What Postwar California Gave to Art, Design and Culture

By Willard Spiegelman
Wall Street Journal
March 4, 2009

The Renaissance had a word for it: sprezzatura, the quality of apparent ease that the perfect courtier brought to all his high-wire acts: swordplay, flute-playing, poetry-writing, singing, lovemaking. A later articulation of the same quality: A hundred years ago Vaslav Nijinsky, when asked how he managed his gravity-defying grands jetés, said "I merely leap and pause."

Recklessness, abandon, sang-froid, talent: Fifty years ago it was called "cool." It still is. That's the quality celebrated in "Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury" at the University of Texas' Blanton Museum of Art (now through May 17). Originally organized by the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, this is the kind of small didactic show, based on a somewhat shaky premise and promising a mingling of many arts, that nevertheless manages to delight and instruct in often surprising ways.

Something happened in Southern California after World War II. European émigré artists and intellectuals, having escaped Nazi Germany, had set down roots. New postwar prosperity led people to move west. After a decade of the war effort, industry resumed, offering new materials for civilian products. The stars were aligned. Industrial design, film and television, painting and jazz all bloomed in the desert. A new aesthetic emerged.

This show's title, borrowed from Miles Davis's album "Birth of the Cool," suggests unnecessary special pleading. Even though Davis's 1949 recording signaled a new musical development, he was an East Coast guy all the way. Los Angeles had no monopoly on the cool, the hip, or anything else. Even the famous furniture of Charles and Ray Eames, as well as the sleek glass-and-steel, often cantilevered architecture of Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig and John Lautner, would not have been possible without the commanding inspiration of modernist masters like Frank Lloyd Wright (whose 1959 Guggenheim Museum in New York is pictured in the exhibit) and Mies Van der Rohe. Or the Danish modern furniture -- rosewood and teak -- that filled domestic spaces along the East Coast throughout the '50s.

Anyone even approaching senior-citizen status will get a kick out of the historical timeline -- a walk down Memory Lane -- with which the show begins. Along three walls in the first "room" of this open space, the curators have mounted magazine covers, video and audio clips, newspapers ads, and other memorabilia from 1959, a year that began with the death of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper and that also included the rise to national prominence of Jack and Jackie Kennedy; Maynard G. Krebs (the first TV slacker, or beatnik, on "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis"); Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest," with its own Mount Rushmore version of an L.A.-styled Neutra house; Louis Kahn's Salk Institute; and the Dave Brubeck Quartet's "Time Out."

Having whetted our senses with these snippets of style, the show then opens into a grander space, where we find interesting clusters of objects on the floor, especially a grouping of 13 Eames furniture pieces, a bright kaleidoscope of shapes, materials and colors. The molded plywood for the famous chairs is used, as well, in a Quadriflex stereo speaker, which is itself -- a circle within a box, within another box -- a kind of painterly abstraction.

What distinguishes all of the pieces is lightness. Everything seems to float, even an Eames surfboard coffee table from 1957 that is hung on a wall like a shield. So do a chair by Maurice Martiné of walnut, aluminum and cotton cord, and another by Dan Johnson of steel, brass and rattan. If "Cool" has any meaning in furniture, it suggests release, levitation and bounce. ("Cool" also owed a lot to the materials being developed for the burgeoning aerospace industry in Southern California.)

The furniture seems to be having a discussion with the pictures on the walls -- "hard-edged" modern works by Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, John McLaughlin and Helen Lundeberg. This is perhaps the most instructive part of the show, especially if one wanders upstairs to see the Blanton's fine assortment of New York School paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s. By comparison to the sheer painterliness, richness and varied palettes of their East Coast Abstract Expressionist cousins (Joan Mitchell, Adolph Gottlieb, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler), the colors of the California painters seem brighter, their lines sharper, and their edges cleaner. (I kept thinking of Richard Diebenkorn's much more beautiful "Ocean Park" series, more than a decade in the future.)

