Miles Davis's seminal recording, known as "Birth of the Cool", is the starting point for this colorful, multi-disciplinary journey through 1950s West Coast America. 1950s West Coast style exuded "cool": from the smooth, hypnotic strains of a Miles Davis riff through Richard Neutra's elegant, modernist residences to the hard-edged paintings of Helen Lundeberg and Karl Benjamin. This richly illustrated volume casts a fresh eye on Fifties West Coast style with illuminating commentary from a variety of perspectives. Designed to echo the period it celebrates, this catalog explores modernist innovations in art, architecture, design, film and music. Prominent cultural critics write on an array of topics: Thomas Hine about the culture of cool; Elizabeth Smith on domestic aspects of the period's architecture; Francis Colpitt on hard-edged abstract painting; Dave Hickey on jazz, and Bruce Jenkins on the crossover between animation and experimental film. The result is a multi-faceted exploration of the 1950s West Coast.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
In Elizabeth Armstrong's BIRTH OF THE COOL: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury (Orange County Museum of Art/Prestel, $65), every facet of popular art, from architecture to furniture, with a generous dose of graphic design, is examined for how it expressed California's cultural aura.
The title of this book the catalog for a traveling show that is now at the Oakland Museum of California is borrowed from the 1957 album by Miles Davis, who in this telling is the standard bearer of West Coast cool, in stark contrast to the East Coast hipster style. "His lyrical playing and pure, vibrato free tone seemed to define a postwar concept of cool," Thomas Hine writes in "Cold War Cool," one of the book's nine essays.
Complementing Miles's sounds, the startling minimalist furniture design of Charles and Ray Eames and the space age architecture of Richard Neutra and Rudolph M. Schindler added to the unmistakable West Coast aesthetic. While modern graphic design did not begin in California, for various transplants from New York (like the film title designer Saul Bass) and Europe (like the poster artist Herbert Matter), as well as for the Angeleno and book jacket maestro Alvin Lustig, it was a hotbed of graphic experimentation. The magazine Arts & Architecture was the wellspring of graphic progressivism. "Covers by Ray Eames, Alvin Lustig and John Follis all utilize the technique of building an idea through a freewheeling juxtaposition of photographic and handmade elements," the book designer Lorraine Wild writes in her essay "Formal, Cool, Dense: Graphic Design in Los Angeles at Midcentury," "though each did this in her or his own very specific way." Not every aspect of California cool is uniquely Californian. But as Bruce Jenkins writes in "Making the Scene: West Coast Modernism and the Movies," the simplified graphics that characterized United Productions of America, the studio behind the Oscar winning animated short "Gerald McBoing Boing" (in addition to Mr. Magoo), defined the post Disney West Coast aesthetic. UPA cartoons "referenced not only a visual style emerging within the larger arena of the fine arts but also a design aesthetic that was fast becoming a distinctive style within California residential and commercial architecture the cool."
In the current international culture, where regional and national styles are fast falling victim to global branding, this integrated and consistent history shows that design is a function of not just commerce, technology and politics, but also location, location, location.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company --The New York Times, 5/31/2008
In the current international culture, where regional and national styles are fast falling victim to global branding, this integrated and consistent history shows that design is a function of not just commerce, technology and politics, but also location,location, location. --The New York Times: Sunday Book Review, 6/01/2008
The title of this book the catalog for a traveling show that is now at the Oakland Museum of California is borrowed from the 1957 album by Miles Davis, who in this telling is the standard bearer of West Coast cool, in stark contrast to the East Coast hipster style. "His lyrical playing and pure, vibrato free tone seemed to define a postwar concept of cool," Thomas Hine writes in "Cold War Cool," one of the book's nine essays.
