Excerpt from Pasadena: Landscapes, Artists, & Patronage 1900-1930 Lecture

There has always existed a certain bias emanating from the east coast-more virulent then than it is now-that is the arbiter of true cultural and artistic merit: and the west coast can never quite measure up. For instance, his New York dealer told Benjamin Brown that people might be more inclined to buy his paintings if Brown were to "conceal the fact that he was from California. Brown angrily refused and thereafter defiantly added the word California beneath his signature."

Many critics associated with the eastern art centers felt moving to the west coast was like committing career suicide. A critic by the name of Stewart Edward White who had moved from Michigan to California said, upon arrival, "California is the graveyard of talent." However, many artists of the west felt that to move anywhere else was unreasonable and bland, comparatively.

Much to the dislike of east coast and Midwest critics, California artists continued to portray the ideal of beauty in art and not the avant-garde trends of the twentieth century. Critics felt that by portraying an old ideal the California artists risked being pushed aside as idealistic and ancient and that without a stronghold in the modernist trends they gambled with their careers. Charles Nordhoff quoted a colleague from the East Coast as once stating, "It is generally acknowledged that some very respectable people live in California; but we who live on the Atlantic side of the continent are sorry for them, and do not doubt in our hearts that they would only be to glad to come over to us."

Antony Anderson, who wrote the Sunday Art Review column for the Los Angeles Times for twenty years, starting in 1906, refused to let these eastern critics get away with their lofty dismissal of the landscape artists who were residing in Los Angeles and greater southern California. He wrote that,"... we may bemoan our distance from the 'art centers', but neither we nor our talents die.... nor do we know the suffocating feeling of being buried alive. New York thinks we do, of course-but how should New York, always rather myopic, focus us clearly, four thousand miles away?" Anderson truly believed that the best artists in the United States were located in California. His outright disapproval of anything else brings up a biased point of view, but he sought to demonstrate California as the new Giverny and many of its artists as the new Impressionists.