Birth of the Cool at Oakland Museum of California

It was a cool crowd in tuxedoes, little black dresses and pearls, strolling through the Oakland Museum of California gardens and terraces during a cocktail reception on Saturday. The Board of Trustees’ Golden Gala 2008 celebrated “Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury” exhibit, which features painting, architecture, furniture design, decorative and graphic arts, film, and music that launched 1950s modernism in the United States, and established Los Angeles as a major American cultural center. With more than 150 objects on view, Birth of the Cool examines the dynamic community of artists who played a germinal role in the development of the iconic style of high modernism. Inspired by Miles Davis’s album Birth of the Cool, the exhibition “captures an era in post-war Southern California when exploration in architecture, art, music and design coalesced to form a modern sensibility based on living well,” said Philip Linhares, chief curator of art at the Oakland Museum of California. “With roots in Bauhaus Germany, and inspired by European immigrant artists and architects and young American designers and avant-garde jazz musicians, the ‘cool’ aesthetic flourished in the LA landscape and climate. Wartime industrial innovations were adapted to peacetime use—steel, glass and concrete houses, and molded plastic and bent plywood furnishings.” In the late 1930s and 1940s Hollywood provided employment and a safe haven for artists and intellectuals fleeing the war in Europe, who carried with them the tenets of international modernism. Attracted to the favorable climate, optimistic spirit, and relative prosperity of post-war Southern California, a disparate group of painters, filmmakers, designers, and musicians came from all over America to develop new strains of American modernism. The work of important modernist architects Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, and Craig Ellwood, among others, is examined in the context of their projects for Arts & Architecture’s Case Study House program. Their designs for residential dwellings are among the iconic mid-century architectural gems captured in Julius Shulman’s photographs (featured). Considered among the most influential American designers of the 20th century, Charles and Ray Eames exemplify the joining of American ideals of creativity, optimism, and hard work with the rigors of international modernism. The exhibit showcases early and rare examples of Eames furniture, films, and archival materials. It is accompanied by a 300-page illustrated book (published with Prestel Publishers, 2007), which provides a thorough reassessment of the era. Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury was organized by the Orange County Museum of Art’s chief curator Elizabeth Armstrong. The exhibition continues through August 17 at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th Street, in Oakland. For more information, call 510-238-2200 or visit www.museumca.org.