Sign from Hwy 67

(Published on the KPBS arts blog, Culture Lust, August 4, 2010)
By Dave Hampton

They’ve been at it for generations. Since 1941, members of the Lemurian Order have quietly practiced their beliefs and offered correspondence courses from a remote site high on the boulder-strewn slopes northeast of San Diego.

A hand-wrought sign along State Route 67 marks the way up the hill to the Lemurian Fellowship. There’s something about that sign. At once rustic and strangely sophisticated, it has just the right proportions and materials.

Little can be seen from the highway except a glimpse of empty road leading up into the light.

Who are these mysterious Lemurians and do they wear… robes?

Well, technically, they’re a nonprofit religious corporation, a non-denominational group formed to disseminate 12 lessons, or Lemurian teachings, all based on ancient wisdom they trace back to civilizations on the lost continents of Mu and Atlantis.

These teachings were revealed to a gold prospecting, world traveling, osteopath turned fiction writer named Dr. Robert D. Stelle, who founded the Lemurian Fellowship in 1936. After short periods in Chicago, Milwaukee and Chula Vista, the Fellowship acquired property in 1941 near Ramona, California, where they’ve resided ever since.

The Fellowship describes itself as a school of universal philosophy and “the only earthly organization authorized to work directly with those individuals who desire to embrace the Lemurian Philosophy and help fulfill the Great Work.”

The Fellowship members I’ve met are warm, good humored folks. Eccentric, perhaps, but in a banal, dress shirt and slacks way (no robes). Their karmic laws, ethical principles, spiritual evolution and far-fetched historical perspective hardly come as a big surprise. And predictably, they’re looking forward to a better world in the form of a post-Armageddon New Order (The now-forming Kingdom of God).

What is surprising – what’s really fantastic – is the Fellowship’s contribution to 20th century modern design.

It’s true. Ancient Lemurian wisdom was featured at the Museum of Modern Art and households across the US in the form of mid-century objects made by Lemurian Crafts, “an effort by a handful of students of the Lemurian Order to make artistic and useful products and market them.”

Initially, the Fellowship was supported by student fees, book sales, and early mail order products like “Flipper,” a painted wooden duck pull-toy with leather feet. Not just a pragmatic approach to economics – or “prosperity consciousness” – their products also had deeper meaning as manifestations of Lemurian philosophy in action.

But after WWII, the look of Lemurian Crafts evolved rapidly toward Modernism – an aesthetic movement that’s frequently associated with spirituality and earnest idealism.

1946 Lemurian Crafts ad from Desert Magazine

A 1946 Desert Magazine ad suggests that sophisticated taste, materials and craftsmanship found in a Lemurian Crafts cigarette box “fashioned from Honduras Mahogany, carefully styled to the tempo and comfort of Western living” had replaced Flipper, the pull-toy.

Woodworking was their first triumph.

A line of lathe-turned dinnerware, called “Simplicity,” with plates, bowls, salad servers and “beakers” appeared in the Fall, 1949 issue of Furniture Forum Magazine, a leading trade publication dedicated to modern design. The sleek shapes created by Lemurian Crafts, in oil-finished walnut and mahogany, fit seamlessly with mid-century furniture and interiors.

They also show up repeatedly in the pages of Arts & Architecture Magazine (sponsor of the hugely influential Case Study Program) and were included in the prestigious “Good Design” shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

In 1952, MOMA acquired a Lemurian Crafts beaker in black walnut for its permanent collection of Architecture and Design objects.

Another New York institution, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, selected a lignum vitae (ironwood) vase for its 1956 “Craftsmanship in a Changing World” exhibition. That show subsequently toured the country, including a stop at the Del Mar Fair.

Curiously, this level of recognition indicates that Lemurian philosophy in action, manifest through modern design and marketed alongside the best 20th century American designers, achieved genuine prominence in the American design world.

Custom work in the 1940s and 1950s for designers like Robsjohn Gibbings and Gerald Jerome, local enamel artists Jackson and Ellamarie Woolley and Los Angeles silversmith Allan Adler involved everything from large mosaic wall plaques to mobiles and table lamps.

