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• 1 2018-07-19T22:06:42-07:00 Enter Julius Shulman and John Entenza: Arts & Architecture in the 1930s-1940s 1 plain 2018-07-19T22:06:42-07:00 In 1936 Neutra met a brilliant young amateur photographer and college drop-put named Julius Shulman and the two of them began a partnership of a very different sort—a fateful collaboration between a master of making spaces and a master of making images of spaces. Possibly the greatest, and certainly the most influential architectural photographer of the 20th century, Julius Shulman (1910-2009) developed a very close association with each of the modernist architects active in Southern California: Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Charles and Ray Eames, Gregory Ain and John Lautner, and many others, mostly associated with John Entenza’s cutting-edge Arts & Architecture magazine. Shulman’s images, massively published in the burgeoning consumer magazine market of the post-World War II era, played a major role in shaping the image of the Los Angeles and Southern California “lifestyle” to the rest of the nation and world during the 1950s and 1960s. Shulman’s distinctive images are also responsible in large part for the reception and even the reputation of major modernist architects and architectural movements, such as the Case Study House program. Shulman developed an aesthetic vision that paralleled the rise of glamour photography in classic Hollywood, emphasizing strong contrast, rectilinear composition, and masterful control of highlight and shadow detail. These qualities were ideal for magazine reproduction and constituted a “look” that became the predominant visual theme for postwar Los Angeles. The Shulman archive is thus a “source” of Los Angeles history in two senses: as evidence of the city’s massive 20th-century growth, and as a source of its visual representation as a place.
  
  Another key element in the rise of Southern California Modernism was the arrival of John Entenza as editor of Arts & Architecture. Entenza was the son of a Michigan labor lawyer who had been an advocate for migrant workers. Schooled for the foreign service at the University of Virginia, the twisted paths of the Great Depression led him in 1932 instead to a job in the experimental film production unit of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The critic and future champion of modernist architecture, Esther McCoy, remembered meeting Entenza in that year, “at a time when Los Angeles was the wrong place to be. San Francisco was all right, but in 1932 L.A., even Santa Monica, was déclassé....We were trying to escape from Los Angeles.”[note] But Entenza was determined to change the place from a satellite to a center. He had a strong interest in architecture, and after he left M-G-M in 1936 he became an assistant editor of the staid, 32-year old magazine California Arts and Architecture. Imbibing the Popular Front liberalism of 1930s California, Entenza developed the conviction that modernist residential architecture, which shunned decoration and advocated cheap, durable industrial materials and simple designs, could play a major role in social reform and the opportunity for home ownership by the working classes.
  
  In 1943 Entenza bought out his employers and changed the name of the magazine to Arts & Architecture. In the same year he formulated the Case Study House (CSH) program, in a competition titled “Design for Postwar Living.” The competition was for “the design of a small, modern, worker’s family house, sponsored by twenty-two materials manufacturers...” The three published winners were the firms of Sarinen and Lundquist, Pei and Duhart, and Raphael Soriano. Within a few years Entenza and his magazine had helped to solve the problem he and Esther McCoy had lamented back in 1932. Los Angeles would no longer be a backwater. On the contrary, Arts & Architecture would be a coveted forum for new talent in many fields, from architecture to graphic arts, sculpture and poetry.[note]
  
  Entenza challenged architects to take advantage of the inexpensive, mass-produced, high-­strength materials of steel, plywood, glass, cinder block and fiberglass to make affordable modernist designs available to the masses. Entenza and the contributors to Arts & Architecture modified an aesthetic movement that had begun decades earlier, in fin-de-­siecle Vienna, Berlin, New York, and Chicago by fusing it with the Mediterranean landscape and climate of Southern California. They espoused the geometric minimalism of earlier modernism, and added the concept of a seamless transition between interior and exterior, modeling the patios and gardens and functional “rooms” integrated with the dwelling itself. The Case Study House program has become legendary in the history of architectural modernism. It produced a coherent body of exemplary structures that undoubtedly influenced both advanced and vernacular designs. The “look” of the Case Study houses is inseparable from Shulman’s photographic images of them. It is difficult to say how the Case Study houses appear apart from the Shulman archive.
  
