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GONZALEZ, Amado/ CALIFORNIA WINE ADVISORY BOARD [San Francisco, c. 1964] California-Wine Land of America. 28 ½ x 40 inches. Excellent condition. This is among the most artistically pleasing pictorial maps we have seen. It is also a significant artifact in the early promotion of the California wine industry, as it was produced at time when California wines were still largely considered jug wines and regarded as greatly inferior to European wines. It wasn’t until 1976, when the shattering “Judgement of Paris” saw California wines sweep their French counterparts in the red and white categories, that the status of the California product was dramatically elevated. Wisely, the trade organization, the Wine Advisory Board, selected an accomplished artist to make the visual case for California wines with this graphically sophisticated pictorial map. (In this sense, they followed the playbook of railroads, which employed prominent artists to promote tourism.) This work has a quintessentially 60’s graphic style that conveys a light, casual elegance to communicate a sense of an evolved, mature wine culture that was perhaps not quite matched by reality yet. The map designates specific wine regions, as if long established, and by showing roads, it also promotes wine tourism. A large wine press at upper right serves as a cartouche for a general description of the state’s wine growing area, and at bottom left is a history of viticulture in California. Amado Gonzalez (1913-2007), muralist and portrait and graphic artist, was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, immigrated to San Francisco in 1927, and studied at the California School of Fine Arts under disciples of Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and Orozco.
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