Anyone who has driven around Los Angeles in the last 50 years knows Millard Sheets' art, even if they don't know his name. For Home Savings of America, he designed the distinctive white marble branch banks and their artistic decorations, sometimes collaborating with others, beginning in 1952. (Later many of those buildings became branches of Washington Mutual and now Chase bank.) The stripped classicism of the architecture is enlivened by Sheets' specialty: stylized mosaic murals and wall reliefs.
The decor has a certain period charm, even if the already shaky conceit of a prosperous, postwar American equivalent of Renaissance era Medici bankers as art patrons has inescapably curdled in our era of too-big-to-fail banking scandals. But there was never any doubt that Sheets, who died in 1989, believed in the notion. He was by most accounts as conservative in his political outlook as he was in his art.
At the Pasadena Museum of California Art, a useful if rather uninspiring exhibition of 23 oil paintings and 60 watercolors looks at the roots of Sheets' undeniably prolific career. An artistic prodigy born on a Pomona farm in 1907, he was institutionally well-connected. Sheets taught at Chouinard Art Institute, Scripps College and Claremont Graduate School; helped choose participants in the Public Works of Art Project that employed artists during the Great Depression; directed (for a couple decades) the annual art exhibition at the Los Angeles County Fair, and was an illustrator and artist-correspondent for the U.S. Air Force and Life magazine. He ran Otis Art Institute, now Otis College of Art and Design, where the library is named for him.
Sheets got around. And he started young.
Culture Monster | Pasadena Museum of California Art | Los Angeles Times
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