One of the most arresting pictures is Karl Benjamin's 1957 oil-on-linen "Small Planes: White, Blue, and Pink," whose multiple tetragonal shapes look like boxes that have been mounted, or spread, but simultaneously seem to float weightlessly on the picture plane. Again, the painting embodies that quality of lightness that we have come to associate with coolness.

One darkened corner of the exhibit features "Tops," a three-minute film (1959) that Charles and Ray Eames did for "Stars of Jazz," a television series, and completed in a week. Music accompanies the action. Children's tops, as well as a dreidel and a gyroscope, are seen from above, below, close up, far off, singly and in groups. Pictured spinning or dancing like Wordsworth's daffodils, they combine balance and drunkenness; it's as if the Eameses had taken a Giorgio Morandi still life and made his bottles start to turn.

The show leaves the impression that one synonym for "cool" is neither "hip," nor "sleekly rational," nor "laid-back." It is, unexpectedly, "innocent." The '50s died officially on Nov. 22, 1963. But even before, in the mid-1950s, we had the "angel-headed hipsters" of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the escapades of Jack Kerouac's heroic wanderers in "On the Road," the nascent Civil Rights movement, and Castro's revolution. Still, the postwar generation had hopefulness, too often mistaken by cultural historians for conformity and repression.

When we look at the pictures of the elegant June Cleaver ladies and their tie-wearing gentlemen in the sleek houses overlooking L.A. (think a West Coast version of "Mad Men"), and especially at William Claxton's gorgeous black-and-white photos of jazz musicians (and hear their music through the overhead speakers) -- a smiling, barefoot June Christy; a saxophone-carrying Art Pepper mounting a dusty, tall Los Angeles hill; even the tragic Chet Baker on the prow of a sailboat -- we might say to ourselves "how young they all are."

Mr. Spiegelman is the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D7

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Blanton exhibit a midmodern study in all things 'Cool'

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
American-Statesman
Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Cool. In midcentury California it wasn't just an aesthetic. It was an ethos and culture all its own. Serious yet fun and playful, California cool was confident yet laid-back, free-spirited but simultaneously impersonal, revolutionary yet also eminently practical.

California cool spread, spawning a more widespread midcentury American modernism of sleek lines and simplified forms, an aesthetic that in our new millennium resonates through every facet of home and commercial design.

At the Blanton Museum of Art, you can immerse yourself in the beginnings of the cool ethos with "Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury," a sprawling, comprehensive survey exhibit on view through May 17.

Organized - appropriately - by California's Orange County Museum of Art, "Birth of the Cool," named for the seminal Miles Davis album, makes its final stop at the Blanton after a successful 18-month national tour.

Architectural photographs; paintings; decorative objects including vases, bowls

and tableware; film clips and cartoon shorts; furniture such as chairs, lamps and tables; album, book and magazine covers; and a listening lounge to soak up the cool vibes of Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins and other jazz masters - "Birth of the Cool" gathers it all up with more than 200 items.

But it's hardly an interdisciplinary mishmash of objects nor is it a pedantic review.

Instead, through artful arrangements of furniture, decorative objects and art, the paramount principle of modernism is revealed: Midcentury cool wasn't just an aesthetic; it was a way of living.

Perhaps nowhere is this more distilled than in the architectural photographs of Julius Shulman and, appropriately, an enormous reproduction of one opens the exhibit.

("Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman" a new documentary by Austin filmmaker Eric Bricker, screens April 8 at the Alamo Ritz. It's one of four films in an accompanying series beginning March 25.)

Shulman captured California cool in his sleek, luminous pictures of the Case Study houses, a series of sample homes sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine and designed by major modernist architects such Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig and Eero Saarinen.

The Case Study homes were meant to demonstrate how adaptable modernist principles could be, perfect for the postwar U.S. building boom and the demand for inexpensive and efficient housing.

Shulman's pictures were pure glamor. They look as much like film stills as they do design images. In a departure from most architectural photographers, Shulman included live models, posed as if engaged in the good life, lounging with cocktails and listening to jazz on the hi-fi.