Complementing Miles's sounds, the startling minimalist furniture design of Charles and Ray Eames and the space age architecture of Richard Neutra and Rudolph M. Schindler added to the unmistakable West Coast aesthetic. While modern graphic design did not begin in California, for various transplants from New York (like the film title designer Saul Bass) and Europe (like the poster artist Herbert Matter), as well as for the Angeleno and book jacket maestro Alvin Lustig, it was a hotbed of graphic experimentation. The magazine Arts & Architecture was the wellspring of graphic progressivism. "Covers by Ray Eames, Alvin Lustig and John Follis all utilize the technique of building an idea through a freewheeling juxtaposition of photographic and handmade elements," the book designer Lorraine Wild writes in her essay "Formal, Cool, Dense: Graphic Design in Los Angeles at Midcentury," "though each did this in her or his own very specific way." Not every aspect of California cool is uniquely Californian. But as Bruce Jenkins writes in "Making the Scene: West Coast Modernism and the Movies," the simplified graphics that characterized United Productions of America, the studio behind the Oscar winning animated short "Gerald McBoing Boing" (in addition to Mr. Magoo), defined the post Disney West Coast aesthetic. UPA cartoons "referenced not only a visual style emerging within the larger arena of the fine arts but also a design aesthetic that was fast becoming a distinctive style within California residential and commercial architecture the cool."
In the current international culture, where regional and national styles are fast falling victim to global branding, this integrated and consistent history shows that design is a function of not just commerce, technology and politics, but also location, location, location.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company --The New York Times, 5/31/2008
In the current international culture, where regional and national styles are fast falling victim to global branding, this integrated and consistent history shows that design is a function of not just commerce, technology and politics, but also location,location, location. --The New York Times: Sunday Book Review, 6/01/2008
About the Author
Elizabeth Armstrong is Deputy Director for Programs and Chief Curator of the Orange County Museum of Art.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Tailfin times,
This review is from: Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury (Hardcover)
A brave and fascinating attempt to pull together the various strands of, mostly, commercial creativity in southern California in the middle of the last century. Case Study Houses and other modern architecture, the output of Pacific Jazz and Contemporary records, abstract art by John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley, furniture design by Charles and Ray Eames are some of the exciting design ideas that blossomed during the affluent tailfin fifties in the sunshine of the Golden State.
The book concentrates on architecture, abstract art, movies, furniture and graphic design. Missing (and I would have thought a good contributor to 'cool') is beat writing but as the book is a catalog to a visual exhibition it's hardly surprising that it only gets a passing mention. Of the nine essay contributors I though those by Elizabeth Smith and Thomas Hine the most interesting. Smith is the author of the most thorough book on Southern California architecture (Blueprints For Modern Living) and her essay `Domestic Cool' puts architecture exactly in context. Hine's contribution: Cold War Cool really belongs in the front of the book as a succinct overview of the subject. The visual importance of 'cool' in the book is revealed by a chapter that looks at the photographic work of William Claxton. He probably took a photo of every West Coast cool jazzman which were used extensively on the LP covers of Pacific Jazz and Contemporary Records, he designed many of them, too. As the book is a permanent reminder of the exhibition it covers I thought it was a pity that the editorial has several flaws. There is a thirty page chapter devoted to the year 1959. The editors considered this a pivotal time and wanted to put the book's essays in context. These pages just contain large news photos and related graphics and as such assume much more importance than they are worth. The idea is a good one but a spread devoted to a text timeline would have worked as well freeing up pages for more images in the rest of the book. The page design seems very arbitrary to me. Many pages have a deep eau de nil band running horizontally across the middle but on some spreads it is missing. The inclusion of this band seems pure designer whimsy and if it wasn't included readers would not be aware of something missing. They unfortunately would be aware of the many missing page numbers though. Frequently captions refer to images on a particular page by their number, also the forty-three pages of historical printed material have no numbers at all but items in this section are often referred to in the index. All of this is really inexcusable for a quality publication though I understand it is not untypical of exhibition catalogs. The book celebrates the up-market aspects of cool in a particular place and time. To read about down-market cool have a look at 'The Catalog of Cool' by Gene Sculatti. He surveys popular culture at the other extreme in mid-century California and America. ***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cool!,
By James Chan (Philadelphia, PA, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury (Hardcover)
This is a wonderful book, beautiful looking and a delight to read. The credits above omit several of the contributors who make it so good. These include Thomas Hine, Bruce Jenkins, and Elizabeth A.T. Smith, who wrote essays, and Lorraine Wild, who wrote an essay and was one of the book's designers.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great modern images with suburban prose.,
By
This review is from: Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury (Hardcover)
This book is beautiful, and would look great on any book shelf or coffee table. It really gives a good feel for the time. But it seems like all of the contributors have read the same sources, and have nothing to add of their own. This makes the reading (rather than the perusing of the great photos) tedious as the writing is very repetitive. A book about the modern movement in art, design, and culture should include more ideas and discussion.
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