(Click on images to enlarge)

Pauline Gibling Schindler, from a prominent east coast family, studied music for four years at Smith College (see below) after which she moved to Chicago and taught music from 1916 to 1919 at Jane Addams‘ Hull House, a settlement house for the poor and center for social reformers and intelligentsia. During Pauline’s time at Smith, Addams and Emily Green Balch founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom for which both, on separate occasions, were to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Pauline’s mother Sophie became the Treasurer of the League. In 1919, Pauline met and married architect Rudolph Schindler, and moved with him to Taliesin, his employer Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio. Ironically, Richard Neutra would also briefly stay at Hull House upon his arrival in Chicago from New York in March 1924 where he taught children’s drawing classes to earn his keep. (RN-Hines, p. 48-9, P&F, p. 116).

Frank Lloyd Wright appointed Schindler superintendent of his office for the duration of his two year period in Japan supervising the construction of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. At the same time, with a large commission for the oil heiress, Aline Barnsdall, Wright set up office in Los Angeles, which is where the Schindler’s moved in 1920. The following year Schindler set up his own, independent practice and, in collaboration with Pauline’s college friend Marion Chace and her contractor husband John, designed and built the Kings Road House with financial support from Pauline’s parents. The Kings Road House, wrote the architectural historian Rayner Banham, “is perhaps the most unobtrusively enjoyable domestic habitat ever created in Los Angeles.” (Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Harper & Row, 1971, p. 182).

The house reflected Pauline’s social philosophy, a place of simplicity where people from all walks of life could meet together. Pauline had expressed this kind of open meeting house in a letter to her mother well before she had met Schindler. She presciently wrote from Hull House in 1916,

During this period, the lifestyle embodied in the design for their house was observed by the Schindlers (and the Neutras after they moved in in March 1925) through diet and exercise, psychoanalysis, education, and the arts of music, dance, painting and photography. The outdoor courts were dining rooms and playrooms for their toddlers, who ran free under the sun year round. They slept in the open air, ate simple meals of fruits and vegetables by the fireplaces, and wore loose-fitting garments of natural fibers closed with ties rather than buttons. At their parties, the terraces served as stages for musical and dance performances; in the audiences were many aspiring California artists, actors and writers.

Edward Weston was one of the earliest visitors to the completed house. Weston likely met the Schindlers at the Walt Whitman School around 1921 where Pauline taught and Weston’s sons Chandler and Brett were enrolled. The Schindlers visited Weston’s studio in the summer of 1922 and later “when the evening was ripe” the group moved over to Kings Road. Weston “[was] of course very much excited about the house, and wanting to see it by daylight. All of it a fearfully stimulating evening…RMS and I couldn’t sleep, with the stimulus of the music, and Mr. Weston’s pictures.” (Artful Lives: Margrethe Mather, Edward Weston, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles by Beth Gates Warren, p. 253 and letter from SPG to family, July 1922). The Schindlers, and later the Neutras, would become lifelong friends and collaborators with Weston and his sons.

Announcement for a February 22, 1930 talk on modern art at Kings Road. From Sweeney, p. 107.

“He was gotten, willfully, at noon of a still burning August day on one of those beaches; we both knew that he would be a male. His mother and I, living in a dream world, believed that once he was surely conceived she could go happily forth into the world alone, carrying him, and I return to my work with Nellie Van.” Browne soon divorced Van Volkenberg, married Janson and moved into a new “redwood shack” built for Ellen by her parents in Halcyon. (Too Late to Lament, pp. 280).

Browne and Van Volkenberg were, however, soon back working together on projects such as an April, 1925 performance at the Wilshire Ebell Theater by the Maurice Browne Players of Browne’s “Mother of Gregory” (first performed in Carmel in 1924). (“Ebell Program for Month Out”, L.A. Times, April 23, 1925, p. I-7.)  Browne also announced in February, 1926 that Los Angeles would be the production headquarters for his Maurice Browne Theater Association with offices to be located in the Transportation Building and that he would be joined by Van Volkenberg. (“Nationally Known Producer Chooses City as Production Headquarters for Little Plays”, L.A. Times, February 28, 1927, p. 23).

Ironically, Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg (seen above just before Browne left her to have a child with Ellen Janson) spent time in Carmel as directors of Edward Kuster’s Theatre of the Golden Bough in 1924. In his autobiography Browne recalled his former San Francisco student, “[Kuster] proposed to build a playhouse in Carmel; it would have a full sky-dome, the first in the country. The three of us spent months pulling his plans to pieces; the Theatre of the Golden Bough was to be the best equipped and most beautiful in America. It was. Kuster invited us to open it with a play written by me, to run a summer-school there, and to direct it afterwards as an art-theatre.” (Too Soon to Lament, p. 271).

Coincidentally, Browne and Van Volkenberg were originally involved with Aline Barnsdall as early as 1915 in Chicago where, in 1912, they had established the Chicago Little Theater, a critically acclaimed experimental troupe inspired by the Irish Players at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Pauline’s knowledge of Browne and Van Volkenberg dated all the way back to their Chicago Little Theater days as the pair had collaborated with her mentor, Hull House and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom founder Jane Addams, to produce a national tour of Euripides’ “peace play” The Trojan Woman during her employment there.

Barnsdall, eager to start her own theater company in Chicago and produce her own plays, offered to build Browne and Van Volkenburg a larger, more modern theater whom she commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design preliminary plans for in 1915. Aline put the plans on hold as she moved to California in 1916 and opened a theater in rented space in Los Angeles. She then commissioned Wright to begin Hollyhock House on Olive Hill, the Schindler’s raison d’etre for moving to Los Angeles, originally planning to add a theater later which never came to pass. (From Frank Lloyd Wright: Hollyhock House and Olive Hill by Kathryn Smith, Rizzoli, 1992, pp. 21-23). When the Chicago Little Theater failed the next year, Van Volkenberg and Browne headed up theater troupes in both Seattle and on Broadway in New York to much critical acclaim. (NY Times Archives). Pauline coincidentally also knew Ellen Janson from her early 1920s involvement with one of the members of Aline Barnsdall’s experimental theater group. (Sheine, note 27, p. 283).

