CAC History ~ American Art Review, March 1996

Three Creators of Artist's Alley

by David T. Leary, Ph.D.

The literature about the influence of adult family life on creativity is not extensive. One study, however, argues a negative relation between numbers of children and creative performance, suggesting the fewer the domestic distractions, the more abundant the art. The suggestion might well apply here. Better established in the literature is the importance of emotional support when creators are making breakthroughs. Forsythe, Johnson, and Smith were making important transitions, if not breakthroughs, when they came west: they were all putting their careers at some risk. To believe they would have done so absent their wives’ backing is quite difficult.

Another thing. When the Forsythes settled in Alhambra, Cotta Forsythe’s parents were there already. And though Forsythe had a hand in the Johnsons’ move, the fact is that Vinnie Johnson’s parents, sister, and brother-in-law all came about the same time as Frank and Vinnie did. The Smiths’ arrival, by contrast, seems simply to have been at Johnson’s aegis. Even so, the role of the two wives’ families looks truly influential.

Each of the three artists—Forsythe, Johnson, Smith—prompted the arrival of other artists. Forsythe and Norman Rockwell had shared Frederic Remington’s former studio in New Rochelle, NewYork. When Rockwell’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1930, Forsythe introduced him to Mary Barstow, whom Rockwell married later in 1930. More to the point, the Barstows lived on Champion Pl., and over the next few years the Rockwells visited there. Johnson had known Eli Harvey, a sculptor of animals, in New York. Johnson sparked Harvey’s interest in Champion Pl., and Harvey built a home and studio there. He was elderly by this point, and how much new sculpture he undertook is problematic. Never mind, his was one of the studios Rockwell used. Smith had a part in all this, too, in a poignant way. After he died in 1949, Sam Hyde Harris, another commercial artist turning to the easel, bought the property. Harris, however, only used it for work: he lived on N. Hidalgo Ave., a few blocks west.

Meanwhile, the three pioneers were interacting socially. In 1925, for example, before the colony was entirely in place, the Johnsons reached Los Angeles harbor after a voyage from New York. On hand to meet them were the Forsythes and Smiths. Then, too, Vinnie Johnson had begun giving “studio parties” about 1913; she maintained the custom in Alhambra, where the Forsythes and Smiths were among the guests.

More significantly, the pioneers worked side by side in the field. Smith and Forsythe were reported to be sketching jointly in the Palm Springs area in 1927. The Johnsons and Forsythes seem to have taken more than one trip together. But what is really interesting is a photo in the Johnson Collection, showing all three encamped with their wives in the Sierras.

As has been said, the artists were making transitions, if not breakthroughs. Familial support would have been important, but so would the encouragement of actively working, unthreatening colleagues. Johnson put it well when he said that “each work of art is an experiment, and the knowledge gained by each individual in his effort at expression, is ofttimes of greater value to one’s fellow artists than that gleaned from books.” The three surely must have been exchanging opinions and sharing views in collegial fashion at this point.

Finally, they reached beyond themselves and their friends, offering their efforts to the public, submitting to the evaluation of professional critics and collectors and peers. They sought to impress the field. With what result?

Neither the domain in which Forsythe, Johnson, and Smith did their work nor the field they sought to impress when they showed that work were of a piece. At least two disputes affected both. One concerned nationalism.

During the first years of America’s independence, some thinkers argued that America’s culture was not sufficiently assertive, that it took too many cues from Europe. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman were among this group. Early on, at least when it came to graphic art, the nationalists may have been overly anxious. As the century closed, however, European art did become widely popular. Nevertheless, vigorous counterpoints emerged, exemplified by Robert Henri and then by Thomas Hart Benton.

Graphic art in and of the West and California had had a documentary strain from its start, with regional inspiration lingering well into the twentieth century. In any case Johnson, Smith, and Forsythe left scant doubt about where they stood. Johnson unabashedly held his specialty to be “paintings of Western Life.” And one of his mentors, notably, had been Robert Henri. Smith asked, “Why go elsewhere? Where are mountains nobler than the Sierras? Where are seas bluer than off the California coast? Where are forests to compare with our own?” Indeed, he said, “Whatever I have seen elsewhere I have found in California, and more glorious. It is all here.” And Forsythe declared, “The Golden State is so different in climate and geography from other portions of the country that she exercises an influence over her painters which they cannot escape.”
Just as clearly the three artists took a stand in a second dispute affecting both domain and field. This was significantly about tradition.

