In April 1879 an exploration party of Mormons left the Cedar City-Fillmore area of Utah to scout out southeastern Utah before a group went to colonize the area. The larger party crossed Hole-in-the-Rock on their way to Bluff, where they eventually settled. Their passage was fraught with difficulties, not the least of which was the lowering of their wagons down the east slope of Hole-in-the-Rock, a process depicted in Westward. Buff had first become interested in the history of the Mormons in the late 1920s when he was asked to decorate the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Los Angeles. There he painted a series of lunettes depicting the original group of pioneering Mormons who moved West in 1847. For this and other commissions for smaller Mormon churches that he later received, Buff explored Nevada and Utah, travels which increased his admiration for members of the church. The subject of Westward fascinated Buff and he made several versions of it in oil as well as a lithograph. A photograph of Westward I in the transcript of the Buff interview in the Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, and given the date 1933 is of a version similar to the museum’s painting in overall conception, but it differs in details of the rock formation and the wagon train and in the placement of the signature. The next year he completed a large oil on canvas mural, Westward II (Santa Monica [Calif.] High School), for the Public Works of Art Project. In it the details of geography differ somewhat from those in the museum’s painting and Buff added in the foreground a cliff on which a pioneer mother and two children perch precariously. In 1934, the same year he painted the mural Westward II he included in his solo exhibition at the Stendahl Art Galleries a painting titled Hurricane Pass on the Covered Wagon Trail in Southern Utah. Judging by its reproduction in the Los Angeles Times (July 22, 1934, pt. 2, p. 8) this appears to have been almost identical to the version now owned by the museum. Pentimenti in the museum’s painting indicate that the placement of the small figures in the foreground was changed slightly. This suggests that the museum’s version, which is undated, may have been first exhibited in 1934 as Hurricane Pass . . . and then changed slightly and given a new title. If so, the reason for the artist’s alterations are not known. Buff’s typical subject was the Western mountain landscape, its dramatic forms rendered as bold, clear shapes with an almost architectural quality. Its historical subject and rustic figures (one posed for by the artist’s son) give Westward a more regionalist flavor. The genre element as well as the baroque viewpoint were typical of murals created in the 1930s. Westward displays the technique of the artist’s earlier paintings: a thin underpainting of various colors applied in large areas of light and shade, each color enlivened by a series of short lines of a different and sometimes complementary color. The cliffs are maroon, orange, lavender, and beige; the distant hills are pastel blue, lavender, ocher, and green. The technique, which the artist described as "pointillist," may recall Italian divisionist painting, which he might have known from his youth in Switzerland and southern Germany. Buff maintained this mature style until he gradually broadened it in later life. Although Buff was invited to exhibit paintings in his pointillist style with the city’s modernists in the early 1920s, Westward won the first prize in the "conservative class" at the museum’s Eighteenth Annual Exhibition: Painting and Sculpture, from which it was purchased. The Los Angeles art world had changed, but Buff had an individual style independent of the art movements around him.

Four years after the stock market crash of 1929, which triggered the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt initiated the New Deal, a program of domestic reform meant to revive the economy and alleviate the problem of mass unemployment. Toward these ends, he established various new federal agencies, putting many more people to work to do the increased business of government. Thousands of artists were employed, most through the largest program, the Works Progress Administration. Although the government did not dictate the type of art that was to be produced, it did encourage the use of a representational style and American themes. As a result, most of the art created in the decade prior to World War II was humanistic in orientation.

Artists, writers, and philosophers of the period became obsessed with the social relevance of art. Although a small group of American artists did attack the societal ills of the nation (housing shortages, unemployment) and of the world in general (the rise of fascism and militarism), most adopted a more pragmatic and even positive attitude. American scene painters captured busy city dwellers on streets, in buses, at work, and at play. Occasionally artists infused an element of humor into the pathos of everyday existence, even in scenes that allude to the political disasters of the day. Regionalists were particularly fond of idealizing the past and aggrandizing the present accomplishments of the country. In fact, the myth of America as a country where everyone lives a pastoral, carefree existence emerged with new vigor in the art of the 1930s.

The diversity of the people also emerged as a strong current of social realism. Artists who were accustomed to working in their studios now looked beyond their immediate circles for models. Individuals of various races, professions, or creeds inspired some of the most moving portraits of the century and demonstrated the soul of the people.

• About the Era.
• Eleventh Annual Exhibition of Southern California Art. San Diego: Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego, 1939.
• Blake, Janet, and Deborah Epstein Solon. Art Colony: the Laguna Beach Art Association, 1918-1935. Laguna Beach: Laguna Art Museum, 2018.
• Fort, Ilene Susan and Michael Quick.  American Art:  a Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collection.  Los Angeles:  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991.