This variety of requests is probably what led Lemurian Crafts to develop a line of custom architectural hardware; an idea so successful that it displaced their woodworking altogether.

Lemurian Crafts hardware

By the early 1960s their disc, bow tie and boomerang-shaped door handles were much sought after by modern architects such as Henry Hester (who used them for the penthouse of his Salomon Apartments) and wound up on commercial buildings across the country.

Inlaid stone, marble and ceramic tile offset the lustrous brass, bronze and aluminum push plates, door pulls and handles. These are still in use on some the Fellowship buildings, designed by prolific Palm Springs modernist William Cody. The striking designs represented the Fellowship’s abiding devotion to modernism.

Rhu House designed by William Cody

By the late 1970s, demand for their architectural products ebbed and production ceased altogether, as those who brought Modernism to the Lemurian Fellowship grew old and eventually transitioned. In the last twenty years the Fellowship has returned to working exclusively with wood. They’re currently known for making elegant music stands.

Marked only by obscure glyphs, scattered over time and space, objects created by Lemurian Crafts in decades past have become modern relics, virtually impossible to find, like the lost continents and civilizations whose ancient wisdom inspired their makers.

Marlene Williams pushes her “product” Richard Allen Morris down La Jolla Blvd.

(Published on the KPBS arts blog, Culture Lust, May 10, 2010)
By Dave Hampton

The six-year span from 1959 to 1964 was a breakthrough period for new art in San Diego. During this time, the Art Center in La Jolla (now Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego) under director Don Brewer began to focus its exhibition program on contemporary art – a choice that threatened to alienate the organization’s conservative benefactors. The proto-museum opened a school with full time faculty of artists and launched a series of major annual exhibitions of current California painting and sculpture… all before the UCSD campus opened and Interstate 5 was complete.

This brief epoch was full of promise, as the Art Center drew some of the area’s best artists to La Jolla with teaching gigs, residencies and exhibition opportunities. For a little while, two lively art galleries, supported by the pool of Art Center talent, operated right next door to each other on La Jolla Boulevard, just south of Pearl St.

Between them, the Art Works Gallery and the i Gallery represented San Diego’s avant garde, and while each was connected to the scene at the Art Center, both short-lived enterprises reflected the legendary personalities of their owners: Lou Sander and Marlene Williams, two people who brought San Diego face-to-face with the new.

In June of 1962, Louis M. Sander opened the Art Works gallery on Adams Avenue with a show of oil paintings and drawings by Richard Allen Morris. The gallery then followed with a controversial show of mixed media “X Signs” by painter John Baldessari.

In a review of the Baldessari show, Dr. Armin Kietzmann, the San Diego Union’s art writer, reported that one of the pieces, “X Sign for a Crucifixion,” involved “waste materials, paint smears and a ragdoll nailed to a splintered post.” In defense of his work, Baldessari suggested that “brutal means evoke the Crucifixion more sincerely, perhaps, than a small golden cross worn round the neck.”

Baldessari is the most famous artist to have emerged from the San Diego mid-century art community. While teaching at Southwestern College (and later at UCSD) he explored conceptual art with his friends, Bob Matheny, Russell Baldwin and Richard Allen Morris, and fueled the growing movement on the West Coast.

The Morris and Baldessari shows established Art Work’s “rebel spirit” (Kietzmann’s term) and Sander’s outstanding eye for local talent. Sander himself was an enigmatic and colorful guy. “He was a little bit of an operator,” remembers painter Karen Kozlow, an Art Center student who later married Sander.

That’s a little bit of an understatement.

Sander juggled artists (and sometimes their wives or girlfriends); finances (sometimes his wives or girlfriend’s); and gallery shows that contributed to the modern art breakthrough in San Diego, with an avid interest in psychedelics.
“He had this wild side, but he was really, really a wonderful person” says Kozlow. “When I first met him I thought he was a big wig from New York and I was going to get very famous.”

