Los Angeles in Black and White

Victoria Dailey reviews Jake Milgram Wien’s catalogue raisonné “Paul Landacre: California Hills, Hollywood, and the World Beyond.”

By Victoria DaileyNovember 8, 2025

• Art & Architecture

RARELY DOES a catalogue raisonné combine detailed information on an artist’s output with incisive prose describing the artist’s life, work, and cultural milieu as well as the exceptional new book Paul Landacre: California Hills, Hollywood, and the World Beyond does. A staggering achievement in bibliography, biography, and cultural studies, this collection documents the artistic output of Paul Landacre (1893–1963), a California artist who was one of the United States’ most talented printmakers and book illustrators. The author, cultural historian Jake Milgram Wien, spent over three decades investigating his subject. His formidable research, with much information appearing here for the first time, combined with his engaging writing style, makes this work much more than a standard catalog.

Like many artists in California during the first half of the 20th century, Landacre was appreciated locally but did not, until fairly recently, gain the same fame as printmaking artists from the East Coast and England, such as Rockwell Kent and Eric Gill. He certainly hasn’t enjoyed the reputation of California photographer Edward Weston (1886–1958), whose images often mirror those of his friend Landacre. The latter’s abilities were so evident that a group of significant Los Angeles collectors founded a group to support his efforts during the Great Depression—the Paul Landacre Association, which lasted from 1934 until 1940 and was spearheaded by legendary L.A. bookseller Jake Zeitlin and Hollywood director, producer, writer, and collector Delmer Daves. (Perhaps inspired by Landacre’s support group, Weston launched the Edward Weston Print of the Month Club in 1935, but it did not succeed, ending a year later.)  

The Hollywood connection, rightly noted in the catalog’s title, was important not only to Landacre but also to other artists and writers of the period. Among the 12 members of the Landacre Association were such Hollywood luminaries as actresses Kay Francis and Frances Howard Goldwyn (wife of movie producer Samuel), along with surgeon and noted da Vinci collector Dr. Elmer Belt and two of the foremost women collectors of their day, Carrie Estelle Doheny (wife of oil tycoon Edward) and Ruth Maitland. Wien provides much new information on Los Angeles’s prominent book- and art-collecting community, a topic that is now beginning to receive serious attention. Working in his favored medium of wood engraving, Landacre designed bookplates for director George Cukor and several other Hollywood notables, and, in a departure from his artistic output, crafted an unusually sophisticated map to the homes of movie stars in 1932, when Los Angeles hosted the Olympic Games. From Fatty Arbuckle’s to Fay Wray’s, 76 homes are rendered in the artist’s distinctive style, and on his largest woodblock. The map, virtually unknown until now, is presented here for the first time, along with Wien’s explanatory text about its creation, which reveals that Landacre, known for his impactful and subtle imagery, also had a lively sense of humor.

Although the Hollywood dream factory and the myth of sunshine and palm trees have come to symbolize Los Angeles, the city contains other realms obscured by these potent symbols. Landacre’s powerful images of the California landscape, the female nude, industrial objects, and natural forms were created mainly in inky black and pearly white, a surprising departure from the colorful works showing typical sunny scenes of hills, mountains, ocean, and desert by such artists as Frances Gearhart and Pedro de Lemos. Landacre’s sensibility was different—his scenes offered a starkly modern vision of sunlight and shadow, a courageous response to the mythic clichés. His work presages the bold cinematography of film noir, in which hints of the unseen lurk in the shadows, filling the landscape with a sense of mystery and foreboding.

While film noir exposed the underside of the City of Angels, examples of the hidden side of Los Angeles in painting are more difficult to find. Although Man Ray, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí had come to Hollywood in the 1940s, those surrealists weren’t particularly interested in the urban or natural environments of California. Several L.A. artists, notably Edward Biberman and Millard Sheets, worked in the vein of social realism, but their work is more political than personal, and the pastel days of California impressionism were over when Weston and Landacre mastered the realm of black-and-white. Comparing Weston’s Shells (1927) to Landacre’s Shell (1935) offers an example of their parallel interests, which developed alongside their decades-long friendship.

Landacre also maintained a career as a book illustrator. His most notable book, California Hills & Other Wood Engravings (1931), was selected as one of the “Fifty Books of the Year” by the American Institute of Graphic Arts and is eagerly sought-after today. He also illustrated over 30 other books, including several titles published by the Limited Editions Club, such as Lucretius’s De rerum natura (in 1957) and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (in 1963).

As Dana Gioia, former poet laureate of California, says in his afterword to this volume: “Wien does justice to Landacre, his work, and his era. I read these handsome volumes with pleasure, profit, and, above all, gratitude.” So did I.