Despite an offer to stay at Ellen Janson’s house in Halcyon over the winter of 1927, Pauline left for Carmel on October 19 where she would remain for the next two years. (Sweeney, p. 103). She likely heard great things about the artist’s colony and bohemian lifestyle of Carmel from Galka Scheyer who had arranged a Blue Four exhibition there in 1926. 

As she had done at Kings Road, Pauline rapidly assimilated into the Carmel arts community. She soon began contributing an unsigned column, “The Black Sheep”, to the Carmel Pine Cone. (See photo below). Appearing 11 times between November 1927 and March 1928, she described it as a “new critical department which does not promise to behave itself too well,” but that it would be, “young, fearless, honest, and vital.” She focused mainly on music, local issues and events. Pauline was also named drama critic for Carmel for the Christian Science Monitor. (Sweeney, p. 104). Thus, she may likely be responsible for the four late 1920s and early 1930s Monitor articles on Neutra projects listed in my Neutra bibliography. During her tenure at the Carmel Pine Cone, the Harrison Memorial Library designed by Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck was opening on Ocean Avenue. (See below).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reynolds initially announced the weekly as, “a periodical which will without fear or favor give voice and light on both sides of a mooted question affecting the artistic or practical in village life.” Reynolds, at odds with the entrenched positions of the Carmel Pine Cone, used his new vehicle as a way to publish politically-charged editorial jibes beginning in February 1928.  Pauline quickly advanced to editorial assistant and and was anticipating becoming managing editor by mid-April. (Sweeney, p. 105). In a May 7, 1928 letter to her father she wrote of The Carmelite as being, “a liberal-radical weekly, in whose pages the visiting or resident intelligentsia, from Lincoln Steffens to Robinson Jeffers, all had a word.” After only 16 weeks at the helm, Reynold’s turned over The Carmelite to Pauline after the May 30 issue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Left, The Carmelite masthead for May 23, 1928, the last issue before Pauline’s editorship began. Right, Masthead after Pauline’s redesign. The Carmelite, July 4, 1928, front cover. (from Sweeney, p. 105).

 

The July 11th cover featured a photo of Point Lobos by Johan Hagemeyer and a feature story “The Good Neighbor” under Pauline’s byline on her erstwhile mentor Jane Addams and her Hull-House. Pauline also included a brief article “Maurice Browne in a Second Edition” reporting on Ellen Janson Browne and four-year old Maurice, Jr. passing through town and the whereabouts of Maurice Sr. currently producing a play of George Bernard Shaw’s in London. Pauline wrote of Browne, “In Carmel he remains a memory and an influence, for Morris Ankrum, George Ball, and many others here busy with the stage have had their first dramatic training under the direction of this intense and passionate artist.”

The July 18th issue featured a cover photo of Jane Addams and a headline announcement of her upcoming speaking engagement at the Golden Bough. It also included a letter “To Carmel With Love From Halcyon” from editorial board member Dora Hagemeyer who was spending the summer in the home of Ellen Janson and Maurice Browne and an announcement for the upcoming opening of an exhibition of the paintings of Henrietta Shore in the Hagemeyer Studio on Ocean Avenue. In her lengthy and insightful review of avant-garde pianist Henry Cowell’s performance at the Golden Bough which was illustrated with a Virginia Tooker woodcut, Pauline wrote, “The program was a study of the development of the tone cluster principle which used as a method by a versatile artist of unusually free imagination. Of these, some are small in range, and contribute a scintillating brilliance to simple diatonic material. It is as though the tones had passed through a sound prism, and been broken up into their parts and overtones.”

Shore’s “The Bull Fight” then appeared on the cover of the July 25th issue along with a poem by Dora Hagemeyer and an article discussing the financial crisis Edward Kuster was facing in his attempt to keep the Theatre of the Golden Bough open. Also in that issue, Pauline reported at length on the activities surrounding Jane Addams visit to Carmel. After a Wednesday luncheon in her honor at the Mission Tea House, Addams lectured on Sunday evening on “Governmental Steps Toward World Peace” to an overflow crowd at the Golden Bough Theatre which was followed by a reception at the home of Lincoln Steffens and Ella Winter. Addams (see below) was on her way to Los Angeles for four days of speaking engagements and a banquet in her honor at the Biltmore Hotel and then to Hawaii for the Pan-Pacific Women’s Congress and Congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.  (“Los Angeles Will Honor Sociologist”, L.A. Times, July 26, 1928, p. I-11). It is likely Addams and Neutra’s paths also crossed during her Los Angeles visit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Carmelite, March 20, 1929. (From my collection).

Richard Buhlig, 1922. Margrethe Mather portrait. From Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration by Beth Gates Warren, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2001, p. 97.

 

PGS reviewed concerts and plays at the Theater of the Golden Bough, the Carmel Playhouse, the Carmel Theater Guild, and Forest Theater, exhibitions at the Denny-Watrous Gallery, published wood block and linoleum cut prints by artists such as early Kings Road visitor and now Carmelite staff artist Virginia Tooker (see above), Esther Bruton, Stanley Wood, Ray Boynton and others. Music was obviously one of her major focuses as she routinely reported on concerts, many of which she arranged, by major, avant-garde pianists passing through Carmel on there way between Los Angeles and San Francisco. She covered performances by dancers John Bovingdon, Ruth Austin and Grace Burroughs, pianists Imre Weisshaus, Dene Denny, future lover John Cage mentors Henry Cowell (see below left and center) and Richard Buhlig (see above right and center), violinist Albert Spalding, guru Jiddu Krishnamurti and numerous others. She reported on important events, exhibitions and concerts she attended in San Francisco such as her December 26, 1928 review of “The Blue Four” exhibition at the Berkeley Museum organized by Galka Scheyer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Carmelite, July 3, 1929, pp. 7 -8. (From my collection).