Through Shulman's lens, California cool is full of optimism and confidence - and postwar economic prosperity. What becomes readily clear in this exhibit is that part of the ethos of midcentury cool was that it was a commercially oriented aesthetic very much for sale, not some precious art philosophy.

If you wanted to be cool, all you had to do was buy some cool.

But why did all this cool percolate in California? The edge of the West Coast represented the ultimate American frontier, full of sunny possibility and with seeming unlimited room for expansion and invention. You could do what you want without the pressure of storied East Coast traditions.

Despite the lack of generations-old institutions or storied families of arts patrons - or perhaps because of the lack of these - midcentury Southern California attracted an impressive lineup of iconoclastic cultural innovators. In the 1930s, with the rise of fascism in Germany and the tightening of cultural freedoms in Soviet Russia, an extraordinary roster of European modernist mavericks emigrated to the United States and landed in California: architect Richard Neutra, composer Igor Stravinsky, filmmaker Fritz Lang, playwright Bertolt Brecht and artist/animator Oskar Fischinger, among others.

With them they brought their distilled and tested avant-garde visions that had already met with a certain critical and commercial success.

The pull to the West Coast wasn't just the sunny weather and wide-open spaces. California's burgeoning movie industry offered employment to all manner of creative types. Fischinger, for example, worked as an animator for Paramount and MGM and sketched the outline for a portion of Disney's "Fantasia."

Back east, the artistic mood contrasted sharply with California cool. The post-World War II decades saw New York artists rebel against convention with a kind of anxious, individualistic striving.

Jackson Pollack vigorously splashed paint onto enormous canvases, the ultimate artistic gesture of the independent rebellion that characterized the Abstract Expressionists. Monumental, ego-driven, highly individualistic, Abstract Expressionist art was sui generis: sculptures and paintings created precisely to defy all the sculptures and paintings that came before them.

In golden, sunny California, modernism and its iconoclastic styles had a much more laid-back, ego-less vibe.

Painters such as Karl Benjamin and Frederick Hammersley created vibrantly hued, dynamic abstract paintings filled with hard-edged forms in jazzy composition.

Smooth-surfaced and geometrically informed - and generally modest in size and scale - such paintings bear no strident individualistic message.

California modernism also had an economic and industrial sensibility. Many of the best creative minds turned their talents to the practical. Understatement and belief in the infallibility of technology reigned. Sophistication replaced personal expressiveness.

Husband-and-wife designers Charles and Ray Eames - arguably the most influential American designers of the 20th century - make the most interesting case study of this aesthetic.

Appropriately, representations of their work from furniture to architecture to their forays into filmmaking are amply represented in "Birth of the Cool." The Eameses' sinuous now-iconic chairs eschew ornamentation and instead celebrate the properties of bent plywood, wire or plastic. An Eames chair represents well-designed affordable, urbane comfort for the optimistic sophisticate.

Fussy, dark personalities need not inquire. They're not cool.

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Sold on the Cool
The Blanton's 'Birth of the Cool' is midcentury modernism made sexy

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
March 13, 2009

The woman leans back into the sleek black sofa, her blue dress and red nails and lipstick popping against the house's stark white walls, ceiling, and floor – great blocks of white broken only by a few black beams and accent lines like dark bars in an abstract painting. Her head and body are tilted as if she's listening to something, and indeed, behind her stands a man in a dark suit at an entertainment console – a long rectangular box on tubelike metal legs on which sit an ashtray, a planter, and a small sculpture of a bird as smooth and clean as the console itself. The look of it all is cool, as in streamlined, spare, sharp, and up to date (at least for 1958). That makes it cool as in hip, too, and you can imagine this button-down man has just set the needle down on an LP by Chet Baker or Miles Davis, and these two are soaking up the first blue notes of chilled West Coast jazz before slipping into a pair of Tanqueray martinis, extra-dry.

