Letter to the Editor Regarding Victoria Dailey’s “Los Angeles in Black and White”

Johanna Drucker responds to Victoria Dailey’s review of the catalogue raisonné “Paul Landacre: California Hills, Hollywood, and the World Beyond.”

By Johanna Drucker December 3, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• History

DEAR LARB,

Victoria Dailey’s enthusiastic review of Jake Milgram Wien’s study of the work of Paul Landacre spotlights the contributions of this uniquely gifted wood engraver. To this review, I would like to add a few additional observations. Landacre moved to California in the late 1910s, and his first major publication, California Hills & Other Wood Engravings, was produced in 1931 by Bruce McAllister, who was part of the community of fine press printers that had begun to flourish in Los Angeles in the 1920s. Without question, the images in California Hills have a distinctive graphic character, and Landacre’s approach distills form to its essence in a way that shows a clean, unfussy, moderne inflection but is also shaped by art historical precedents with ideological implications.

A crucial dimension to these images is what they leave out. Landacre’s striking images of the California landscape are all almost entirely devoid of human occupation—settlers, miners, farmers, oil fields, and urban communities are all absent. The landscapes appear pristine, open opportunities for expansion and occupation. But the most conspicuous absence is any trace of the Indigenous peoples who had been displaced and enslaved under a succession of European and American regimes beginning with the arrival of Russian explorers to Alaska in the middle of the 18th century. The violent history of oppression enacted by the Spanish missions is well known, as is the history of the Mexican ranchos, the land grab of the Gold Rush era, and the establishment of reservations, none of which benefited the native populations whose settlements had been in place for millennia.

Documents, including drawings, detailing the first encounters with Europeans included considerable observation of Indigenous tribes, customs, costume, and activities. The Robert B. Honeyman Jr. Collection in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley (largely available online through the Online Archive of California) provides a rich inventory of these records. While the view of Indigenous people through European eyes has its biases—many individual men were painted as if they were figures from Greek and Roman sources—the presence of the existing settlement patterns and communities was graphically represented. One example from 1671 published by engraver Jacob van Meurs, Arnoldus Montanus’s De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld (The New and Unknown World) shows Sir Francis Drake being crowned by California Indians in a ceremony that, in spite of its racist overtones, makes clear their presence in the landscape. Ludwig Choris, among many other 19th-century artists, produced lithographic prints of Indian settlements, social organization, and activities showing the integration of people and the natural landscape. Book and journal publications further documented individual tribes for broader audiences. Indigenous people were not only acknowledged but also studied and represented in some detail, however limited the understanding might have been.

However, and this is what is significant for reading Landacre, 19th-century European and American landscape painters such as Albert Bierstadt, William Keith, Thomas Cole, and many others created a myth of the majestic Sierras and California landscapes that celebrated the vast open spaces, mountain peaks, and dramatic vistas. The Indigenous people disappeared from view in their canvases. These were artists whose work reinforced the legitimation of Manifest Destiny in fully Romantic terms. They established a pictorial convention in which the landscape was without occupants, open and pristine, ready for exploration, exploitation, and appropriation. These images also influenced photographic work that was in turn appropriated by such entrepreneurial agents as the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose brochures marketing spectacular scenery “From The Golden Gate to The Great Salt Lake” on their routes along “The Road of a Thousand Wonders” depicted one magnificent view after another and filled the advertisements in the company’s Sunset magazine. Conveniently, all evidence of prior occupation and settlement was absent from these images.

The publication of California Hills coincided with a major expansion in development in Southern California made possible by completion of the first phases of the aqueduct, the discovery and extraction of oil, and the burgeoning film industry and agricultural boom that became economic engines. Landacre is not a villain here, but it is important to situate his iconography within visual traditions that changed radically from early encounter documents to art historical imagery that served to erase the presence of Indigenous peoples. Landacre and his wife Margaret were progressive individuals, worked with civil rights advocates, and lived a very humble, even precarious existence in their small cottage. I spent a summer going through Landacre’s archives at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. The account books in which he tracked every expenditure and source of revenue dispel the myth of his privilege. The subvention his supporters supplied did not change his modest circumstances or the need to make a living with his wood engravings.

The question is how we view Landacre’s images now in relation to pictorial conventions, his own profile, his social position, the aesthetics of the mid-20th century, and patterns of land use. Rather than revel in the idyllic character of these scenes, we can place his imagery within these larger histories, and Landacre’s landscapes can be read as part of conventions he did not invent but adopted. Landacre’s individual style and vision were unique, his approach to wood engraving distinctive, but the images in California Hills make clear that his vision was constrained by an iconography of erasure, and for all his talent and insight, he did not break through those limitations. The landscapes he depicted remain unoccupied, pristine spaces ripe for development, as if they had never contained human settlements. When I taught a course on this material at UCLA, the students arrived disposed to see Landacre as a person privileged by demographics and celebrity whose images reproduced a legacy of racism. But they finished with an understanding of the challenges of being a working artist, struggling to make a living within the specific conditions of his time and place, whose aesthetic was shaped by the historical models. I love Landacre’s work and have enjoyed being able to pass on to my students and others my appreciation of his unique contributions without ignoring the ideology of the pictorial tradition in which they participate.

Johanna Drucker

Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor Emerita, Information Studies, UCLA