Henry Cowell, 1923. Margrethe Mather portrait. From Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration by Beth Gates Warren, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2001, p. 111.

 

With Richard just wrapping up the design for the Lovell Health House, the Neutra’s took a much-needed week’s vacation for the lecture and concert. They stopped on the way to Carmel after a delightful drive along the coast to observe “the strange inhabitants of Oceano.” (P&F, p. 206). The Neutra’s son Raymond recalls his mother Dione “talking about walking in the Oceano Dunes and coming across a naked hermit friend in his hut.” (July 15, 2010 e-mail message from Raymond Neutra to the author). Dione’s description of the two stormy night events in Carmel are recorded in a December 1928 letter to her parents. (P&F, p. 173). 

Excerpts from Pauline’s review in the next issue read,

“He cited the principle which is the alpha and the omega of modern architecture, “Form Follows Function,” and distinguished between the functional architecture of the true modern, as compared with the formalist architecture of the earlier pseudo-classicists in the United States who took the Greek Doric column (italics mine) and thought they could make an American architecture with it. It is not the architect who now makes architecture said Mr. Neutra, but the situation out of which it arises. He clarified this by criticizing adversely several typically false buildings including the Chicago Tribune Building…

Mr. Neutra’s lecture so well achieved his purpose that his audience not only listened without resistance to his startling statement of modernistic principles, but were afterwards to respond with sympathy and understanding to photographs of advanced architecture, much of it his own, which were hung on the walls.” (Schindler, Pauline, “Neutra Renders Modern Architecture Intelligible,” The Carmelite, December 5, 1928, p. 4).

Denny and Watrous met at a party in the  studio of a mutual friend in 1922. To further their education, they decided to go to New York by way of Carmel. Here they found a city almost entirely dedicated to the arts.  They returned in 1925 and lived over a garage while Hazel designed their “Harmony House,” on East Dolores, 4 N. of 2nd. One of the problems that faced people moving to Carmel was finding a way of making money. Hazel solved this by designing houses, some 36 of them. They were innovative in design — she drew on the Arts and Crafts movement with exposed beams and redwood on  the interior and board and batten exteriors. Large picture windows, painted shingles and pastel colors for the exterior walls were also featured.

The houses were extremely popular, and introduced a new style for Carmel architecture. “Harmony House” with its two-story picture window, flanked by two grand pianos (see above) and warmed by a fireplace, became the gathering place for informal recitals, lectures and other gatherings. Here pianist Henry Cowell, future mentor to John Cage and frequent denizen of the aforementioned Halcyon, demonstrated his entirely radical tone clusters and Richard Neutra lectured on modern building design. Pauline Schindler, by then a friend of the duo, regularly attended and reported on these events in The Carmelite, some of which, such as the Neutra lecture, she helped organize.

 

 

In 1926 Denny and Watrous founded the Carmel Music Society. In November of the same year (see above) Dene appeared in Los Angeles with avant-garde composers Henry Cowell (featured in the July 3, 1929 issue of The Carmelite) and Dane Rudhyar (one of Pauline’s contributing editors) at the New Music Society with Pauline undoubtedly in attendance. She made other Los Angeles appearances over the next few years. In 1928 the official partnership, Denny-Watrous Management, was  launched. In the same year they leased the Theatre of the Golden Bough  from Edward Kuster and in twelve months produced a dozen concerts and eighteen plays routinely reviewed by Pauline in The Carmelite , including Ferenc Molnar’s “Liliom,” Eugene O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones” and Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts”, all recently presented for the first time in English in New York. They then opened the Denny-Watrous Gallery, Carmel’s first art gallery, using the space to present plays and concerts, as well as art. Here was the first known American performance of  Bach’s “Art of the Fugue.”  http://www.carmelresidents.org/News0303.html

 

Johan Hagemeyer Studio, Carmel. Photo courtesy OAC and U.C. Berkeley Bancroft Library, Johan Hagemeyer Photo Collection.

 

Tired of city life, Weston moved to Carmel in early January 1929, trading spaces from a temporary stay in fellow photographer Johan Hagemeyer’s studio in San Francisco to renting his Carmel summer studio. Pauline’s article “Edward Weston on the Way” in the issue above announced the impending arrival of another friend from her Kings Road salons and soirees. Weston described the move at length in his Daybooks. (Weston, pp. 99-108). Pauline published Dora Hagemeyer’s poetry periodically in The Carmelite. (In 1923 Hagemeyer opened a portrait studio in San Francisco and also built a summer studio in Carmel which soon became a meeting place for artists and intellectuals. It was there that he met Weston, who encouraged Hagemeyer to further his career in photography). Weston and Hagemeyer had a falling out in late 1929 over the studio lease agreement. Weston then moved his studio to the Seven Arts Building upstairs from The Carmelite‘s offices in January 1930. (See photo below).

 

Pauline properly introduced Weston to Carmel’s Bohemian “Society” at a reception for the Kedroff Quartet after there March 16th performance. Weston’s Daybook entry reads,

“To the Kedroff Quartet: the most exquisite vocal music I have heard. The folk-songs were especially thrilling, and the Strauss Waltz! … After, I went with Pailine to a reception for the Quartet, and there met Carmel “society,” everyone that I should meet I suppose! I have certainly been flatteringly presented to Carmel with many newspaper columns [by Pauline in the Carmelite] of flowery praise. Once could easily become “a big toad in a little puddle” here. Not my intention!”

Pauline kept steady tabs on the comings and goings of Weston and various combinations of visiting sons in the pages of The Carmelite. (see above). In the March 27, 1929 issue she reported on a serious Brett Weston accident while riding with long-time Weston patron and book designer Merle Armitage. Brett suffered a compound fracture when his horse threw him and rolled over onto his leg. (“Personal Bits”, by Pauline Schindler, The Carmelite, March 27, 1929, p. 3).

