California dreamin’: how Los Angeles gave post-war artists the space to create ‘their own artistic world’

In 1956 a young aspiring commercial artist from Oklahoma named Ed Ruscha read that the city of Los Angeles was gaining 1,000 new residents per day. ‘I felt: I want to be part of that,’ he later recalled. He was one of many post-war artists, including David Hockney, who would find a new creative freedom in the city.

‘Los Angeles was — and still is — the cultural frontier. It was the city where you could create your own artistic world,’ the dealer and curator Jeffrey Deitch tells Christie’s. ‘It didn’t have the weight of the European Modern tradition or the New York School.’

This sense of artistic liberty resonated with the Hollywood legend Norman Lear, who moved from New York City to Los Angeles in 1949 and went on to pioneer a bold new era of television. His groundbreaking series like All in the Family, The Jeffersons and Good Times offered candid views of American life previously unseen onscreen. Lear and his wife, Lyn, acquired an incomparable collection of fine art, with a focus on works from the 1950s to the 1980s, many of them by artists whose freedom of expression flourished in Los Angeles.

This May, Christie’s will offer The Collection of Norman and Lyn Lear in New York, with masterworks including Ed Ruscha’s Truth (1973) and David Hockney’s A Lawn Being Sprinkled (1967), from the artist’s iconic California Dreaming series.

The rise of the LA art world

By the mid-1960s, Los Angeles had emerged as a thriving cultural hub, not just for the entertainment and music industries but for fine art. LA’s Ferus Gallery was founded in 1957 by the husband-wife curator duo Walter and Shirley Hopps and the artist Edward Kienholz, who was replaced by Irving Blum a year later. The gallery championed avant-garde work from the West Coast — including Kienholz, Ruscha and Richard Diebenkorn — and the East, exhibiting Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and more. The gallery was an early champion of Pop art.

Walter Hopps would depart from Ferus in 1962 for the Pasadena Art Museum, where he curated the first-ever museum survey of the genre, New Painting of Common Objects, featuring works by Ruscha, Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Joe Goode and others. Established in 1961, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art became the city’s first major art museum, and in 1965, it opened a futuristic new campus on Wilshire Boulevard.

With the rise of boundary-pushing galleries and new museums, Los Angeles grew a pool of forward-thinking collectors who were open to emerging forms that responded to the media-saturated world around them, from Kienholz’s sprawling works of California Assemblage to Ruscha’s paintings incorporating text from advertisements and popular culture.

Fusing fantasy and reality

Local and visiting artists mined the creative liberty of Los Angeles via a wide range of approaches spanning Pop, Conceptualism and hard-edge abstraction. Ed Ruscha interpreted LA in depictions of the city’s landmarks, such as the Hollywood sign and the LACMA complex, as well as sharp bits of language plucked from daily life, be it the 20th Century Fox logo or an onomatopoeic OOF. ‘Ed Ruscha is really the foundation of the Los Angeles aesthetic,’ says Deitch. ‘It’s a fusion of conceptual and realist observation, of fantasy, of the interplay of word and abstract image.’

In Truth, from the artist’s series of word paintings depicting moral tenets that he began in 1972, the text sits on a horizon line, ensconced in warm brown and orange. ‘It’s such a resonant work,’ Deitch says. ‘I love the way there’s a kind of vibration in how Truth is painted with these fiery colours in the background that in a way predict the weather crisis in Los Angeles. It was meaningful then — and now in our so-called post-truth world.’

The open-minded social scene for artists in LA was a key part of the appeal for many practitioners. And for some, like David Hockney, the city provided not just artistic opportunities but the freedom to live as their authentic selves. Hockney, who came to Los Angeles from London in 1964, aimed to become what he called the ‘Piranesi’ of Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. ‘Los Angeles gave him the freedom to create his own artistic vision that was liberated from the heavy tradition of figuration in England during the 1950s,’ says Deitch.

