectors and burros have a mournful quality, they have a comic one as well. There is some violence in Johnson’s pieces, but it is exception as against rule and, where present, perpetuates myth more than reality. (Indeed, he seems to have known that the Old West, the one of his boyhood fascination, had seen its day. ) And Smith’s landscapes are really pristine, though in truth, as late as his time, the West was still far less touched than it is now.

Finally, all three were representative in style rather than abstract. From the Renaissance, artists and been expected to render the world as the world was seen: anything else violated the canon. By the late nineteenth century, however, at least in some European circles, seeing came to be regarded as less physically precise and universally consistent as had long been presumed.

Meanwhile, though, the United States was experiencing a Golden Age of Illustration. Roughly from the Civil War to World War I, there was a boom in publishing. Ever more Americans found instruction and pleasure in books, magazines, and newspapers—copiously illustrated. American illustration has many parents, but Howard Pyle (1853-1911) is often given primacy of place. Representative in style, insistent on accuracy of detail, he trained numerous students, many of whom went on to train others. Altogether, he influenced an era.

Even if they had not started in Pyle’s world, Forsythe and Johnson and Smith might still have been representative in style. They were Westerners now, and they were satisfying insatiable national curiosity about the West: they were fulfilling a certain instructional or informational capacity. They could be selective about what they depicted, but whatever it was had to be recognizable. Otherwise, their credibility would have suffered.

So once they had really left commercial art behind and found a new footing, they remained pretty constant: none of the group radically reinvented himself. However, saying their approaches at the outset were their approaches at the end is not to detract. There are, after all, degrees of creativity, and each man had had a transition, if not a “breakthrough,” to his credit.

Moreover, when they embarked for California—certainly when they reached Alhambra—Forsythe and Smith were in their thirties, Johnson in his forties. Statistically, their life expectancy at birth had been less than fifty years, so by the standards of the day, they were no longer young. On the other hand, the literature argues that the thirties and forties are the ages of greatest artistic creativity. Furthermore, all three men were artistically productive beyond those decades. One might well ask, therefore, what sparked and sustained them? What were the wellsprings of their creative accomplishment?

Forsythe’s father was a merchant, but he recognized his son’s talent and quite possibly paid for instruction both at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design and at the New York Art Students League. Johnson’s grandmother and father were amateur artists, and the father’s sketches had an inspirational effect on the son. Smith’s father contributed to the decorating of the New York State Capitol at Albany.

Finding confirmation, then, is research indicating that a child’s family may both spark and nurture creativity. Although a youngster can drive off entirely on his own, it appears obvious that a pre-existing family interest can both fuel the engine and turn the ignition switch.

All three of the artists were high school drop-outs, but they did attend established art schools where they had celebrated teachers. Frank V. DuMond was one of Forsythe’s instructors at New York’s Art Students League. John H. Twachtman, William Merritt Chase, and Robert Henri were Johnson mentors, all in New York, the first at the New York School of Art, the others at the Art Students League. Frank Duveneck taught Smith at the Cincinnati Academy of Art, and Winsor McKay proved helpful in Lexington, Kentucky.

Dropping out of high school should not signal over much: during the years of interest, less than 10 percent of the U.S. population got high school diplomas. To boot, the research shows that formal, traditional classrooms do not appear to enhance creativity. Notable examples of the phenomenon are Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky.

Of greater consequence was the art school attendance. It undoubtedly increased their technical competence in the domain—competence which surely proved vital to their creative accomplishment. And it provided mentoring—doubtless another vital component of their accomplishment.

All three of the artists married, and all three did so in their twenties. In this respect they were rather typical: most of the population married in those days, and the Census of 1900 indicated the median age of marriage was about 26 for men. What makes them atypical, though, is the fact that none had children: that same census indicates the national average household size was 4.76 people; two-person households constituted just 15 percent of the total.

All three seem to have had happy marriages. The Forsythes and the Smiths celebrated golden wedding anniversaries; the Johnsons surely would have, too, had Frank not died unexpectedly. Smith, nevertheless, did miss family—a fact he made clear to his sister. “While you have had many things happen in the past years to cause you grief and trouble,” he wrote, “you have one priceless boon. You are surrounded by your family which is a great comfort in times of stress. That is something that will be denied Emma and myself.”

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