A June 12, 1929 entry in Edward Weston’s Daybook describes a drive into the valley with “Paul” (Weston’s new nickname for Pauline Schindler to her great delight) and dinner with her and Dene Denny and Hazel Watrous. The evening’s conversation was on how to run the Carmelite, and its aspirations. Weston wrote,

“I, being on the editorial staff, had to listen in until after midnight though bed called me, having retouched all day. Village gossip about the divorce of the Lincoln Steffens and Ella Winter. A letter from Una Jeffers, written on the train, again expressing their pleasure in the portraits. And a catalogue from Film und Foto – Stuttgart (see below): they reproduced my head of Galvan, and published my article, hung 18 of Brett’s photographs and 20 of mine. I sent 20 from each of us.”

Film und Foto was a very important avant-garde traveling exhibition in which Richard Neutra, through his European publishing and Deutscher Werkbund connections, was responsible for America’s contributions.

Weston writes in his January 3, 1929 Daybook entry,

“… Neutra is always keenly responsive, and knows whereof he speaks. Representing in America an important exhibit of photography to be held in Germany this summer, he has given me complete charge of collecting the exhibit, choosing the ones whose work I consider worthy of showing, and of writing the catalogue forward to the American group. … I have busy days ahead.” (Weston, pp. 102-3).

“I have written of photography as direct, honest, uncompromising, – and so it is when it is used in its purity, if the worker himself is equally sincere and understanding in selection and presentation. Then it has a power and vitality which moves and holds the spectator. There can be no lie in such photography. No human hand of possible frailty has in the recording lessened its pristine beauty, nor misrepresented its meaning, destroying significance.”

Neutra’s choice of Weston to make the American selections provided the entree for him, son Brett and friend and future Group f.64 member Imogen Cunningham (along with Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, and others), to be included in this seminal show alongside the European avant-gardists. The below catalogue and exhibition poster as well as show installation were designed by El Lissitzky who also designed Neutra’s 1930 book Amerika (see directly below) which features a 1927 Brett Weston photo of a factory in Los Angeles in El Lissitsky’s cover photomontage and internal photos by both Brett and Edward. This was likely the first cover photo Brett had ever had published and it was also published in the Los Angeles Times as part of Athur Millier’s review of his first one-man show in July 1930 at Jake Zeitlin’s Book Shop. (Millier, Arthur, “”Photographs for Himself,” L.A. Times, July 25, 1930, p. III-12).

 

Pauline lived in Ojai intermittently living in a series of rented cottages. From this base she continued to visit Santa Barbara, Halcyon and the Oceano Dunes settlement of Moy Mell. She also traveled to Santa Fe, the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. During her periodic stays in Los Angeles she lived briefly on Hillcrest Road  and also occasionally stayed at Kings Road for brief stints between the comings and goings of tenants in the guest-studio and/or her wing.In early 1930 Pauline submitted a six-page article, “Samuel House, Los Angeles, Lloyd Wright, Architect”, to Architectural Record which was eventually published in  in the June 1930 issue. She also submitted photos and an article on the Kings Road House to the same publication which was rejected. This prompted an angry letter of protest from RMS. Oddly, Kings Road, arguably the most iconic modern house in the country was not published until 1932. (Sheine, p. 261). PGS authored an article, “The Suburban Home Moves Out of Doors“, featuring RMS’s furniture designs which was published in the May 1930 issue of  The Small Home. Later in the year she had an article published in the highly-regarded literary journal Pagany: A Native Quarterly. Editor Richard Johns frequently featured the work of  Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and many other legendary poets and authors thus Pauline, as was her custom, was keeping famous company indeed.

In an April 15, 1930 letter from Frank Lloyd Wright to Pauline Schindler, in response to her letter asking him to participate in the exhibit in Los Angeles, Wright wrote, “While many of my sworn adherents and generous admirers have in the past profited considerably by my work and by my own clients, – I can remember no such instance ever happening to me concerning them or theirs. Richard [Neutra] is evidently gone head over heals, – Le Corbusier, Rudolph, too. It is a pity. But there is nothing to be done about it. I suppose I shall have to turn on them myself and show them up soon.” (Sheine, p. 42.). Much on the correspondence with Frank Lloyd Wright can also be found in Sheine.

In an April 30 letter Pauline asked Wright for permission to plan a lecture series for him in the West. She wrote, “Let me explain to you why I concern myself so actively with architecture: my own first contact with it was simultaneous with a central ecstasy, so that it has the equivalence and force with me of some critical emotional impression of childhood which dictates the direction of life.” (McCoy, p. 58). After turning her down she wrote back, “There is nothing I can say except that I love you profoundly for the majesty and meaning of your work, that I should have been utterly proud to serve it…”

A July 28, 1930 letter from her father Edmund reveals the financial state she usually seemed to be in. “What have you been doing young lady to bring about a ponderous flood of bills? Am enclosing August check and will send an additional $50 about the middle of the month…Let’s consider ourselves in conference going over your business affairs and analyzing present conditions and prospects. This with a view to whether any part of your plans need modification, or here or there reshaping.” (McCoy, p. 60).

Pauline had also written to Neutra while he was on his world tour after moving out of Kings Road asking for permission to represent him in a series of lectures. In a December 1930 reply from Cleveland near the end of his tour Neutra wrote, “Dear Ghibeline: Am ready to be managed by you and grateful naturally…Not usually interested in chapter AIA meetings. More in laypersons, who might be our clients…Richard.” She then successfully arranged for a Neutra speaking engagement in Chicago through a former Smith College classmate. (McCoy, p. 60).