Kozlow, who became romantically involved with Sander, helped finance the gallery’s move to La Jolla a year later. But Sander and Co. were still on Adams Avenue when Marlene Williams, the striking wife of painter Guy Williams, decided in June of 1963 to open the i Gallery on La Jolla Boulevard, not far from the Art Center where her husband was teaching.

“Marlene was a pistol!” remembers Kozlow. “She was smart and had marvelous taste and a good business sense.”

“She was very energetic and could operate in the art scene’s political milieu,” recalls painter Fred Holle. His fellow Art Center colleague Don Dudley says she “had ambitions to be something more than just Guy Williams’ wife.”

Marlene was ambitious. Her plan was to show the work of top-notch contemporary artists from New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles side by side with her own “stable” of local hotshots. In retrospect, her 32-artist opening show was the most significant contemporary art exhibition put on by a commercial gallery in San Diego at the time.

Along with local painters, Williams presented now-iconic 20th Century artists like Sam Francis, Richard Diebenkorn, Louise Nevelson, and Peter Voulkos together for the first time in San Diego.

By the time he moved in next door to the i Gallery, Lou Sander also represented a solid group of local painters, including Kozlow, Fred Holle and Sheldon Kirby from the Art Center, Cliff McReynolds and the German-born Fred Hocks (a respected elder statesman of modern art in San Diego). When Kozlow won an award at the Third Art Center Annual of California Painting and Sculpture for her painting “Cradled Light,” Lou Sander accepted it on behalf of his gallery. She “was the first woman artist given an award” in the prestigious series of annuals.

Not to be outdone by Williams’ big opening, Sander brought Ed Ruscha, Wayne Thiebaud, Billy Al Bengston and other major California artists to his La Jolla gallery for a west coast pop art show called “Six More Plus One.” After a couple of months in La Jolla, the mercurial Lou Sander changed the name of his gallery from Art Works to the Sander Gallery.

The two galleries only lasted for about a year – a short, but heady run.

“Oh, it was fun!” recalls Kozlow. “We had openings on the same night and the Jefferson Gallery joined in with us. We had a little La Jolla art scene! There was no animosity at all, we were just so glad to be trying to do art together and I liked Marlene, we were good friends.”

Shows from both galleries were reviewed in Artforum magazine, the upstart west coast art bible, which consecrated the La Jolla scene with its acknowledgment, even if the reviews themselves were lukewarm.

According to painter Don Dudley, John and Carol Baldessari were married at the i Gallery “in a wonderfully Dadaist ceremony/ performance.” For Richard Allen Morris’s solo show, proprietor Marlene Williams was photographed pushing the artist, her “product,” down La Jolla Boulevard in a shopping cart. Morris was close friends with Guy and Marlene Williams and after that couple left for Los Angeles, Lou Sander and Karen Kozlow “took over feeding Richard,” says Kozlow.

Late 1964 marked the end of an era. Major changes took place at the Art Center. The school closed and the program of juried annual exhibitions was discontinued as the institution evolved into the La Jolla Museum of Art.

Artists who had lent such vitality to the La Jolla scene: Holle, McClain, Dudley and Guy Williams, left San Diego permanently when their Art Center jobs ended abruptly. La Jolla Boulevard’s miniature gallery row collapsed.

The i Gallery closed first, in true period fashion. “It closed with a happening,” Kozlow says. “Aida Fries (wife of painter Bob Fries) was in a trunk in her belly dance outfit and John Baldessari’s wife Carol was sitting in a chair with a stack of pancakes on her lap. And then they opened the trunk and Aida got out and did belly dance. Those are the main things I remember.”

After closing their gallery, Sander and Kozlow (now married) lived in Pacific Beach. He took a day job to support them while they made films, staged poetry readings and held a variety of exhibitions. The most publicized of these was an unusual 1965 exhibition of nine artists’ work displayed in model units at the new Loma Riviera townhouse development called “New Art in Living Space.” John Baldessari, Richard Allen Morris, Karen Kozlow, Cliff McReynolds, Susan Long, Bob Fries and Ed Carillo were among the featured artists.

