POST-WAR ART IN LOS ANGELES AND SAN FRANCISCO At first glance, California would seem to be an exceedingly unpromising place for major art to emerge in the second half of the Twentieth Century. A new state with a throwaway culture without a history, California had...
BEAT CULTURE 1950s Most cultural movements are large-scale shifts in thinking due to a collective action on the part of many people. Beat Culture is unusual in that the concept of what it meant to be a Beat was based upon the writings and activities of a very few...
ART IN SAN FRANCISCO 1940-1950 San Francisco was the center of high culture on the West Coast, boasting an opera and art museums and art schools while Los Angeles was a provincial oil town. Remarkably, the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art...
CULTURE IN LOS ANGELES 1940-1950 The City of Angels has many names, or to be more correct, many variations of its Spanish name: El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula. The locals have their own names for the city: “L.A.” and the “City of...
THE OXYMORON OF NAZI “ART” Long sequestered and rarely viewed, recent art historical writings have begun to examine the art of Fascism. This series of podcasts, in four parts, attempts to answer a series of questions: what were the goals of Nazi art, who...
THE GERMAN ARTISTS BETWEEN THE WARS, PART ONE OTTO DIX In the period between World War I and World War II, Otto Dix dedicated his art to demonstrating with frank brutality the cost of war. While George Grosz leveled his attacks on self-satisfied bureaucrats, Dix...