About this time PGS wrote Edward Weston trying to interest him in doing a book of his photographs. He replied quoting from her letter, “‘Let’s do a book on Edward Weston.’ I do not think he has had the nationwide publicity to warrant a publisher’s interest. They are not in business except to make money. My love and greetings, Edward.” (McCoy, p. 59). (Weston’s first monograph would be produced by his friend and patron Merle Armitage in 1932). Weston presented Pauline a portrait of Diego Rivera made in Mexico in 1924, possibly around this time. (McCoy, p. 60, n.d.).

Rendering of Schindler’s Wolfe House on Catalina Island announcing Schindler’s lecture at the Denny-Watrous Gallery. The Carmelite, September 4, 1930, p. 1.

 

Schindler lecture announcement. The Carmelite, September 4, 1930, p. 4.

Pauline had also been trying to arrange lectures by Neutra and Schindler at the Denny-Watrous Gallery in Carmel. Hazel Watrous guaranteed either a $25 fee, replying, “Schindler has a mastery and charm, Neutra has ideas about mass production. I’ll leave the choice to you…We have arranged with Galka Scheyer to have her exhibit here in June. Edward Weston has been showing his prints for several weeks.” (McCoy, p. 60).  PGS then booked a lecture for Schindler on September 6th. (See above). Still a frequent contributor since her ouster, Pauline introduced Carmelite readers to Schindler with an introductory article in which she wrote,

“Of the three architects [Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra and R. M. Schindler] it is often said that Schindler is most the creative genius. He sees first the pure form. His designs are uncompromising as far as period architecture is concerned. Those who have wondered why the modernist does not build himself a “Spanish house” will have an opportunity to hear the basic principles back of modern building when Schindler speaks on Saturday. An opportunity for questions will also be given, and slides of Schindler’s and Neutra’s buildings will accompany the talk.” (Schindler, Pauline, “Schindler, Modern, Speaks on Architecture,” The Carmelite, September 4, 1930, p. 7).

Long-time family friend and still on the Carmelite’s editorial board, Edward Weston took great exception to the treatment Schindler suffered at the hands of his patron John O’Shea after his gallery lecture.

“Schindler bore himself with dignity, he was a gentleman, the others were not. I admit John O’Shea had been drinking, good, – one’s character is revealed with a few drinks. After the lecture he made disparaging remarks, even indulging in personalities in a loud voice standing near Schindler, head turned toward him, face in a leering mask. Disgusting! I sat down and wrote The Carmelite an article giving full vent to my feelings, not using names, but several offenders were plainly enough indicated.” (Weston, p. 187).

Weston’s angry letter to the editor presciently ended with,

“Always the new in art, science, philosophy, has been ridiculed. But this time the joke is on the persecutors, for the new architecture has long ago been accepted, is spreading all over the world. It is for those who live today. Future generations, looking back upon the beginnings of the American Renaissance, which we are in, and being so close cannot recognize, will point out such names as Wright, Neutra, Schindler, who in the face of smirks and guffaws, went their own way – building with foreesight, faith and hard work.” (Weston, Edward,  ”Schindler,: The Carmelite, September 11, 1930, p. 6.

Soon thereafter, John O’Shea invited Weston to a stag party which he tried to get out of but finally attended. He wrote in his September 17th Daybook entry, “I spent my evening trying to keep them off art and keep my temper. Dickinson said, “Weston is too serious!” But they were the serious ones – that [Carmelite] article had a sting! I was sober enough to sit back and watch the others, especially John: and his face revealed much. I saw a man, soured, cynical, negative. Perhaps he knows he can never reach the heights he tried for. A fine painter, but nowhere near a great artist. I feel sorry for him, but that does not excuse his childish nonsense.”

In April 1932 Hazel Watrous asked Weston to write a review for The Carmelite for the Denny-Watrous Gallery John O’Shea exhibit and he agreed writing, “I sweat doing it, – because to a degree I had to resort to evasion…” Hazel, Dene, John and wife Molly all asked him to do the review. “Each one of these friends has not only been very kind to me, but has helped materially to raise my economic status. Of course I am trying to excuse my guilty conscience.” (Weston, p. 211-2).

Schindler continued to get mileage from her “Contemporary Creative Architecture in California” exhibition into 1932 as Creative Art’s editor Henry McBride published her “Modern California Architects” in the February issue, the same month the “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” opened at the Museum of Modern Art. The five-page article included Brett Weston photos of RMS’s Wolfe House on Catalina, Neutra’s Lovell Health House, and The Bachelors, Ltd. Haberdashery by J. R. Davidson and also described work by Lloyd Wright, Jock Peters and Kem Weber. PGS was successful in placing three-page article, “Group Offices for Physicians, Los Angeles; J. R. Davidson, Designer” in the August 1932 issue of Architectural Record. She wrote of Neutra in the Creative Art article,

“His work is the coolest, the furthest removed from stylization or a conscious esthetic. It is the most closely related to the neue Sachlichkeit of contemporary Europeans.” Of RMS she opined, “Schindler’s work is particularly lyric, an utterance of a definite life feeling. It is profoundly organic, the parts moving into the whole by transition of an inner logic.”  

Pauline’s activities were centered in Ojai between 1932-35. Mark was attending the Ojai Valley School between October 1932 and June 1937. She lived there intermittently in a series of rented cottages. From this base she traveled to Santa Barbara, Halcyon and the nearby Oceano Dunes settlement of Moy Mell. There were numerous connections between Carmel and Halcyon and Oceano which Pauline seemed destined to be involved with. The Neutra’s may have been the first to tell Pauline about the Oceano Dunites whom they observed on there way to Carmel in November 1928 for their previously mentioned lecture and recital. Pauline also reviewed concerts by avant-garde pianist Henry Cowell who frequently collaborated and stayed with John Varian (see below) and wife Agnes in Halcyon. Irishman Varian was an amateur musician, mystic poet and ardent Thesophist, prominent among the Halcyon sect known as “The Temple of the People.” (See below).

