ARTS

Blanton exhibit a midmodern study in all things 'Cool'

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
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. See box at right.)

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.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699

'Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury'

When: 10 a.m to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays (open until 8 p.m. third Thursday of each month), 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m. Sundays through May 17

Where: Blanton Museum of Art, Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. and Congress Ave.

Cost: $7 adults, $5 seniors, $3 college students with ID, $3 youth (ages 13-21), free for children younger than 12. Free for everyone Thursdays.

Extras: The Blanton has teamed up with the Elephant Room for a jazz series featuring local musicians, the Alamo Ritz for a film series (see box) and has other programs planned in conjunction with the exhibit.

Information: 471-7324, www.blantonmuseum.org.

Austin Film Society 'Birth of the Cool'

Where: Alamo Ritz, 320 E. Sixth St.

When: All screenings at 7 p.m.

Information: See www.originalalamo.com for ticket information.

March 24: "Avant Cinema." A program of shorts by designers Charles and Ray Eames.

April 1: "Strangers When We Met." In this 1960 melodrama, Kirk Douglas stars as an architect whose life reflects the modernist dilemma.

April 8: "Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman" A documentary by Austin filmmaker Eric Bricker. Q-and-A with Bricker to follow.

April 14: "Let's Get Lost," Bruce Weber's 1988 documentary of trumpeter/singer Chet Baker.