Toward the nineteenth century’s end, thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic began questioning virtually all the old rules. Involved was not just graphic art, but also literature, music, architecture—even the social and physical sciences. What provoked the phenomenon, indeed just what it was, essentially, has yet to be agreed. But modernism yielded various new forms of expression, which some people found exciting and others considered nonsensical. In graphic art it often entailed less representation and more emphasis on the artist’s psyche.

Modernism turned up in the West and California during the early 1900’s. Several of the Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico artists were incorporating one or another of its modes at least by 1920. A Modern Art Society was organized in Los Angeles in 1916, but individual modernists had appeared there even earlier. Needless to say, they found both friends and foes.
Among the skeptics were Forsythe, Johnson, and Smith. “The fault, as I see it,” Forsythe said, “is not in any of the modern movements, which are life-giving, but in the army of insincere apes who litter the walls with imitative, abusive nightmares, as a short cut to easy money.” Asked for his thoughts about modernism, Johnson said, “In my opinion, sincerity is the keynote of all great art. Lack of it, and ignorance are bound to crop out and attract attention but [sic] are not desirable. However there are many fine things done in this modern style.” And Smith declared, “I have no quarrel with the very few able painters who with a background of sound fundamental training are experimenting with abstract problems. But I do protest strenuously against the great majority of that group who with no background and with very little art training are foisting their half-baked efforts, the results of half-digested ideas, on the public under the name of art, with the help of some Museums and public galleries and a few so-called art patrons.”

The three artists’ regional subject matter and traditional styles, combined, encouraged participation in a successful and rather unique venture. As early as 1923, Jack Wilkinson Smith had a key role in the start of the Painters of the West and the Biltmore Salon (or Gallery). The Painters of the West was a group of 20 artists (Forsythe, Johnson, and Smith among them) who concentrated on representational depictions of the Western scene. The Salon, located in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, was its marketing arm. Although the two entities changed over time, Smith remained a central figure, not only as one of the Salon’s contributing artists, but also as its principal executive officer. The undertaking enhanced the Southland’s cultural life. Significantly, as well, it gave the artists a place where their work might be viewed by professional critics, collectors, and peers.

When it came to professional critics, there seemed to be approval, yet reluctance to forget the three artists’ backgrounds in illustration. With Clyde Forsythe this was particularly so. Arthur Millier, one of Southern California’s most important critics, reviewed a Forsythe exhibit at the Biltmore Salon, for the most part desert scenes. “In these,” said Millier, “the light and color are both convincingly true and harmonious. Many of these will wear exceedingly well, for into them the artist puts his considerable knowledge of the desert.” But just the next year, commenting on another Forsythe show, Millier remarked, “The large portraits or story-telling pieces, would be better as reproduced illustrations than as framed paintings.”

The same was true even of Frank Tenney Johnson, whose canvases had gained popularity both locally and nationally. Said Fred Hogue, “Frank Tenney Johnson has won with his brush a place in the front rank of contemporary artists. His best is equal to the best in any company.” And Everett Carroll Maxwell declared, “This artist stands alone in his ability to depict an incident in the life of the old West, or the West of today, without losing sight of mood—the mystery of haunting night, or the stinging heat of desert noonday.” But then Maxwell went on, “It is this mystery that saves Johnson’s pictures from being illustrations and makes them fundamentally works of art.”

Jack Wilkinson Smith experienced like treatment. Writing about an exhibit at the Biltmore Salon, Arthur Millier said that “Smith makes a convincing demonstration of his essential poetry and his ideals of craftsmanship.” Nevertheless, Millier soon observed, “When Smith introduces figures into his pictures they tend to become illustrations at the expense of art.” Four years later Fred Hogue was not so equivocal. “Jack Wilkinson Smith is the premier painter of California sunlight,” he said. “He may violate the classic canons of art, but the canvases he creates may cause future critics to revise the accepted canons.” Aesthetic values have changed and do change; Hogue was thoughtful and humble enough to recognize the fact.