Later, Kozlow and Sander founded an artist’s retreat/commune east of Alpine where late-60’s art happenings met transcendental meditation. Sander had become an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church and their remote, five-acre Ulife Institute was described by artist Bob Matheny in 1968 as both an “informal artist’s cooperative” and a “non-sectarian church” set amongst “good oaks, clean air and handsome rock formations.” Kozlow and Sander’s marriage was also a bit rocky by then and shortly after their divorce the Pine Valley Fire of 1970 swept over the property, consuming all of Kozlow’s paintings.

Before the fire, Sander started working at the Post Office, where he was subsequently elected American Postal Workers Union Local President in 1975. He later married the artist Ellen Van Fleet and they moved to Sacramento.

Years after his gallery relationship with Sander, Richard Allen Morris was approached at his Spanish Village studio by an F.B.I. agent who questioned him about Sander. There was “no joking, no smiling” and the artist assumed it had to do with drugs. “I clammed up,” Morris remembers. The agent left his card.

Sander continued to represent artists and sell privately. His diverse interests took him around the world and he died in a puzzling airplane crash on a runway in Seoul, Korea in 1980. He had apparently changed his name to Ray Van Fleet.

Kozlow and Sander remained close after their divorce, and for years after the reports of his death, she had the feeling that he might still appear one day out of nowhere.

“That,” she says, “would be just like Lou.”

The former Capri Theater on Park Boulevard in San Diego. Photo by Julius Shulman

(Published on the KPBS arts blog, Culture Lust, February 2, 2010)
By Dave Hampton

San Diego’s Park Boulevard was home to one of the city’s first mid-century modern theaters, known as The Capri. Under new (and unconventional) ownership during the mid-1950s, the Capri also became an unlikely outpost of San Diego modernism. In fact, the Capri became a showcase for some of San Diego’s best artists.

The building’s facade looked like a bit like a Mondrian painting. An “ultra-modern” bronze sculpture hung from the 17-foot high lobby ceiling and there were Miró-inspired mosaics in the bathrooms. The main wall of the lobby became a de facto gallery, displaying carefully selected work by local artists.

The credit, or blame, for turning the theater into a bastion of Modernism falls upon its owner Burton Jones, aided and abetted by a writer named James Britton.

Jones, who owned theaters elsewhere in San Diego and Los Angeles, purchased the 1926 Egyptian Theater, the centerpiece of an exotic stretch of Egyptian Revival buildings along Park Boulevard just south of University, and promptly gutted it. Modernists could be ruthless in their efforts to bring things up to date and historic preservation issues did not keep them up at night.

Jones “completely rebuilt” the building “inside and out” according to a July, 1954 article in the San Diego Union, accompanied by a photo of the stocky Jones posing over a model of his “modernistic” theater. There are rumors that San Diego modern architect Lloyd Ruocco was involved with the Capri project, but Frank Gruys, AIA (of Beverly Hills) is credited with the design.

Along with new improvements like “draftless” air conditioning and an 800 square foot screen, much was made of the bronze sculpture commissioned for the lobby from Los Angeles sculptor Bernard Rosenthal.

Lobby with Rosenthal hanging sculptures and art installation. Photo by Julius Shulman

Rosenthal (known as Tony Rosenthal after 1961) received a lot of architectural commissions through his association with Charles & Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen and John Entenza. He gradually became synonymous with public art in the 1960s, exhibiting at major museums and galleries around the world until his death last July. His sculpture for the Capri was designed to “throw shadow patterns against the lobby walls.”

The building and Rosenthal sculpture may have been unconventional for the time, but so was owner Burton Jones. He went out on a limb when he decided to have James Britton, an outspoken architecture critic, select and install art exhibitions in his lobby.