This image by photographer Julius Shulman, taken to showcase the work of architect Pierre Koenig (who is, in fact, the man at the hi-fi), captures not only the look of midcentury modernism – that clean, minimalist aesthetic – but the vibe of it: the chicness, the sophistication, the style. You don't just admire it; you desire it. Small wonder, then, that the image is being used by the Blanton Museum of Art to advertise "Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury" – and I don't use that verb casually. The era on which this touring exhibit is focused is also the era in which advertising rose to new prominence in American commerce, as any fan of the cable series Mad Men can tell you. Postwar prosperity and the arrival of television combined to create a vast new audience for goods and a powerful new medium for marketing them. And Shulman's photographs, as artful as they are, shimmer with the carefully composed allure of a sales job from back in the day.

Locating us in that era is something this show from the Orange County Museum of Art takes pains to do. The first room is taken up with a lengthy timeline for the year 1959. Text blurbs detail Sen. John F. Kennedy's presidential bid, Nixon squaring off against Khrushchev, and the forward march of the civil rights movement alongside accounts of cultural milestones with interactive elements that are, well, cool. You can listen to cuts from the classic Dave Brubeck Quartet album Time Out and Duke Ellington's soundtrack to Anatomy of a Murder and watch scenes from Hitchcock's North by Northwest, TV's The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, and Playboy's Penthouse, Hugh Hefner's first venture into the television variety/talk show, with Nat "King" Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Lenny Bruce as guests. It's fun stuff, and anyone interested in such material is well advised to reserve ample time for taking in the exhibition.

By the time you head toward the bulk of the exhibit's artifacts, you're solidly grounded in this moment in time, and it becomes easier to see this midcentury modernism as a progression from the previous two decades. The clean lines in Koenig's architecture and the hard-edged shapes in the abstract paintings of Lorser Feitelson and Frederick Hammersley and the smooth chairs of Charles and Ray Eames speak to a kind of shedding of ornamentation from previous periods of art and design. It's as if the representational and the decorative were emblematic of the Depression and World War II and were being sloughed off in this era of expansion and prosperity. America couldn't afford to be weighted down with the past as it moved toward the future. The view in Shulman's photograph Case Study House #22 – from the house high on a hill, with the lights of Los Angeles dotting the dark valley below – says it all: We're on top now, the world at our feet. This is our future.

But if we get a good sense of how the country came to this moment in history, we don't get much sense of how modernism got there. Aside from a few references in the timeline to earlier modernist works and creators, the links to the "cool" modernism of midcentury are missing. It's noted that in 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright passed away, but his influence on the work of Koenig, say, goes unremarked upon. It's only when you see the North by Northwest clip, set in a modernist home strikingly similar to Koenig's Case Study homes in the exhibit but based on the designs of Wright, that you gain a sense that the architecture by Koenig and Richard Neutra might have been part of a modernist tradition that had developed over time. The same is true of the furniture design by Charles and Ray Eames; the abstract art by Feitelson, Hammersley, Helen Lundeberg, and others; and the jazz by Davis, Baker, Brubeck, et al.: We're lacking a sense of the history and influences that these were drawn from.

With that present, we'd have an even greater appreciation of what the modernism presented here achieved, how it infused the movement with something new. The cleanliness and elegance of earlier forms – be they Mission Revival architecture, Scandinavian design, or abstract expressionism – are there, but midcentury modernism added an understated dose of sensuality. You see it in the subtle curves of those Eames chairs, contoured to the body. It's in the muted colors of Lundeberg's architectural abstracts, pale and soothing. You hear it in the laid-back, relaxed rhythms of West Coast jazz played in the exhibition's jazz lounge and see it in William Claxton's breathtakingly sumptuous black-and-white photographs of jazz musicians hanging there: It's all so seductive – modernism made sexy. And at "Birth of the Cool," you just want to ease into it and steep there, like in a hot bath.

At one point in Mad Men, adman/cad man Don Draper is dispatched to Southern California to pitch business to the burgeoning aerospace industries. He falls in with a jet-set princess and her decadent Eurotrash family and, amid the perfect weather and pools, contemplates abandoning his East Coast life for this West Coast land of lotus-eaters. It's a temptation that has waylaid many a visitor to the region, and it's part of the secret of the culture of cool documented in the exhibition. It doesn't just strip away the ornament and decoration, but like SoCal seems to do, it strips away the struggle and strain of life, leaving just what's smooth and loose and chill.

