The Mating Dance of LA Arts and Architecture: 1900s-1950s
The western conception of “fine arts,” in which a handful of uniquely talented or gifted artists stand apart from ordinary society, creating works of transcendent beauty, only arose in the last few centuries. Painting, sculpture, and architecture all grew from artisanal crafts, and still to this day, most "fine artists" are also artisans, skilled at working with their hands on materials. So, the commercialization and industrialization of artisanship is only a return to roots.
With the rise of mass culture in the early 20th century, especially in the motion pictures, thousands of creative artists contributed to the production of a vast visual aural landscape. Animators, graphic designers, most photographers, studio musicians, and performers, are the proletarians of the culture industry.
Producing and maintaining this boundary, between mere artisans and "fine" artists, has been a ever-ending struggle since the rise of modernism and mass culture at the last fin-de-siecle, circa 1900. A comic irony illustrates the roles. Tom Wolfe satirically sketched the comic "mating dance" of the fine art avant garde, who flaunt convention and annoy the bourgeoisie, whom they also then seduce, seeking their patronage.[note] Capitalists are in some sense committing class treason by supporting revolutionary artists. But they also absorb the revolution by converting works of art from use value into exchange value as commodities; by co-opting its avantistas at regular intervals; and by creating a surplus labor pool, employing 99% of working artists, while leaving many more unemployed to keep wages down and keeping the employed artists feeling lucky to have work in design and marketing.
Los Angeles aesthetic production and exhibition was dominated and policed, as Sarah Schrank has shown, by the "booster" propaganda machine led by the romantic Charles Fletcher Lummis, and powered by the radical free-enterpriser, LA Times publisher and landed lumber and cotton magnate, Harrison Grey Otis. Selling Los Angeles was one of the critical economic sectors of the Land of Sunshine. The city's dominant art institutions and exhibition spaces were monopolized by the same interests who whitewashed the region with romantic lies about benevolent rancheros of Spanish origin. For the first half of the 20th century, the European- and New York-inspired modernist avant-garde artists who kicked sand in the eyes of the sunbathing Los Angeles bourgeoisie, "shadowed," as Schrank puts it, this official Southern California art regime.[note]
The avant garde in a capitalist patriarchal and racist age, has been, more often than not, emancipatory, advancing freedom, tolerance, equality, and liberty. The "avant garde" is a military combat metaphor: the advance guard -- those who stay ahead of the infantry to probe the enemy, bravely taking the greatest risks and leading the army. But the avant-garde artist is, after all, leading an army. They are not guerilla artists working to overthrow the status quo. Instead, they enjoy the notoriety and financial success awaiting those who successfully gain recognition as visionary leaders of the culture industry that they usually disdain. Their greatest innovations are inevitably decomposed into commodities that become templates for mass produced aesthetics.
There is no intrinsic difference between an artisan and a fine artist. Their work is identically skillful, so the ascribed difference lay in the institutional position and their visual claims made by artists. The radical dichotomy imposed on these terms was the work of Baumgarten and Kant in the 18th century, and it only lasted until the triumph of "found," pop, and conceptual art in the 1960s. The global art market still maintains the myth, to ensure scarcity of their commodities.
Also, avant-garde is another grounded metaphor. These avantistas literally traveled to new places, made new places. They understood intuitively that they needed to take their radicalism, socialism, feminism, and modernism from Chicago, New York, Vienna, London, and many other places where they had imbibed it, and inscribe a new landscape with it, to achieve genuine democratic spaces. Bravely, brashly, sometimes naively, and not a little Quixotically, they chose Los Angeles, a land of experimentation that was already dominated by the reactionary, counter-revolutionary Otis-Chandler regime.
To identify with an avant-garde in the first decades of the 20th century also meant an embrace of modernism, which sought not only new forms of visual art but also to revolutionize culture and society. A bewildering variety of such avant-gardes branched apart, associated (or not) with scores of political ideologies, including anarchism, socialism, liberalism, communism, and fascism, and hundreds of varieties within those labels. In the United States, the mainstream left in culture and politics called themselves “progressives,” a term that usually overlapped with social democracy and feminism. In spite of the first Red Scare repression of 1917-21, and the disillusionment caused by the Great War itself, “progressive” arts and politics survived and even thrived in 1920s Los Angeles, aided by the emigration of many talented Europeans, and by the attractions of the rapidly expanding motion picture business, which was always hungry for creative artists of all kinds: writers, composers, performers, and of course visual artists.
