Book description
In 1921 Sam Rodia, an Italian laborer and tile setter, started work
on an elaborate assemblage in the backyard of his home in Watts,
California. The result was an iconic structure now known as the Watts
Towers. Rodia created a work that was original, even though the
resources available to support his project were virtually nonexistent.
Each of his limitations-whether of materials, real estate, finances,
or his own education-passed through his creative imagination to become
a positive element in his work. In The Modern Moves West,
accomplished cultural historian Richard Cándida Smith contends that
the Watts Towers provided a model to succeeding California artists
that was no longer defined through a subordinate relationship to the
artistic capitals of New York and Paris.
Tracing the development of abstract painting, assemblage art,
and efforts to build new arts institutions, Cándida Smith lays bare
the tensions between the democratic and professional sides of modern
and contemporary art as California developed a distinct regional
cultural life. Men and women from groups long alienated-if not
forcibly excluded-from the worlds of "high culture" made
their way in, staking out their participation with images and objects
that responded to particular circumstances as well as dilemmas of
contemporary life, in the process changing the public for whom art was
made. Beginning with the emergence of modern art in nineteenth-century
France and its influence on young Westerners and continuing through to
today's burgeoning border art movement along the U. S.-Mexican
frontier, The Modern Moves West dramatically illustrates the
paths that California artists took toward a more diverse and inclusive culture.
"The strengths of this book are its inclusion of much
material that has been thus far omitted from narratives of the period,
and the origin of its research in archives and oral history
interviews, several of which were conducted under the auspices of the
Archives of American Art and the UCLA oral history programme, some by
the author himself." - Lucy Bradnock, Art History
Richard Candida Smith is Professor of History at the University of
California, Berkeley, and author or editor of several books, including
Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California.