You gotta figure that Don Draper could come up with an irresistible way to sell that. But he wouldn't need to. Cool sells itself.

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Ray Donley: Lost and Found

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
March 13, 2009

The figures on his canvases look as if they were painted hundreds of years ago, but they are recent creations, some brand new. The paintings they appear in are shown across North America and Europe, but they're made here in Austin. And the story behind them is being told in a new documentary, Ray Donley: Dancing the Inquisition Waltz.

It's rare that an Austin artist is the subject of a film, but then Donley is something of a rarity himself: a painter who's also a degreed art historian, a contemporary artist working in a centuries-old representational tradition, an artist who has found international success yet chooses to live and work in Austin, the city of his birth. "People say, 'Ray, why don't you move to New York and be a bigger artist?' I say: 'No, I'm happy here in Austin, Texas. Anybody can move to New York and make it. It takes a real artist to make it in Texas.'"

Donley is making it, routinely showing and selling his work in Berlin, London, Amsterdam, and so on, but the flip side of that is his work is rarely seen in his own hometown. That makes this month's showing of "Ray Donley: Still Awake in the City of Dreadful Night" at the Russell Collection Fine Art Gallery a special treat. The exhibition, which is showing through March 20, naturally features many of those enigmatic, shadow-drenched figures that are Donley's signature, figures whose "combination of inscrutability and aristocratic beauty ... seduces the viewer," as Molly Beth Brenner wrote in a 2004 Chronicle review. But the show will also include a first for the artist: a piece of sculpture. "I had this idea – and it could only occur in Austin, I think," says Donley, "that I wanted to do something that would be a summation of much of my work, maybe the darker aspects. It is a skull mounted on a pedestal with a jester's cap. It is my ultimate ecce homo – behold the man. What better way to remind someone of the brevity of life than to thrust in their face a skull?"

The impulse to shock someone into thinking about mortality has been driving Donley throughout his career. "I am a differently ordered person," he says. "That is, I probably couldn't be characterized as overly optimistic. I always thought that optimism referred to an eye disease. It's a kind of darker view, but I'm wanting very passionately to say something about the human condition, and I think that's what great art does. It jolts us into taking a refined look at our situation and the kind of world we inherited, maybe to promote change, I don't know. But sometimes my job as an artist is to paint bleakly about bleakness, because that's all I see. 'Los Bien Perdidos' is what I call my cycle of images: the lost ones, the very lost ones, the profoundly lost ones. And these characters somehow touch on that. These individuals that I create – 99 percent of them through my imagination – are on a journey, some sojourn: getting lost, getting found, getting drunk, getting drunker, setting out. Perhaps suggesting that we're all lost in some emotional, spiri0tual, psychological, cosmological way. That's been the burden of my art since I announced to the world that I was an artist."

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Haven Gallery & Fine Gifts

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
March 13, 2009

This year, I had the pleasure of getting on the bus for the annual Art Night Austin event put on by Art Alliance Austin. Buses stopped at Arthouse, the Austin Museum of Art, and several commercial galleries, with each venue featuring food from local restaurants to go with the art on display. I admit that I had no idea what was in Haven Gallery & Fine Gifts, and I am here to say it has good fine art in it; it's not all gifts. And if you go in looking for a gift, beware; you might come out with a piece of art for yourself. The gallery is crowded with items, and with some parsing, you can find some real gems.

Haven has more small-scale sculpture on display than other galleries in town. The wide range of items includes mosaics, wood, ceramics, bronzes, found objects, and blown glass. A blown-glass vase in off-whites and clear glass made by Leigh Taylor Wyatt of Wimberley caught my eye. Its lozenge shapes and stripes give it a stylish Seventies vibe, even though it's quite shiny and new.

