Letter to the Editor: Jake Milgram Wien Responds to Johanna Drucker

The author of ‘Paul Landacre: California Hills, Hollywood and the World Beyond’ underscores the universality of the artist’s engraved landscapes and refutes a critic’s claims that Landacre participated in racism associated with Americans’ westward expansion.

By Jake Milgram WienJanuary 30, 2026

• Art & Architecture

• History

IN HER recent letter to the Los Angeles Review of Books concerning Victoria Dailey’s review of the recently published catalogue raisonné of Paul Landacre, Johanna Drucker shows no evidence of having read the set of volumes under review. Rather, her remarks perpetuate her own confounding ideological agenda, aired not only in her letter but also in a 2023 essay and in a lecture she delivered at UCLA in 2024, in which she implicates Paul Landacre in “the history of the displacement of Indigenous peoples, systematic genocide, [and] erasure” in California.

Both in terms of Landacre’s liberal politics and, more importantly, his right to artistic freedom, Drucker could not be more wrong. Based on the fact that no Indigenous people are depicted in the 1931 bound folio California Hills and Other Wood Engravings by Paul Landacre, she argues, bafflingly, that the artist was complicit in historical crimes perpetrated against Indigenous people. Despite having played no part in any such activity, Landacre has fallen prey to Drucker’s astonishing belief that all American artists, living or dead, must be required to depict Indigenous people in their work, especially in the landscape genre—for if they do not, they will be deemed guilty of “erasure.” As Drucker asserts, “the images in California Hills make clear that his vision was constrained by an iconography of erasure.” This illogical complaint, which implies a deliberate racist attempt at exclusion, is a reductio ad absurdum masquerading as analysis.

Drucker goes on to suggest that Landacre (despite his lifelong physical disability) should have made the effort to travel in order to find Indigenous people and stage them in his drawings of the hills, mountains, and deserts of California. She claims in her 2024 lecture that, by not doing so, he advanced a “set of conventions and tropes for seeing the land as empty” that justified the white man’s Manifest Destiny. Disingenuously denying her desire to “rag on anybody or criticize anyone” currently living, Drucker also implicates artist Richard Wagener for his wood engravings appearing in California in Relief (Book Club of California, 2009). She asserts that the “tropes” of exclusion informing Wagener’s imagery “sink in” and “almost become the way you see the landscape because those conventions are so deeply imprinted that you project them when you’re looking.”

The catalogue raisonné reviewed by Dailey—with its rigorous documentation of the local, national, and international exhibition histories of Landacre’s fine art prints, dozens of which garnered awards—demonstrates the falsity of Drucker’s assertion, in her 2023 essay, that “the impact of his oeuvre was fairly limited, in part because much of his work was done for book publication and illustration, not as fine art.”

Drucker alleges that Landacre borrowed “from an established tradition of Romantic landscape that ignored the history of contact” and mistakenly claims, in her letter, that “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” even as “the Indigenous people disappeared from view in their canvases.” These artists did not create a “myth” about the mountains; they painted what they saw, often including Native inhabitants in their scenes. Countless examples of the presence of Indigenous people can be found in American paintings, including those of Thomas Hill (see Indian Encampment, Yosemite Valley from 1863), Albert Bierstadt (see Mariposa Indian Encampment, Yosemite Valley, ca. 1872), and Raymond Dabb Yelland (see Yosemite Indian Village from 1874). Nineteenth-century artists conveyed the majesty of Yosemite and the surrounding peaks as an expression of the grandeur of nature. Although their paintings attracted visitors and settlers, they are not to be blamed for initiating a “pictorial convention” that was involved in the unspeakable horrors against Native populations.

As Kevin Starr, the eminent historian of California, eloquently observed (as cited by Dana Gioia, former poet laureate of California, in his afterword to the volumes), Landacre “depicted the hills of the California coast in their intrinsic structural power as the architecture of the planet itself.” His work is about elemental nature—earth, air, fire, and water—an eternal subject in art, poetry, and literature. Ironically, these are the same elements that Native Americans incorporate into their lives and work, a fact that went unobserved by Drucker (with the exception of her awkward observation that Landacre “also paint[ed] fire” at a time when “Indigenous practices of controlled burns” were “not necessarily well known”). Delmer Daves, the Hollywood movie director respected for his humanistic portrayals of Native Americans, was Landacre’s most ardent patron. He collected all of Landacre’s luminous Western landscapes, and their austerity resonates in his finest Westerns, as one of the cultural sidebars in the catalogue raisonné suggests.

Nowhere mentioned in Drucker’s letter or her prior lectures about Landacre is poet Robinson Jeffers, whom Landacre approached to write the foreword to California Hills. Jeffers was a guiding light for Landacre and his circle, which included Edward Weston, Ward Ritchie, and Jacob Zeitlin. “[T]he greatest beauty,” Jeffers wrote in his poem “The Answer,” is “the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man / Apart from that.” Drucker, who asks in her lectures “how we read” Landacre’s landscapes, would do well to study Jeffers for an answer. Landacre’s scenes are not “idyllic,” as Drucker characterizes them, but rather stark, penetrating, and primordial—radical visions that confront rather than pacify. Anyone of any faith, nationality, or racial origin can find themselves in these works, whose essence is their universality.