The fine arts and Hollywood visual culture: Art practices and artistic identity in the California southland of the nineteen-thirties (Delmer Daves, Paul Landacre, Gordon Newell, Barse Miller)

California's Southland, during the nineteen-twenties and thirties, was a unique setting for art and artists. A synergy occurred between the producers and consumers of art, cultivating a context in which art-making practices and identity as an artist became a continuum which crossed the boundaries of fine, commercial, and popular art. This study describes that synergy and the continuum of practice and identity which it fostered.; The Southland's interpretation of modern aesthetics was linked with both popular culture and an intention to create a cultural establishment. Thus, the Southland generated neither a modernist avant-garde nor a counter-modernist enclave. Hollywood was the most visible manifestation of the resulting visual culture, and its idealized aesthetic informed nearly every aspect of the development of modern southern California. Hollywood did not create its visual culture in isolation, however, and an understanding of the complexity in which it arose it is critical here.; Ward Ritchie, a designer and printer of books, attracted a diverse group of artists and intellectuals which included the artists considered here: script writer and continuity artist Delmer Daves, wood engraver Paul Landacre, sculptor Gordon Newell, and painter Barse Miller.; This study examines how these artists model the appropriative eclecticism and practical continuum of Hollywood visual culture, and its characteristic view of art and artist. Several aspects are considered to illustrate their negotiation of the unique circumstances. First, they saw themselves as part of modern visual culture, not separate from their contemporaries in terms of their artistic contribution. Second, the synergistic mutuality between the arts became normative to their artistic identity. Artistic identity was located in the individual, and they were free to engage in commercial or popular art production, without degradation of artistic status. Third, their practices assimilated modernism as a heritage and represented a continuance of modernist visual expression. This encouraged a freedom to use both the traditions and modernist disruptions of those traditions as expressive turns.; While this historical moment must be seen as one of the facets of modernism in America's cultural unfolding, it may represent seminal shifts in artistic practice and identity which we now categorize as post-modern.