Critics aside, some collectors must have liked what the three did. Vinnie Johnson kept a record of Frank’s sales, and in 1933, the year the Great Depression was at its worst, his paintings grossed over $12,000, of which a substantial percent came from the Biltmore Salon. Not bad when one considers how the dollar has inflated in the last seven decades. Regrettably, though, we do not have any such records for Smith or Forsythe, nor do we have the books of the Biltmore Salon—at least immediately. The best we can do is simply infer their paintings did sell.

In fact, however, while major Southland collectors did not disdain local art, they favored the East Coast or, more likely, Europe. There were exceptions, true enough. Henry E. Huntington acquired a score of Pasadena painter Carl Moon’s depictions of Native Americans. Aline Barnsdall was interested in the California Art Club, headquartered in Los Angeles, and bought works by local artists such as Emil Kosa, Millard Sheets, and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. But again these were exceptions. So thinking Forsythe, Johnson, or Smith had really significant patrons—locally anyway—seems questionable.

Erstwhile illustrators they may have been, but Johnson, Smith, and Forsythe were all three honored by their peers in various ways. The American National Academy of Design awarded Johnson associate status in 1929 and full membership in 1937. Few other Californians had been so recognized, and Johnson was enormously pleased. The California Art Club elected Smith its president in 1920 and 1921. He rightly claimed a role in establishing it “as a strong civic cultural influence in Southern California.” It chose Johnson president four times—1935 through 1938—and he thought that during his tenure there should be featured “amongst other things of interest to Artists, such activities as would tend to increase their knowledge of materials, methods, and means of producing the best expression possible in the different lines followed.” In 1939 a painting by each of the three men was among those shown at the Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco. There were certainly other oils, yet they not only dated from California’s start to the exposition’s opening, but also reflected both “conservative” and “modern” styles. Good company, for sure.

Keeping the field’s approval in mind, but returning to creativity itself for a moment, one finds debate about the effect of reward—at least extrinsic reward. Those who hold it in small regard seem to suggest it implies control, which, earlier, has been shown to be inhibiting. But should extrinsic reward, as from critics or collectors or peers, truly be no more than a by-product, it would seem to fall into the realm of positive reinforcement.

That noted, what have we altogether?

Artists’ Alley has actually remained something of a colony over the years. Nonetheless, it really enjoyed its heyday during the 1920’s and 1930’s, and even then it never drew residents from domains other than the graphic or plastic arts. In this respect it was at odds with certain more celebrated colonies—Taos and Santa Fe in New Mexico, for example, or Monterey and Carmel in California—where a greater number of domains were represented.

Still and all, the story of its beginnings is useful. Therein, first off, one finds not just a few ingredients of creativity’s necessary adjuncts, domain and field, but more importantly some makings of creativity itself. Most notably as to the latter, Artists’ Alley was a place where creators could exchange ideas in a supportive environment. When all is said and done, this may have been what really gave it purpose and significance.

In addition, however, one may undertake a bit of extrapolation. Forsythe and Johnson probably had family in mind when they chose Alhambra; after that, friend prompted friend. Has it been so different with numerous colonies? The personal element, in short, has existed elsewhere.

Finally, concentrating on both domain and field, one may argue Southern California was scarcely a cultural wasteland during the early 1900’s. It had professional critics who were knowledgeable and articulate. It had active collectors who, admittedly, preferred the East Coast or Europe but, in this, followed the tastes of the day as much as anything. It had graphic artists of distinctive merit_never mind creators in other realms. Although hardly as extensive or sophisticated as Paris or New York, say, given its population and priorities, the Southland had nothing to be ashamed of.

Acknowledgements

The author David T. Leary is a southern California native. He completed his undergraduate work at Stanford University and received a doctorate from the University of Southern California. Dr. Leary taught at Pasadena City College for many years with a special interest in California history. For his research on “Three Creators of Artists’ Alley” and requisite permission to quote, Dr. Leary especially wishes to acknowledge: The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley for their papers on Jack Wilkinson Smith; The McCracken Research Library at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center for their papers on Frank Tenney Johnson; and The Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art for items pertaining to Clyde Forsythe (there is no single repository on Forsythe).

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