  Fundamental to the CSH program was a symbiosis between the building materials industry, the magazine, and the architects. The premise of the program had been to demonstrate that modernist designs were not only superior functionally and aesthetically, but also more affordable for the ordinary postwar family, because they would be built from cheap and yet strong industrial products. Entenza made this clear from the outset. The steel, glass, cement block, plywood, and many other industries were enthusiastic to show the world the utility of their products, especially because so many of these manufacturers had been forced to reconvert to civilian manufacture at the end of the war. Arts & Architecture served as the broker, then, in the industry-architect-client triangle. For the promise of publicity, the manufacturers were happy to donate their materials. This made the houses very affordable indeed, but artificially so. The architects gained direct access to the most advanced materials, as well as excellent technical support during the design and construction phases. At the end of the day, however, the Case Study homes, loaded with the latest materials and furnishings, were mainly showcases for the wares of the postwar American corporations—distinctly unaffordable housing for longer-term practical planning.
  
  The pages of Arts & Architecture  are stuffed with advertisements for every kind of product. Packard-Bell placed a full-page ad n the February 1947 issue, titled “Planning for Pleasure,” showing the new occupants partying with the latest hi fidelity radio-phonographs. “How fitting that Packard-Bell PhonOcord and radios should be chosen to help glorify the interiors,” the ad copy modestly observes. “And both Case Study House No. 16 and Packard­Bell symbolize luxury, comfort, and happier living.”[note] Each issue of Arts & Architecture featuring a new Case Study House also ran an immense list called “Merit Specified,” of all the suppliers. Rodney A. Walker’s CSH #16 lists hundreds of firms, from local to international, that supplied everything from the Aluminum Umbrella (Kool-Vent Aluminum Umbrella Corporation); to Flourescent Tubes (Westinghouse Corporation); Plexiglass Screen (Rohm & Haas); down to the ­Weather-­tight Door Saddle (Columbia Mills Supply Company). The lists also include the hundreds of material culture props for the magazine photographs, from Beer (Papst) to Toiletries and Cosmetics (Sara Cooley Cosmetics).[note]
  
  Arts & Architecture was the public stage for the "Mating Dance: where cutting-edge artists served as the lab frontier for new styles and products: Despite its avant-garde pretension, it had become the consummate pro-industry consumer cornucopia. While its community saw itself as cutting-edge, it was only the cutting-edge of a nuclear-powered Cold War weapons economy. It may not be insignificant that the visual culture of Southern California modernists fused so seamlessly with Abstract Expressionism, the ultimate flight from ideology and social commitment of any kind.
  
  By the early 1950s Entenza’s Arts & Architecture was widely recognized as a leading forum for the modernist movement across the arts. The Case Study House program, and modernist architecture in general, anchored the steady stream of features about Abstract Expressionism, “modern jewelry,” poetry, music, and politics.[note] The January 1951 numbers lead with a review by Margo Sorzano of the “17 Modern American Painters” show at the Frank Perls Gallery in Beverly Hills, featuring William Bazoites, Willem de Kooning, Lee Gatch, Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, Pousette­ Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Theodoros Stamos, Hedda Sterne, Clyfford Still, Mark Tobey, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. A loyalist, Sorzano praises the work in its own expressivist terms against critics who find it remote from the “real world,” but she is also quick to refute the charge by associating the artists with architecture, and hence the real world. “A natural link exists between painting and architecture,” Sorzano explains, and names “Motherwell and other artists working with architects to incorporate painting and sculpture in the design of specific dwellings.”[note] This association was no accident. The artists, architects, sculptors, and jewelry designers were joined in a common movement, made real by their joint appearances in Arts & Architecture and other venues. For unknowns, a feature in Arts & Architecture could launch a career. For the established, it reinforced the movement.
  