Amidst the sparkling pools and pristine landscaping of the LA suburbs and surrounded by his new social circle, including the novelist Christopher Isherwood, the painter Don Bachardy and the dealer Nick Wilder, Hockney produced lush canvases presenting utopic views of sun-drenched leisure. A Lawn Being Sprinkled, which hung in the entryway of the Lears’ Brentwood home and more recently was on extended loan from the Lears to LACMA, is ‘one of the masterpieces of David Hockney in that period’ alongside A Bigger Splash, according to Deitch. ‘The painting is a brilliant rendering of the artificiality of Los Angeles,’ he adds, noting the fantasy and contradiction of green lawns in a desert climate, sprinklers dousing a drought-prone landscape.

A city of contrasts

The city’s searing contrasts, from the manicured lawns and slick fiberglass surfboards to the urban grit and spare desert backdrop, offered the perfect laboratory for artists looking to explore the relationship between reality and representation.

‘LA has this duality. There’s the beautiful sunshine and the green, but then, there are these ominous elements: wildfires, earthquakes, mud slides,’ says Deitch. ‘You have this fantasy life, but you also have all the things you read about in the tabloids — personal tragedies and people who have pushed the dream too far.’

These artists brought this duality into the picture plane. In the words of Robert Rauschenberg, ‘A picture is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world.’ While the ‘combine’ artist, who synthesised painting and sculpture in elaborate assemblages, lived and worked in New York, he was a frequent visitor to LA, where he collaborated with the city’s renowned print studios. He befriended Lear in the 1970s on one such trip while working with the famed Gemini Graphic Editions Limited. In 2018 Lear lent Rauschenberg's Rodeo Palace (Spread) from his collection to Rauschenberg: In and About L.A. at LACMA.

Another East Coast artist, Ellsworth Kelly, had his first LA solo exhibition at Ferus gallery in 1966, where visitors, according to one critic, were ‘bathed in the senses of pure pigment.’ Like Rauschenberg, Kelly worked with Gemini G.E.L., with whom he created more than 300 prints and editioned sculptures.

Kelly emerged as one of the leading proponents of ‘hard-edge’ abstraction—a term coined by a Los Angeles Times art critic in 1959 to describe a new iteration of abstraction that prized pure colour, shape and form. In paintings like Blue Pale Gray (1960), Kelly emphasises the flatness of the canvas with a limited colour palette and a bold, suspended shape that appears to sit on the surface like cut paper.

Art in Hollywood

As Deitch notes, Los Angeles has a rich history of cross-pollination between Hollywood and the arts. ‘There are so many people in Los Angeles known for creative achievement in film, television and music, and many in these fields also engaged in the art world, going back to Edward G. Robinson, Billy Wilder and Dennis Hopper,’ he says. ‘For a long time there have been influential people in film and television who have been important art collectors and patrons.’

Lear was one such dedicated patron, and he initially drew on the mentorship of the producer and collector Richard Dorso in making his early purchases. Lear’s interest in painting even made its way into his work on television. In 1973, he met with the painter and former NFL player Ernie Barnes. Lear found him so inspiring he decided to make one of the characters on Good Times a painter and feature Barnes’s art — including The Sugar Shack (1976) immortalised in the series’ closing credits — on the show.

It was not the last time Lear would collaborate with a prominent visual artist. In 1981, he commissioned Roy Lichtenstein to make a work for his I Love Liberty TV special, celebrating George Washington’s 250th birthday in 1982. Throughout his life, Lear, alongside Lyn, remained an avid collector and supporter of the Los Angeles art scene and important institutions like LACMA, where Mrs. Lear has been a trustee since 2011.

‘As someone who shaped popular culture for decades, he had this very sophisticated visual awareness,’ says Deitch of Lear. As the artists of the 1960s and 1970s in Los Angeles brought the real world into the picture plane, Lear fought censorship and broke down barriers to bring the real world onscreen, telling stories that addressed important social and political issues of the day. He recognised this same boldness in the artists of the post-war era for whom Los Angeles provided the freedom to imagine new worlds.