Farmers Market—Los Angeles / The American Scene

When I was in Los Angeles I read an interesting review by Christopher Knight in the L.A. Times of a Roger Kuntz exhibition in Laguna. Mr. Kuntz—an oil painter—used as his main subject matter the freeways in Los Angeles. The article ties Mr. Kuntz to the art movement known as "The American Scene."

Kuntz's freeway paintings seemed Pop because they represent full immersion in unprecedented subject matter, which had rarely turned up before him. Edward Hopper, for example, painted the somewhat similar concrete canyon of a railroad approach into a city in 1946. But that's the point: Like Hopper, Kuntz was an American Scene painter. What makes Kuntz's work distinctive is its singular subject.

Mr. Knight goes on to write that

In the 1930s and '40s, American Scene painters generally represented the city as a brooding, even threatening place, or else they pictured the agrarian world as the nation's epic heartland. The moral, cultural and social tensions between urban and rural life had been a theme for painters for hundreds of years. Kuntz swept all that aside. In its place he pondered something entirely new — the unique suburban model that Los Angeles was in the postwar throes of inventing.

Anyway, I was quite taken with the term "The American Scene." So much so that I’ve redescribed the blog as "California & The American Scene: Photographs & Text by Michael Mundy."

After breakfast at Charlie’s in the Farmers Market I took this photo of the iconic Farmers Market sign, turning to Pat and Joe as I did so saying "See? The American Scene!"

Photo: Farmers Market—Los Angeles, 2009