  John Entenza seems to have been completely oblivious to the contradictions between his circle’s avant garde aesthetics, his own left-liberal politics of social reform (expressed in nearly every issue through his “Notes in Passing” column), and the corporate consumer capitalism for which the magazine was a major vehicle. In the January 1951 issue Entenza filled his “Notes in Passing” column with a speech on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by M. Jaime Torres Bodet, Director-General of UNESCO. “The domain of Human Rights is indivisible. It is the whole problem of the improvement of the lot of human beings that calls us to action,” Torres Bodet proclaims, between advertisements for doorbells and fiberglass chairs: “No one can live outside history; and the history of our time is the crisis of mankind in the throes of achieving its material and moral unity...”[note]
  
  The same issue of Arts & Architecture is dominated by a massive, 26-page advertisement by Kwikset Locks Incorporated, of Anaheim.[note] Adolph Schoepe and Karl Reinhard, who founded this giant door hardware manufacturer in 1945, were also leading Right-wing Orange County political activists. With Knott’s Berry Farm founder Walter Knott (1889–1981), they funded the California Free Enterprise Association, which “circulated 20,000 pamphlets per month through employee’s pay envelopes, reading racks, educators, and ministers,” promoting the anti-Communist, Christian fundamentalist movement that sprang up in the fertile suburban soil of the region south of Long Beach.[note] Kwikset door hardware became the industry leader in cheap locksets, a necessary component for the mass home building of the 1950s. Even the smallest tract homes needed scores of doorknobs. Just how many is suggested by another advertisement. Rezo Hollow Core Doors boasts of “more than 6,000,000” sales, which, stacked in a single pile, “would reach up into the sky for 165 miles!”[note] Nothing could be more symbolic of elemental capitalist private property that is inscribed into uncountable micro-spaces of the metropolis, than Kwikset locks on six million doors.
  
  Arts & Architecture, in short, occupied a precarious position between the avant garde and the mass homebuilding industry. It illustrates beautifully the dynamic between “modern art and the common culture” as described by Thomas Crow: “a necessary brokerage between high and low, in which the avant-garde serves as a kind of research and development arm of the culture industry.”[note] Although Arts & Architecture embodies the political-economic contradictions of modernism, it occupied the high and narrow end of the aesthetic magazine market, a market that virtually exploded during the 1950s to feed an insatiable demand for lifestyle and consumer culture journalism.
  
  As image-maker for Southern California Modernism, photographer Julius Shulman occupied a key aesthetic position.  His stark, rectilinear, and functionalist style epitomized a Cold War, corporate culture in the immediate postwar 1950s.  While his images soon achieved iconic status as fine art, he always sow himself as  commercial photographer first and foremost.  Shulman published throughout the complete spectrum of magazines devoted to architecture, so his influence spread very far from Los Angeles, radiating Southern California Modernism at every level:  Architectural Forum, once the sole leader in architectural publishing, was joined in the early postwar period by House and Home, a builder-oriented magazine which emphasized the residential sector, while Architectural Forum came to specialize in commercial architecture. Architectural Record, the official magazine of the American Institute of Architects, along with Progressive Architecture, targeted the architects themselves. Beyond this narrow circle of the magazines catering to builders and designers was the mass market of “shelter magazines,” which stressed living ideas rather than the architecture itself. The shelter magazine heavyweights were Better Homes and Gardens, its chief competitor, American Home, and Good Housekeeping. These three addressed the vast middle-­class market without pretension. House and Garden and House Beautiful emphasized a more upscale market, while Town and Country and Architectural Digest exclusively covered the homes of the affluent, rich, and famous.[note] Julius Shulman published in all of them. As a photographer his views or influence cannot be reduced to any one of them; his style became indispensable to the popular aesthetics of Fifties America.