The quality of all the ceramic work here is good. I was sucked in by some white porcelain sculptural lamps, particularly Large Coral Reef Light, by Canadian artist Lilach Lotan. I enjoy its repeated oceanic barnacle shapes and its matte finish. Its simplicity and white color is relaxing and allows me to look at the neat inner glow and transparencies within the form as whole. Some of these delicate and well-made lamps look like ruffles, and some look like barnacles, but they all provide a burst of texture. As I wandered around, I noticed Lotan's humorous side on display in vases that have a zipper carved into them, opening up the tops of the vessels. These are similarly understated in solid black or white but contain a surrealist or pop aesthetic.

I was happy to see Darvin Jones had a couple of his pop-art paintings up as well. These look a bit like graphic design, but he can paint happy "la grunge" if he wants. (That's the trend where you overlay lots of fonts, drips, and swirls to create a shape, like the drippy Comedy Central logo.) Jones uses a limited palette of mostly blue and white and creates some soft movements across the composition.

Hung in the same room and also blue are Rebecca Bennett's monochromatic abstracted landscapes. In paintings such as Morning Mist, a wet-on-wet oil on canvas, the layers of gradations from dark Prussian to robin's egg are evenhanded, and the surface texture is pleasingly consistent. It's mindless in a dreamy Zen way.

The gallery does a nice job of mixing styles and types of artwork, all handmade but not all local. Its displays are well put together in small, almost themed groupings. It's nice to see a shop with paintings and sculpture at inspirational prices.

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'Tom Molloy: Lucid'
Lora Reynolds Gallery through April 25

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
March 20, 2009

"Tom Molloy: Lucid" says, "Happy St. Patty's Day, warmongers!"

Tom Molloy is an Irish artist whose political art deals with universal themes but feels quite American. Apparently, our global communications have given us immediate familiarity with certain images. This solo art show appears formally tidy, petite, and well organized. It's nice to see delicate graphite drawings with the potential to give you nightmares. Molloy coaxes his audience to contemplate war, taboos, government service through marriage, and duty via military enlistment. Hard realities are reflected in this art.

The work that has an instant visceral impact is the series of six graphic drawings titled "Lucid." Each drawing uses a touchstone war photograph and a pornographic image in a double-image overlay. They are tiny reminders that sex and violence are a part of life, little pieces of collective visual memory. The first piece is photojournalist Nick Ut's iconic image of a young Vietnamese woman running naked from a napalm bomb combined with an image of some girl-on-girl kissing. It coercively makes the viewer choose a side: Either you squint and see the porn or squint and see the violence. Which do you prefer? Which is more taboo? With his appropriated images, Molloy asks, "How jaded are you?" Along with sexy images that feel unspecific, I recognize more Vietnam, "Tank Man" at Tiananmen Square, and Abu Ghraib. I've read that most Chinese haven't seen Jeff Widener's photo of a man standing in front of tanks; it's a Western news image. The use of these arresting images could be part of Molloy having grown up in Ireland, which had its share of conflicts and pipe bombs in the Seventies and Eighties. Irish artists dealing with issues of violence and human rights look a lot like American artists working with the same themes.

A nimble and versatile artist, Molloy appropriates Warhol's Brillo Pad art in one work. He's cut out his watercolor re-creations of the boxes, framed them nicely, and piled them on the gallery floor. As you try not to kick the art, you are led physically: "Don't get on that soapbox."

A more poignant piece is Whistleblower, which includes a transcription of the (fairly confused) speech by the military man who went public with the torture at Abu Ghraib. Molloy gave a gallery talk in which he pointed out that the Abu Ghraib photos and stories are 21st century as opposed to 20th century.

His embroidered portrait of Michelle Obama is also new. In his talk about the series "Behind Every Great Man," which features embroidered portraits of the wives of the 44 American presidents, Molloy said that he was imagining all of the presidents whispering war secrets into their wives' ears and how odd that would be to talk war over breakfast. He said he chose the series to be embroidered as a reference to feminism. In an attempt at irony, he hired a female artist friend of his to sew them. She insisted on being paid minimum wage.

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