 |
This page requires Flash player to view. Please download it here |
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Julius Shulman’s photograph of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22, 1959–60, evokes a life of leisure suspended above the city of Los Angeles Karl Benjamin’s painting Black Pillars, 1957, offers a different take on abstraction than the East Coast styles practiced by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning Cover for the Dave Brubeck Quartet album Jazz: Red Hot and Cool (Columbia Records, 1955) William Claxton’s album cover for Chet Baker & Crew (World Pacific Records, 1956) The most famous chair of the decade, by husband-and-wife design team Charles and Ray Eames Frederick Hammersley's oil-on-linen Up Within, 1957–58, exemplifies the new genre of hard-edge painting among California artists with its distinctive use of color and shape |
|
|
|
 |
|
The year was 1959. Buddy Holly had just been killed in a plane crash and Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba. A little toy company called Mattel unveiled its future fashion-plate blockbuster, the Barbie doll. Columbia released Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and the Dave Brubeck Quartet was recording Take Five. Moviegoers thrilled to the sights of Sandra Dee hanging ten as a spunky surfer girl in Gidget and Cary Grant outrunning a crop duster in North by Northwest. And, quietly, the design of the times was taking shape on the left coast.
Characterized by an easy, modern elegance, the sleek, geometric forms that were appearing in architecture, furniture, painting, photography, and even cartoons mingled wide planes, sharp angles, and broad curves at the relaxed tempo of a Chet Baker record. Dubbing this period the “birth of the cool,” after the landmark Davis album, curator Elizabeth Armstrong of the Orange County Museum of Art argues that California was the wellspring of the American modernist style. Armstrong marshaled more than 250 paintings, photographs, album covers, film clips, architectural models, book jackets, magazine covers, and other cultural artifacts for the traveling exhibition “Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury,” on view from May 17 at the Oakland Museum.
The Golden State has always been a beacon in American popular mythology—it is the source of the Gold Rush, the fertile promised land of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and, through Hollywood, the world capital of artifice and reinvention. Business was booming in late-’50s Southern California, thanks to a burgeoning population and the growing might of the entertainment industry. Its epicenter was Los Angeles, which attracted talent in every medium. Designers Charles and Ray Eames, Alvin Lustig, Saul Bass, and Herbert Matter; architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra (who went on to design the Getty Center), and jazz musicians like Shelly Manne and Sonny Rollins were drawn by the prosperous economy and, in many cases, the freedom from an art establishment.
Painter Lorser Feitelson recalled of the ’50s West Coast art scene, “There was no problem with ‘modern art’; there wasn’t any art out here! . . . If you said ‘Picasso,’ for them Picasso was the name perhaps of one of the Chicago gangsters at that time.” In other words, the field was wide open. In contrast with the reigning style of the day—the messy, gestural New York–based Abstract Expressionism exemplified by the drips and splats of Jackson Pollock and the frenzied brushwork of Willem de Kooning—the laconic imagery that developed on the left coast was composed of simple, smooth-edged geometric forms and flat expanses of clear color, with angles as sharp as a Plymouth tailfin.
Meanwhile, architects like Neutra and Pierre Koenig were designing homes for a modern California life. Think classic Palm Springs style: low, horizontal layouts; walls of plate glass; sliding doors opening onto outdoor patios and pools. Add to that a vaguely Japanese inflection that maximized the landscape’s two great natural assets, light and space. Sofas, consoles, and chairs by the Eameses, Eero Saarinen, and Harry Bertoia floated just above polished-concrete floors on spiky, antennal legs. These stage-set interiors were documented by photographer Julius Shulman, who posed models in the rooms, as if the pictures were advertisements for the design itself. His photographs showed people how to live in these new interiors designed for display and socializing—a glamorous vision of domesticity for which the only accessories needed were a cocktail shaker and a record player.
Nowhere was the notion of cool more heavily promoted than in the pages of Playboy, which Hugh Hefner founded in 1953 to counsel city dwellers as well as suburbanites on the subjects of sex, speakers, and spirits. The Playboy man was a “cool cat,” well versed in upscale living and its accouterments, especially jazz music (Hef himself is a noted aficionado). The exhibition features a large selection of William Claxton’s photographs of jazz legends, from Ornette Coleman to Gerry Mulligan, in recording studios and poolside jam sessions. Claxton’s photographs document the rise of a new musical strain that provided the soundtrack to the Playboy lifestyle. According to critic Dave Hickey, they are the source to seek for “evidence of what cool was.”
The impact of these iconic works can still be felt today. Witness the continued demand for Eames chairs, the refurbishment of Saarinen’s Terminal 5 at New York’s Kennedy airport, or the breakout success of the TV series Mad Men (AMC), which turns a cynical eye on those heady days while paying reverent homage to the furnishings and styles of the period. As cultural critic Thomas Hine writes in the show’s catalog, California cool “embodies the values of a unique, and irrevocably lost, moment in American life.” Lost, perhaps, but still exerting the orbital pull that only the defiantly, effortlessly cool can.
Birth of the Cool was organized by Elizabeth Armstrong, chief curator of the Orange County Museum of Art, and is on view at the Oakland Museum of California May 17 through August 17. It travels to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, next year.
Sarah P. Hanson is an editor at Assouline Publishing and has written for ARTnews.
Photography Credits:
1. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute
2. © Karl Benjamin, courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood Photo Richard Avedon
3. Photo Richard Avedon
4. © William Claxton; courtesy Demont Photo Management
5. Courtesy Eames Office LLC, Santa Monica, California
6. © Frederick Hammersley, photograph by Schenck & Schenck
|
|
|