 

Edward Weston’s Daybook provides another link between Cowell and Halcyon with this August 24, 1930 entry, “Last night to Henry Cowell’s New Operetta, “the Building of Bamba,” given at the Forest Theater: So poorly produced that one could hardly say whether it had possibilities or not. Many of the cast were from Halcyon, colony of mystics. I have my doubts about the esoteric when it does not include the aesthetic! I certainly would not have gone to an opera, disliking stage bellowing, – worse combined with acting, even if the bellowers are good: these were awful, – most of them, but I had hopes this might be a new note, or new music from Henry. But no, much of it sounded like old church hymns poorly sung.”

Another close friend of the Varian’s was Irish poet and mystic Ella Young who, after emigrating from Ireland in 1925 to escape imprisonment for supporting the Irish Republican Army, lectured widely across the United States and taught Celtic mythology and Irish history at U. C. Berkeley before settling in Oceano. Ella’s audiences were enthralled – not only by her great knowledge but also by the beauty and romance of her words. She became an important literary and spiritual figure in California, much as she had been in Dublin, influencing people like poet Robinson Jeffers, photographers Ansel Adams and Edward Weston (see portraits below), artist John O’Shea, and composer Harry Partch. She found her faeries again in the sacred land of Point Lobos and in the isolation of her cottage garden on the dunes of Oceano . http://www.thesunsraven.com/dsellayoung.html

Ella was responsible for introducing her lifelong friend and fellow Irish Republican Army supporter Gavin Arthur, grandson of former President Chester A. Arthur, to the Varian’s, through which he discovered the Oceano Dunes. (see below). Arthur settled in the Dunes in 1930 with the vision of forming a utopian society of like-minded individuals there. Ella would visit often and christened the Dunite settlement Moy Mell, Gaelic for “Pastures of Honey.” She could feel the rhythms of the Dunes and the vibrations in the individual coves.

 

 

 

In the August 29, 1929 issue of The Carmelite Pauline featured a Helen Bruton woodcut and a poem by John Varian on the front page and a Dora Hagemeyer article “A Day with Ella Young” which described her home and garden and John Varian installing a bookshelf for her. Ella Young sat for both Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, both of whom were very impressed by her persona and beliefs.

In his autobiography Maurice Browne described Ella Young as “looking like a six-thousand-year-old Druid priestess who had just sat to Rider Haggard for her portrait.” He recalled a picnic with her and Ellen Janson on the sand-dunes where Young invoked a spell on a firm of Los Angeles realtors who were selling lots to far-distant Middle-Westerners. “She drew a circle in the sand…and for an hour within that circle performed rites and in a language unknown to me chanted incantations. When finished she erased the circle and said: “I think that we should hurry home.” We hurried home. Within ten minutes over those few thousand square yards there broke a storm unparalleled, it was said later, in living memory.” (Too Late to Lament, p. 281).

Some very interesting interviews indeed of Ella Young herself, and Gavin Arthur and Ansel Adams specifically pertaining to Young and her circle can be listened to at the following link. http://www.dunescollaborative.org/EllaAudio.html

Gavin Arthur invited part-time Halcyon resident and Kings Road habitue Ellen Janson mentioned earlier and  friend Pauline to be assistant editors of his new publishing venture, Dune Forum. Pauline’s first recorded visit to Moy Mell was in September 1933. (Sun-Hines p. 325). The initial six-page “Contributors Number” (see below) published in late summer 1933 included an opening one-page editorial by Gavin describing the Dunes, their psychological importance being halfway between the two West Coast metropolises of San Francisco and Los Angeles, the aims of the magazine and solicitations for contributions of material from like-minded individuals. Later in the issue he describes the Dunes lifestyle in much detail.

 

Ella Young then described Gavin and Janson:

“Gavin Arthur will make a good editor primarily because he is so man-sided and has such wide views and sympathies. His life is colored too with memories of many people and many places; he has known labour leaders and royal dukes, has looked from the view-point of both, yet kept his mind free. Always an agnostic; poet, rebel, sailor, gentleman, vagabond; born a westerner; cosmopolitan yet proudly a Californian; eager to test, to experiment,— his whole life has been lived in the spirit which motivates this magazine. Such a project has been his life-dream.

Ellen Janson is a recognized poet whose work has appeared in such magazines as the London Mercury, Harper’s, Vogue, Poetry. Born and brought up in Seattle, she is a westerner of the modern generation, tall, free, forward-looking. Although she has spent just enough time in London, Paris, Berlin, New York to be thoroughly cosmopolitan, her heart has always been on this Coast, her home in Los Angeles, her chief inspiration in the Dunes. Her exquisite taste, her sure sense of beauty, will bring to the Dune Forum a distinction of which it will have the right to be proud.”

Janson can be seen in the below 1948 photo on the deck of her Schindler-designed home during the most serious period (late 1940s and early 1950s) of their likely long-term relationship. Schindler apparently previously received the steep hillside lot in payment for design of the Laurelwood Apartments. (Sheine, note 27, p. 283). Janson also wrote the first significant Schindler biography in 1938 which was later included in a “book” he assembled compiling all of his published written articles, a map, notes, a directory, and a list of works which was sent to various publishers in the late 1940s, including Peter Blake at the Museum of Modern Art to try to promote interest in a monograph of his work. (Sheine, p. 265).

Janson also dedicated her self-published collection of verses, Poems, 1920-1949 to RMS, “For Michael, Who Makes All Things Possible.“  The book was printed in a small edition of 100 copies for distribution to her friends; with a short foreword by Ella Young, and with the book design by Schindler and dated “December, 1952″ on colophon. Copy 69 was sent to the Skolnicks, Schindler’s last clients, signed and inscribed by Janson on the colophon: “For Mr. & Mrs. Skolnick [sic] — In memory of R. M. Schindler, who built their beautiful house, and mine also, and who designed this book — Ellen Janson”. She sent the book to the Skolniks with a Christmas card in 1953 in which she wrote, “Dear Skolnicks [sic], I still haven’t told you how much I appreciated your kind note, after Mr. Schindler went; but I know you will understand why I have been so long in answering. It is very hard for me to adjust to being without him. Yet the wonderful inspiration that he always was to me still remains … I am sending you, under separate cover, a copy of the book of my poems that Mr. Schindler had printed during that last year of his life. He designed the cover himself, so it is especially precious to me because we made it together. I don’t know if you care for poetry, but I am sure you will like having it, if only for his sake. Sincerely, Ellen Janson”. The card had RMS’s last holiday note included on a blue 3X5 card which read, “From a snowy / mountain top / Best & Warmest Wisches [sic] / R M Schindler”. (From Vashon Island Books).