Britton arrived here in 1948, and soon began writing a column for Point Newsweekly called “Art of the City.” In October of 1954, he wrote about events at the new Capri Theater and praised Jones’ “policy to show only top quality pictures aimed at discriminating audiences.” At the same time, Britton warned that this formula might not succeed in San Diego. “And the town will be the poorer culturally. San Diego will have demonstrated once more that it offers no easy hospitality to men of high artistic conscience.”

The Capri persevered. Two years later, Britton (who became an associate editor at San Diego and Point) was busy curating regular art exhibits in the lobby, featuring painters such as William Munson, Fred Hocks, Sheldon Kirby, Linda Lewis, Fred Holle and many others.

Holle was an aspiring young painter whose art studies were interrupted by four years in the Navy. Soon after being discharged in 1956, Holle and his wife went to see “Lust for Life” at the Capri, where they also saw “paintings by an artist named Sheldon Kirby. The pitch was that Kirby had learned from van Gogh. The paintings were dazzling! Powerful color coupled with strong execution. After seeing the movie coupled with Sheldon’s painting, I couldn’t wait to get home and try to pump some life into my own neglected ‘daubings.’”

Invader IV, 1957, by Sheldon Kirby. Courtesy of Greg Strangman. Photo by Chip Morton

In 1958, Holle’s own work was shown at the Capri. “It was a real treat, especially since I first experienced that venue when I was a nonentity, a half-formed art hopeful. Britton took notice of my work and was very encouraging to me (and others) in his critiques in SD magazine.”

Another young artist that Britton encouraged was James Hubbell. The individualistic sculptor, painter and architectural designer defies categorization and is now one of San Diego’s best-loved artists. Hubbell’s creative community activism and nature-based designs have been recognized around the world.

It might surprise Hubbell fans to know that his first solo exhibition in San Diego took place at the Capri!

Following his return from two years at Cranbrook Academy of Art, the young sculptor’s 1956 Capri exhibition featured architectural panels of plastic with fused glass. For one piece, Hubbell used “great crude chunks of colored glass broken off the edges of pouring crucibles, setting them in a bed of white plaster.” A grid-like structure suggestive of the building’s exterior held the colorful architectural panels upright and also left room for displaying smaller sculptural pieces. It was an eye-catching lobby installation, prompting Britton to declare that it would “win converts to ‘modern art.’”

Still, you can’t please everyone. In his “Art in the City” column, Britton described an elderly patron whose offhand critique of Hubbell’s work – “It stinks!” – was delivered with such force that it knocked her off balance, “but she regained enough equilibrium to teeter back outdoors into the unstudied-but familiar and therefore comforting-ugliness which is the average city street.”

Then there is the case of Marjorie (Marj) Hyde, another young artist who helped shape the San Diego mid-century art scene. Hyde received national attention in 1956 when one of her award-winning works, a mosaic, toured the nation with an exhibition called, “Craftsmanship In A Changing World,” put on by the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York.

However here in San Diego, Hyde’s work caused a stir. The same year of the traveling exhibit, a group of Hyde’s “innocent, elegant” paintings were hung in one of Lloyd Ruocco’s buildings, the Security Trust and Savings Bank in Hillcrest, where they were supposed to remain for a month.

Instead, the paintings came down after just two days, having provoked many complaints, including the following: “If my kid painted pictures like those, I’d give him a beating.”

Marj Hyde’s exhibit at the Capri

Burton Jones and his Capri Theater came to the rescue. Britton’s June, 1956, Art of the City column documented the whole affair while announcing that Hyde’s paintings were being shown at the Capri, where “Burton Jones, the outstanding San Diego businessman-connoisseur, always has ‘modern’ art on view.”

Marj Hyde was a devoted artist and teacher; she became the founding head of the Department of Art at Grossmont College, where the Hyde Gallery is named in her honor.

Britton’s writing is an invaluable, however skewed, record of Modernism in San Diego and while his art shows at the Capri lasted for only two or three years, they are preserved in his “Art of the City” column and bring the challenges and champions of San Diego’s modern community into sharp focus.

As for the Capri, its new look resulted in an unusual domino effect. Britton wrote in 1958 that “the Capri Theater made modern architecture popular in San Diego.”

