Review by Choice Review
Schrank (California State Univ., Long Beach) chronicles, in five chapters, the career of the fine arts, principally painting and sculpture, in Los Angeles since the beginning of the last century. Written with authority and with the usual bias that considers the only acceptable art to be modernist art, the first two chapters explain, occasionally nearly opaquely, how the political and social powers-that-be used their sponsorship of traditional art to boost their desired civic image while trying to prevent modernism from gaining a foothold. A third recounts how post-WW II Red-baiters and other antiprogressive forces continued the assault on modernism. In the richly detailed next chapter, beatniks, musclemen, and other outsiders develop an art that the East Coast arts establishment accepted and that politicians eventually gave up trying to squelch. A final chapter uses an extensive discussion of the Watts Towers to review the tensions between those same old antagonists and a new party in the squabble--a racially heterogeneous alienated population of poor people whose presence and demands were an ongoing embarrassment. Missing is a fuller treatment of Hollywood's role in all this. Richly footnoted but sparsely illustrated, this volume features an extensive index but no bibliography. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above; general readers. C. W. Westfall University of Notre Dame
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
