The Westways Cover Art Program 1928–1981  The fine art that appeared on the magazine’s covers continues to entertain and enlighten audiences By Matthew W. Roth  Westways  November/December  2010

 

Sunset Strip by Jan Sawka, 1978. When Sawka painted this cover, he had recently emigrated from Poland. The vibrant pop art imagery captured how the sometimes cartoonish scene along Sunset Boulevard must have appeared to an emigré fresh from the Eastern Bloc.

In 1926, when Phil Townsend Hanna took over as editor of Touring Topics (the predecessor to Westways), he set out to expand the magazine’s focus on the automobile, broadening it to include travel, the arts, and regional culture. He quickly dispensed with the plain covers, and, 1928, began presenting works from well-known artists who were widely recognized for their California painting.

The painters, including John Frost, William Wendt, and Alson Clark, were primarily associated with the plein air school, also known as California Impressionism or Late Impressionism. They found many aspects of late 19th-century Impressionism—prominent brush strokes, fragmented light, outdoor subjects—perfectly suited to the qualities of light and the as-yet-undeveloped landscapes of Southern California. Their paintings provided a perfect complement to the Auto Club’s promotion of recreational touring.

Natural Wonders
To inaugurate the cover art program, Hanna commissioned a series of 12 landscapes, beginning with the March 1928 issue: San Jacinto by Frost; Malibu Mountains by Hanson Puthuff; Half Dome, Yosemite by Maurice Braun; Del Norte Coast by Jack Wilkinson Smith; Mount Whitney by Benjamin C. Brown; Morro Bay by Jean Mannheim; La Jolla Cove by Clark; Grand Canyon by Carl Oscar Borg; Santa Barbara by Douglas Parshall; San Luis Rey Mission by Duncan Gleason; Santa Ana Canyon by Wendt; and Virgin Creek Gorge by Maynard Dixon.

Throughout the rest of 1929 and for the following two years, Hanna replicated the focus on plein air landscapes. From March through December 1929, he commissioned all the paintings from women artists, including Donna Schuster, Henrietta Shore, and M. deNeale Morgan. For 1930, Hanna hired Dixon to paint all 12 covers, which depicted the history of transportation in California, from natives hauling loads slung across their backs to an airplane circling against a bright blue sky. A third series, in 1931, consisted of scenes from California history rendered in straightforward, representational style by Borg, whose scenes of Junípero Serra, John Fremont, and other notable figures resonated with Hanna’s passion for California history.

Scaling Back
After 1931, when the Great Depression forced the magazine to cut expenses, Hanna still managed to place a few spectacular works of art on the cover, notably Conrad Buff’s Grand Canyon in 1932. Nor did he scale back his vision for the magazine, which was renamed Westways in 1934 in accord with an expansive mission, as Hanna put it, to “reflect the romance, adventure, unexcelled scenic attractions, geographical wonderlands, artists, scientists, musicians, and authors who are doing things in a big way—the essence of California.” For the most part, though, the cover art program went into hiatus for the balance of the decade and throughout the home-front scarcity and rationing during World War II.

By the late 1940s, the energetic California watercolor movement had become an influential force in the regional art scene, and Hanna adorned the cover with works from many of the leading practitioners, including Phil Dike, Rex Brandt, and Maurice Logan. In 1950, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Auto Club, Hanna commissioned a series of watercolors on the national parks of the West. The parks had always figured significantly into the magazine’s content as destinations for driving vacations, and Hanna linked that interest with the revived cover art program.

Post Hanna
When Hanna passed away in 1957, the magazine that he’d built into a formidable creative outlet was in the midst of another of his distinctive series of cover art. He had commissioned Brandt to provide all 12 covers for 1957, each one a diptych pairing an Old World scene with a California or Western scene: the canals of Venice and the waterfront of Stockton; a vineyard in Portugal and the Napa Valley; the English Lake Country and Clear Lake, California.

It was a fitting final gesture for the entrepreneurial editor, who’d taken over the magazine 30 years earlier with the goal of proclaiming the aesthetic contributions of a city and a region that were striving for recognition comparable to that received by the art centers of the East Coast and Europe. With the Brandt series of 1957, Westways expressed the brimming confidence of a region that now declared cultural equivalence between the Old World and the New, especially California.

After Hanna, the editors and art directors of Westways selected cover artists from the eclectic visual arts scene of the West Coast, known for its rich cross-fertilization with many branches of the entertainment business. Westways cover artists from the 1960s and 1970s also designed posters, album covers, and sets for film and theater. Featuring artists such as Jan Sawka and Merle Shore, Westways covers in this period became an outlet for pop art, collage, and assemblage.

Mount Whitney, Benjamin Brown, 1928. Born in Arkansas and trained in Paris, Brown first came to Southern California in the 1880s and always longed to return.  When he finally did, he became known for his paintings of poppy fields in bloom, though the Sierra remained a favorite subject, too.

Linking Old and New
Although newer forms of expression found a place on the cover of Westways, the magazine continued to highlight the work of the region’s most accomplished watercolorists, including Jake Lee and Merv Corning. Among the most prolific contributors to the cover-art program, Lee and Corning demonstrated the continuing vitality of the venerable medium of watercolor.

Scenic View Ahead, a traveling exhibition drawn from the cover art collection went on tour in the late 1990s and early 2000s; subsequently, paintings from the Auto Club collection have been displayed in exhibits at numerous museums and other venues throughout Southern California.

Cover art from Touring Topics and Westways has also been used to illustrate books on California tourism and on the history of California art in the 20th century. Since 2005, examples from the cover art collection have been used in lesson plans on local history and geography written by participants in the annual teachers institute conducted by the UCLA History-Geography Project and the Auto Club. In 2010, the collection begins another tour with an exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art.

A Lasting Legacy
When Hanna began the cover art program, he adopted a standard practice for the magazines of the day, but Westways’ use of fine art persisted long past the time when most other American magazines had abandoned the use of original cover art. For most of that period, the magazine functioned as the primary means of communication between the Auto Club and its members, and the cover art played an integral role, reflecting not only the changing concerns of the organization and its members but also the evolution of artistic production in California.

The enduring value of the collection as a source of insight and enjoyment bears witness to the power of Phil Townsend Hanna’s original vision and the accomplishments of those who carried on his work.

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Matthew W. Roth manages the Auto Club’s archives.

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Scenic View Ahead appears at the Pasadena Museum of California Art from November 14 through February 21, 2011. The museum is located at 490 E. Union Street, one block north of Colorado Boulevard, between Los Robles Avenue and Oakland Avenue. 1-626-568-3665. Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, noon–5 p.m. Admission: $7 for adults, $5 for seniors and students. Auto Club members receive $2 off all tickets to the museum, a 10 percent discount on nonconsignment merchandise at the museum store, and a 20 percent discount on a first-year museum membership.