After a fire gutted the nearby Garden of Allah restaurant, the owners asked San Diego modern architect Richard Wheeler to replace it with a Mondrian-inspired building. They called their new enterprise The Flame and Wheeler is said to have designed three more similar buildings in the area in quick succession – creating the city’s only Egyptian/Mondrianesque neighborhood!

The Flame

The 1950s proved to be the Capri’s heyday. By the mid-1970s, it had succumbed to screening “porno splits” such as “The Devil in Miss Jones” and “Deep Throat.” Landmark Theaters tried to revitalize the run-down space in 1987 as an art house theater (the chain also operated the Ken, the Guild and the Cove at the time) and re-named it the Park.

But in disappointing 21st Century fashion, the entire corner at Park and University was transformed in 2005 into a towering mixed-use, 80-unit condominium development called “The Egyptian.” A prime example of what D.A. Kolodenko recently called “…a major San Diego trend: We like to wreck things and then replace them with new things that celebrate, pay lip service to or otherwise acknowledge the things they replaced.”

In the curious pantheon of obscure, local mid-century art venues, a place called Vroman’s holds a lofty position. It wasn’t a gallery. It wasn’t a museum. Vroman’s was a bookstore that gave many of the young lions of San Diego painting a chance to exhibit when most of the commercial galleries (and there weren’t many – we’re talking late 1950s) wouldn’t go near them.

Located in the old Southern Hotel building, the store was owned by a Pasadena chain of the same name. The San Diego branch at 1153 Sixth Avenue was an elegant place where businessmen and artists crossed paths. There was a basement full of paperbacks and an ‘L’ shaped mezzanine with art supplies and enough room to hang “modest” art shows.

In 1958, new manager John Storm became an unintended champion of local modernist painters and sculptors. A robust man, Storm also authored eight books, including a novel about the artist Suzanne Valadon, who was the mother of Maurice Utrillo.

Storm felt that American art was becoming “increasingly important” and decided to promote this idea at a local level. In July of 1958, Storm agreed to let artist Guy Williams exhibit abstract paintings on the mezzanine. The show was a success, several pieces sold, and Williams began to suggest future shows.

Richard Allen Morris c. 1959

For one of San Diego’s most respected painters, Richard Allen Morris, who has been celebrated in Europe and New York of late, Vroman’s remains significant for a couple of reasons. Morris had one of his first solo exhibitions there, called “Dada Comes to San Diego,” and it’s the place where his 50-year career in downtown bookstores began.

“I had no idea I would earn money to sustain my painting through books,” Morris observed recently. He subsequently worked at the Bargain Bookstore, the Lanning Bookshop, and Wahrenbrock’s, the last of the downtown independents, which closed earlier this year.

Morris eventually took over for Williams and began to work on the art exhibits. “The job came out of the blue; Guy approached me and I said, ‘sure’! He mentioned to John that I needed a gig, so I gladly waltzed right into that.”

The series of exhibitions focused on youthful artists that were progressive, even shocking, by San Diego post-war standards. They included Fred Holle, Sheldon Kirby, Don Dudley, James Hubbell, Ray Trail, Fred Hocks, Conrad Woods and Malcolm McClain. Although not household names, this lot helped put the word ‘contemporary’ in the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

The Enigma of Dada, a mixed media work by Richard Allen Morris

A year after Guy Williams’ inaugural show, Morris presented a bold and humorous collection of his own works on the mezzanine: art-referential constructions such as “The Action Painter of Dada Place” and “A Cool Old Painter” that involved art studio debris, cigarettes and a running record player and a self-portrait of Rembrandt decorated with sun glasses. The young artist’s show was radical for San Diego in 1959, even though its concept (Dada) was forty years old!

Keep in mind that San Diego was still primarily a Navy and aerospace town in the late 1950s and very conservative toward art. Jews were actually prevented from living in La Jolla at the time. How many art-minded San Diegans in 1959 were ready to trade the landscape above the hearth for Morris’s “Mercury In Flight” (a rocking chair hung upside down)? How many would make that choice now?