 

 

Arthur closes Dune Forum’s Contributors’ Number with acknowledgments to: John O’Shea who did the cover drawing, Ella Young, Leone Barry, and Harwood White; and for the promised co-operation of Jack Conroy, Lincoln Steffens, Robinson Jeffers, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Sara Bard Field, Charles Erskine, Scott Wood, J. Paget Fredericks, Marie Welsh, Roderick White, Stewart Edward White, and the many other good friends of the Dune Forum.

All seven issues of Dune Forum are available in their entirety in PDF format on-line at Dune Forum.

Pauline’s first appearance on the Dune Forum masthead as Associate Editor is in the Subscriber’s Number which was published some time in the fall of 1933. (See below left). Her opening editorial in the same issue can be seen below right. She also wrote an article called “Note on the Contemporary Arts” in which she wrote, “Mies van der Rohe in Germany designs a building which says exactly what Chavez in Mexico writes in a sonatina. There is not a superfluous line or tone in either.” She continues on music, “Edgar Varese tells in sound playable orchestrally, of the impact of the electrons in the swirling vortex of the atom, the splitting, the explosions, the shock. In this moment of music (the composition called “Ionization”) he transcends the factor of scale between human being and atom, takes us within the atom (whose interior dynamic necessarily half-deafens us).”

 

This number also included a Chandler Weston cover photo, the first of three published by the Weston family, poetry by Ellen Janson and letters of support for the new venture from Henry Cowell, Mary Austin, Havelock Ellis, Lincoln Steffens, William Carlos Williams, Jack Conroy, Sara Bard Field and many others. Chandler Weston and brother Brett apparently were the first professional photographers to discover the Dunes in the fall of 1933. (See also Brett’s 1933 photo after his January 15, 1934 cover photo below). Father Edward, along with Willard Van Dyke appeared to have made their first visit in early 1934. (See their below cover photos and reference in John Cage letter below). Edward credited Galka Scheyer with first telling him about the Dunes inscribing the verso of a print of the Dunes in her private collection, “To Galka/ Who first told me about the Dunes/ Edward/ 1936. (From The Blue Four Galka Scheyer Collection, Norton Simon Museum, 1976). Pauline’s editorial expertise and contacts gained while running The Carmelite came into strong play in making Dune Forum the quality publication that it was.

 

About this time Pauline was having an affair with Los Angeles Daily News reporter Pat O’Hara. (See Letters from John Cage to Pauline Schindler). It is likely that she met O’Hara at Moy Mell. Pat was introduced to the Oceano Dunes through Dunite Elwood Decker, whom he met at a party in Ojai, where a number of the Dunites would periodically make there way to attend events by previously-mentioned Jiddu Krishnamurti. Pat had gone to Ojai to visit some nudist friends when he met Elwood at a party in late 1931. Elwood read Pat some of his poems about the dunes which inspired Pat to visit. Pat found his way to Moy Mell and quickly became good friends with Gavin Arthur around the time of the creation of Dune Forum.  Finding a ready-made Irish community of previously-mentioned painter John O’Shea, John Varian and Ella Young, a Halcyon resident and long-time friend of Arthur from their days together in Ireland supporting the Irish revolt. (Gavin Arthur Interview About Ella Young).

The January 22, 1934, issue of Time Magazine published an article about Arthur and his new magazine. “At Moy Mell, near Oceano, Calif., halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, appeared last week the first Subscriber’s Number of the monthly Dune Forum, to “express the creative thought of America looking not toward Europe but toward the West.” Editor of Dune Forum is Chester Alan Arthur Jr., 33-year-old grandson of the 21st President of the U. S. Five years ago Editor Arthur worked his way around the world on S. S. K. I. Luckenbach, for “material.” In March 1932, his wife sued him for divorce for non support, said ”he just wouldn’t work.” Under the pseudonym of Gavin Arthur which he uses to create an ”independent name,” Editor Arthur last week thought he had ”sufficient financial backing and . . . literary support to make Dune Forum the outstanding magazine of culture and controversy in the West.” Time Magazine

 

 

 

Westways, February 1934. Courtesy Los Angeles Public Library.

Pauline’s next modernism marketing activity was acting as guest-editor for the January 1935 issue of California Arts & Architecture. Editor and publisher George Oyer courageously entrusted her to select the entire content and verbiage for the twenty pages of material she included. She editorialized on the masthead page where she was listed as “Associate Editor of This Issue” and under a photo of the spec house in Westwood her parents commissioned from RMS, “This issue of California Arts & Architecture has for its special subject that contemporary movement in architecture which is called “modern”…Contemporary creative architecture*, which for lack of a truly definitve word we call “modern”, is organic, based upon principles of structure and spirit profoundly realized.” (See entire editorial below left). *(The same title Pauline used for her 1930-32 traveling exhibition mentioned above)

 

 

California Arts & Architecture, January 1935, Modern Architecture Issue, guest editor, Pauline Schindler. (From my collection).

