Postwar modern art and California's progressive legacies

Abstract

This essay explores mid-twentieth-century cultural and social shifts resulting from California's once-famous commitment to expanding public education. The starting point is how progressive ideologies of education shaped the ambitions of Jay DeFeo (1929 – 1989), one of the state's most important mid-twentieth-century artists. Three distinct lenses are used: (1) the pedagogical goals of the Department of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1940s, when DeFeo pursued her undergraduate and master's degrees; (2) women's modern art networks that developed around the state throughout the first half of the twentieth century and the models that provided young women like DeFeo with intellectual and creative ambitions; and (3) an examination of what expanded access to higher education meant more generally for a group of young women who graduated with DeFeo from San José High School in 1946. The essay moves between art and social history in order to reveal the correlation of overlapping sets of social relations and the subjective horizons they provided for young adults responding to a complex set of opportunities and limitations. An argument regarding the larger effects of expanding higher education emerges from the juxtaposition of the social, institutional and subjective domains drawn from a narrow slice, a microhistory in effect, of California mid-twentieth-century cultural shifts, some of which took material form in paintings, others in the decisions people made about the most intimate aspects of their lives.