Although painter Fred Holle thinks he “actually sold a couple of pieces” at Vroman’s, Richard Allen Morris was doubtful when asked about sales from the mezzanine shows. “That’s kind of sad because I don’t remember, while I was there, that I ever sold one thing! Whether there were sales or not John Storm stood behind it. He wasn’t worried about the sales… he was worried about the exposure for these people – for these artists.”

Malcolm McClain exhibition at Vroman’s, 1961

Don Dudley was another dynamic painter who also worked at Vroman’s and showed there in March of 1959. Dudley remembers that Storm “…was a pleasure to be around. He was literate and sophisticated. Had I been given the choice he would have been my father.”

How Storm managed to pull all this off is uncertain, considering San Diego’s attitude toward contemporary art, but he was known as an astute businessman and a “veteran bookman.” Dudley offers this frank explanation: “(Storm) was a friend to most of the artists I knew; he offered the walls because he was bored with managing someone else’s business.”

Storm died suddenly of heart problems on December 21st, 1959. He wasn’t even 50 years old. The momentum generated by Storm kept the art shows going for a couple of years, but Vroman’s closed its San Diego store in 1962.

We could have done with a handful of John Storms.

(Published on the KPBS arts blog, Culture Lust, November 29, 2009)
By Dave Hampton

In 1948, an abstract painting called “Hope Deferred” took first prize in the annual San Diego Art Guild exhibition. People were pissed.

San Diegans were accustomed to art that was easily chewed and swallowed – happy landscapes and beautiful portraits with recognizable elements, maybe some social realism, but nothing too demanding.

“Hope Deferred” was an early example of geometric abstraction by Dana Point resident John McLaughlin, who became famous for zen-inspired, hard-edge paintings. McLaughlin’s early works are broadly appealing, almost decorative by today’s standards, and his mature style became hugely influential. Today, McLaughlin’s paintings routinely sell for $50 or $60,000. But in 1948, San Diego was fiercely conservative and the award-winning “Hope Deferred” provoked angry letters of protest.

The “furor” (that’s what the headlines called it!) made the papers in a big way. A photo of the oil painting was published two days in a row by the San Diego Union, accompanied on day two by an apologetic caption that started off: “No, no, not again!”

In a letter to the Mayor and City Manager one local resident called the painting “a monstrosity.” He described it as a “lopsided doughnut that has been kicked around the kitchen floor.” Also, according to the paper, a high school biology student was quick to identify the subject as an amoeba. “You can even see the nucleus!” he said.

Other irate San Diegans “harassed Union telephone operators” after the painting was published. But how, most of the callers wanted to know, could the judges pick “Hope Deferred” over paintings of “trees, birds and other recognizable objects?”

One of the judges who gave “Hope Deferred” its prize in the Art Guild competition was sculptor, designer, printmaker and La Jolla resident Harry Bertoia. Bertoia had just left the Eames office in Venice Beach (he contributed, without credit, to the design of the iconic wire version of the Eames Chair, produced by Herman Miller) and was working for the Naval Electronics Laboratory in Point Loma where artists were often employed in the graphic design branch.

Bertoia was a member of the Allied Craftsmen, with whom he exhibited jewelry in the Spanish Village. Founded in 1948, the Allied Craftsmen was a crafts organization that sought to unite crafts artists and familiarize the public with Modernism. Bertoia left San Diego after he was invited to work as a designer for Knoll furniture. His collection of wire chairs for Knoll Furniture became a staple of mid-century modern interiors and he became an important 20th century sculptor.

Modern art was not easily understood and modern artists in San Diego were accustomed to being under fire. But there was a small local art community dedicated to Modernism in art, design and architecture. That they even bothered in the face of such criticism is part of what makes this aspect of local art history so compelling.

Both John McLaughlin and Harry Bertoia are major figures in American art who struggled in a Modernist drama that played out right here in post-war San Diego. The San Diego modern art scene of the 1950s and 60s was full of fascinating people and places, but this period of local art history is poorly documented and about to fade from living memory. The dynamic painters, sculptors, architects and scene makers who made Modernism happen in San Diego are leaving us with alarming frequency these days.