This was the first issue of a magazine in Southern California dedicated entirely to modern architecture and also included work by Richard Neutra (Lovell Health House, VDL Research House, Koblick, Mosk, Beard and Sten-Frenke Residences), R. M Schindler (Oliver, Gibling and Wolfe Residences), J. R. Davidson (The Bachelors’ Haberdashery and Wilshire Blvd. Shops), Kem Weber, Lloyd Wright (Jobyna Howland Residence), Jock Peters (L. E. Sheperd and Gilks Residences with photos by Chandler Weston), Morrow & Morrow (Henry Cowell Residence), Hunter & Feil (Gude’s Shoe Store) and a tribute to Frank Lloyd Wright, “Modern Architecture Acknowledges the Light Which Kindled It” by Pauline Schindler. (See above right). Harwell Hamilton Harris was featured with a two-page spread of his 1934 Pauline Lowe House and an article under his byline, “In Designing the Small House.” Pauline also included a slightly reworked version of RMS’s “Space Architecture” with two photos and floor plans of his Wolfe House on Catalina Island

Publisher George Oyer’s editorial in the same issue titled “California – As We See It” reads, “For some months we have been considering the advisability of recording some of the work of our California modern designers. To the layman, the term modern applies to any house or building with dominating horizontal or vertical lines: to any shop front with polished aluminum or bronze wainscoting. The term modern applied to architecture and interior furnishings has but a vague meaning….It is quite impossible to show all of the distinctive work of our outstanding architects, nor are we able to include in this issue the work of all of our California modernists. In the selection of photographs and articles we are grateful to Miss Pauline Schindler for her able assistance. Whether or not you like it, is beside the point. It is here so we acknowledge it.”See my related post at the following link. http://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2010/05/california-arts-architecture.html

PGS was successful in producing an even more extensive guest-edited theme issue on “The Modern Movement in Architecture” for the December 1935 issue of Architect & Engineer which featured Richard Neutra’s Galka Scheyer Residence, VDL Research House, Ring Plan School and Corona Avenue School in Bell with accompanying articles “Comparative Studies on the Construction and Cost of the Activity Classroom” and “A Revision of the Concept of the School Building: A New Plan for California Schools” and Koblick Residence in Atherton with the article “Problems of Pre-Fabrication.” Work by RMS included the articles, “Furniture and the Modern House: A Theory of Interior Design”, and the Wolfe (with Brett Weston photos), Oliver and Buck Residences. This entree enabled RMS’s follow-up article “Furniture and the Modern House” in the March 1936 issue of the same magazine.

The Museum of Modern Art’s Philip Johnson finally recognizing the importance of what was happening in California, organized an exhibition “Contemporary Architecture in California” which ran from September 30 to October 24, 1935 which included work by Neutra, Schindler, William W. Wurster and others. The exhibition traveled to 20 other locations from 1935-1939. Still feeling the sting of being left out of MOMA’s 1932 Modern Architecture Exhibition, Schindler almost dropped out of this show when he read Arthur Millier’s September 15 Brush Strokes column in the Los Angeles Times , “An exhibit of models, plans, photographs, of recent work of California modern architects, with special emphasis on Richard J. Neutra, is announced by New York’s Museum of Modern Art for October 2 to 24.” Ernestine Fantl of MOMA reassured him that was not the case and he decided to remain in the show. (Sheine, p. 256). This show was undoubtedly influenced by Pauline’s 1930 “Contemporary Creative Architecture in California Exhibition” and triggered by the January 1935 California Arts & Architecture Modern Architecture Issue she guest-edited.

Pauline’s gradual shift from Socialism to Communism evident in her Dune Forum editorials resulted in her in 1935 writing for the Western Worker, “the Western Organ of the Communist Party USA” as she coined the publication in an August 30, 1935 letter to her mother. She had also just spent the previous month with Mark at Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas which was subsequently investigated by the Arkansas House of Representatives as a “Communist” organization. (Sweeney, p. 111). Soon thereafter Pauline returned to Kings Road for good. She had finally tired of her vagabond existence and was ready to settle down. She would communicate with her ex-husband and house-mate RMS by letter for the rest of her days at Kings Road until his 1953 death. (Sweeney). At one time Pauline had expressed an interest in doing RMS’s biography but that would have been hard to accomplish communicating only via letter as they had chosen to do.

 

McCoy (see below) began her illustrious career with her apropos first article, “Schindler, Space Architect,” published in the Fall 1945 number of Direction and the rest, including her invaluable efforts in the preservation of Kings Road, as they say, is “History.” (See “Being There: Esther McCoy, the Accidental Architectural Historian” by Susan Morgan, in the Spring 2009 issue of the Archives of American Art Journal, pp. 24-26 for a more detailed account of McCoy’s genesis as an architectural historian and her first architectural article. Morgan has a McCoy biography in progress and is publishing an Esther McCoy Reader to be released this fall.)

Beach Apartments (Project), 1926, from Richard Neutra: Buildings and Projects edited by Willy Boesiger, Editions Girsberger, 1950. (From my collection).

Neutra’s unbuilt 1926 Beach Apartments above, his highly successful 1927 Jardinette Apartments and other unbuilt apartment projects under the auspices of the Neutra – Schindler AGIC partnership in the late 1920s, not to mention his Rush City Reformed skyscrapers, are a strong indication of the significant amount of thought Neutra had given to high density planning and apartment design by the time of the above article. Also interesting is the fact that the “Skyline” penthouse design was quickly usurped by apprentice Raphael Soriano for his 1936 Lipetz House in Silverlake.

Lipetz House, Silverlake, Raphael Soriano,1936. From Raphael Soriano by Wolfgang Wagener, Phaidon, 2002. Julius Shulman photo. (From my collection).

The above Lipetz House by Soriano has a remarkably similar floor plan down to the semi-circular living room with floor-to-ceiling windows and grand piano. See above and my related post at http://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2010/06/julius-shulman-chronicles-1936.html for more Neutra projects exhibiting this particular semi-circular design element. Also see my post on Phil Townsend Hanna’s Touring Topics – Westways editorship and it’s impact on Southern California modernism at http://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2010/03/touring-topics-westways-hanna-years.html.