At the beginning of his career, early in the 1930s, Millard Sheets created several urban views of Los Angeles like Angel’s Flight and Tenement Flats (1928, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.). While Sheets may have been encouraged to create such cityscapes by his early teacher, Theodore Modra (1873-1930), a disciple of Robert Henri, he was probably inspired just as much by the American Scene painting popular during the Great Depression.
In Tenement Flats and Spring Street, Los Angeles, (1930, estate of the artist), Sheets presented the traditional view of city structures from ground level, possibly prompted by the example of the well-known Cliff Dwellers by George Bellows, (1913, LACMA; q.v.), which had been on view in the Los Angeles Museum since 1916. As noted by contemporary critics, however, Sheets proved more inventive with Angel’s Flight: he viewed the Los Angeles neighborhood from high on a hill. This unusual vantage point must have seemed logical though, given the unusually steep terrain of the area depicted, which is now known as Bunker Hill. A friend of Sheets’s who also painted the Los Angeles scene, Paul Sample (born 1896), was fascinated with unusual viewpoints.
The title of the painting, Angel’s Flight, refers to the now dismantled electric cable railway that was built in 1901 to carry pedestrians on Third Street up the steep hill from Hill Street to Olive, on the top of Bunker Hill. The funicular was built south of a road tunnel. At the same time a pedestrian stairway of 123 steps and ten ramps was constructed on the north side to give those who could not afford the railway free access to the top of Bunker Hill. On the crest of the hill a tall observation tower, known as Angel’s View, was constructed. The young women in the painting -- the model for both of whom was the artist’s wife, Mary -- may be standing on either the observation tower or a railway platform on the hilltop. Sheets omitted the famous cable railway and chose to view the scene looking north toward the stairway. He did not depict the stairs as straight, as they actually were, but showed them as meandering up the hill, thereby exaggerating the sense of height.
Each of the buildings has a slightly different perspective vanishing point. Furthermore, the two women placed in the foreground shadow serve as repoussoir elements, introducing the viewer to the scene below, and as a contrast to the brilliantly sunlit hill below, which further exaggerates the perspective. The prominence of the figures in the foreground and the effect of the unusual viewpoint are quite baroque, a quality seen in the paintings of Thomas Hart Benson and other regionalist artists.
Sheets’s palette is bright and varied, with the apartment buildings and boarding houses painted in vivid orange, red, yellow, and green. The color, combined with the perspective and contrasting light and dark areas, gives the painting a distinctively dynamic quality. Despite its Social Realist subject, Angel’s Flight was a precursor to Sheets’s brighter, more decorative postwar compositions. Sheets painted Angel’s Flight expressly for the 1931 Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh, the first major international show in which he was invited to participate. In 1932, the painting won a prize for the "most representative work" at the annual exhibition held at the Los Angeles Museum and was subsequently purchased for the museum.