In this new Culture Lust series, we investigate specific places that played a unique role in the San Diego modern art scene. From bookstores, coffeehouses and movie theater lobbies featuring local artists, to established galleries and the colorful people who owned them, we’ll dig into what it meant to be modern in San Diego.

Richard Allen Morris, Benefit, 2010, acrylic & patch & paint on canvas, 10 x 10 inches. Courtesy of R. B. Stevenson Gallery

“Patch and Paint,” a show of new paintings by the stalwart local painter Richard Allen Morris, opens this Friday at the R.B. Stevenson Gallery. You will be tempted to lick, chew and swallow his latest works.

An artist’s artist, Morris has become an heroic figure after 50 years of struggle in a city that still doesn’t seem to know what to make of him. We’ve prepared this handy guide to clear everything up:

FACTS about RAM:

-spent high school years in Torrington, WY practicing sleight of hand… to no avail

-has lived and worked in studios near downtown SD since 1956 discharge from Navy

-does not drive

-writes zen-like poetry and gives infrequent readings, currently cannot locate his poems

-loves books, jazz and baseball

-throws a football once a week with sculptor Tom Driscoll; has done so since 1982

-smoked a pipe for many years, used it once in self defense

-has many collections, including paintings on black velvet and antique tins

-inhabits a bunker of a studio, so packed he is forced to paint in the stairwell

-walks daily

-taught adult and children’s art classes, describes his own teaching as “inferior”

-gets two tv channels (three if he’s lucky)

-prepares lists of funny names and phrases to use as titles for paintings

-is a good sport

STATEMENTS about RAM:

“San Diego’s most imaginative and inventive artist. He is like what Rousseau was to other painters in Paris at the turn of the century, but not naive.” – John Baldessari

“A serious, hardworking artist who has gone ahead with his search despite public indifference and apathy and, in some cases, even overt hostility.” – Sheldon Kirby

“He is perhaps the only artist of this vicinity to successfully develop and nurture a vital humorous aesthetic quality in his work…one of the most difficult directions a contemporary artist can choose.”- Don Brewer

“One of the strongest local painters, and one of the least appreciated; he’s one of the most sensitive creative people around and he’s intensely honest to himself and his work.” – Dan Jacobs

His resolve “to work without seduction, without blazes of vainglory, without the crutch of ‘craftsmanship,’ without ‘officialdom’ (even artistic), may someday be a San Diego maxim.” – Malcolm McClain

BOOKS about RAM:

“Richard Allen Morris” CUE Art Foundation 2004, New York, NY. USA

“Richard Allen Morris: Restrospective 1958 – 2004″ Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California. USA

“Richard Allen Morris: Crossing Edges” Hausler Contemporary 2007 Zurich, Switzerland and Munich, Germany.

“Richard Allen Morris: It’s just a certain sound I’m after.” Kienbaum Artists Books and Galerie Schmidt Maczollek 2008 Koln, Germany.

“Richard Allen Morris: Painted!” Daros Collecction 2008, Zurich, Switzerland.

“Richard Allen Morris: Painter’s Room 2009″ Munich, Germany, Zurich, Switzerland.

“Patch & Paint” will be on view from July 11th through the 24th. An opening reception for the artist takes place tonight from 5-8 p.m.

Objects USA, presents RETURN of the Object, the latest in a continuing series of sales exhibitions.

Items for sale are all vintage, from the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, and include paintings, sculpture, pottery, furniture and functional objects for indoor and outdoor use.  Hard to find examples of California Design will be featured as well as artwork by mid century San Diego artists and members of the Allied Craftsmen.

An opening reception will be held on Friday, Nov. 30th at 7 pm, and the show will be open on Saturday, Dec. 1st and Sunday, Dec. 2nd from 10am to 5pm.

Location: Ronis Fine Art, 1946 Broadway, San Diego, CA 92102