An arts colony already flourished in Los Angeles in Pasadena in the 1890s. The dominant aesthetic of Pasadena was Craftsman, with all the anti-industrial, medieval nostalgia that William Morris and his followers could muster. The other cultural salient inscribing itself into the landscape between Downtown and Pasadena, along the Arroyo Seco, “Dry Canyon,” was the Mission Revival school revolving around Charles Fletcher Lummis. “Arts” in this context were usually deployed as part of the Anglo conquest, re-interpreting the Spanish and Mexican pasts into quaint melodramatic stories, like Ramona and the Mission Play, framing these non-Anglos as part of bygone days, declaring an end to the Latino past long before it was never conquered.
Nevertheless, a left did thrive in Pasadena. The most important exception to the Craftsman craze was the work of the architect Irving Gil (1870-1936), who practically invented rectilinear modernism by himself from the model of the Spanish-Mexican adobe, prior to its independent arrival via Vienna and Frank Lloyd Wright’s students. Among the reformers in Pasadena were socialists and feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who was associated with Edward Bellamy’s “nationalist” clubs. They exchanged ideas about the coming reform of western society and one of the most important architectural landmarks in Los Angeles grew from this milieu: the Bradbury Building (George Wyman, 1893). Wyman’s daring design was inspired by the socialist utopia envisioned in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1889). Bellamy’s futuristic novel envisioned large apartment complexes with cooperative child care and cooking facilities that would allow women to pursue careers, Gilman’s leading argument as a founder of modern feminism: the structure of gendered work relations needed to change in order for women to win true equality. [1]
The first fine-arts avant-garde emerged in a decidedly Downtown context: the Art Student’s League, founded by a circle of regional Impressionists who also founded the California Art Club in the same year, 1906—the year of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. The organizers were Hanson Puthoff, trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the LA Times’s new art critic, Anthony Anderson. While content with an orthodoxy of Puthoff’s adaptation of Impressionism to the Southern California landscape, they welcomed more experimentation in the Art Student’s League, modeled after the original, in New York City, which had produced several strong innovations. These founding influences, Chicago, San Francisco and New York City, are typical of the implantation of new institutions in a new metropolis. Those institutions took place on the top two floors of the Blanchard Music and Art Building, (1899) at 233 South Broadway. The League moved again to 115 N. Main St and then to space on Spring Street, between Second and Third Sts, above the Lyceum Theater.[2]
The most important influence to emerge from the League was Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who had been one of the first to graduate from the Art Student’s League. Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell had founded “Synchromism—an abstract painting movement based on the analogy between color and music—in Paris in 1913. The movement gained attention there and later in New York, where Macdonald-Wright became affiliated with Alfred Stieglitz and his legendary 291 Gallery.” Macdonald-Wright returned to Los Angeles in 1920, teaching at the Art Students League, and in 1923 becoming its director. Known for his “fiery rhetoric, aggressive intellectual probing, and sheer artistic talent,” MacDonald was also an institutional force, later a major regional presence as director the New Deal Arts program in the 1930s. Cross-pollination with the motion picture industry began immediately. The future director John Huston (1906-1987) studied at the League under Macdonald-Wright in 1923 and credited him with his “experimentalist” influence. [3]
In Los Angeles, modernists, “progressives” in the arts and politics at the beginning of the 20th century emerged from a Downtown milieu that was a wide-open profusion of race-ethnic diversity, class confrontations, heady Socialist “street speaking,” and appalling police repression. The Los Angeles City Council, frightened by the strength of the Left in the Downtown “red wards” and on the central public spaces of La Placita and Central Park, passed a series of ordinances blocking-off scores of blocks as “no speech zones,” spaces where naked class power literally suspended the First Amendment.[4]
Socialists, feminists, and other reformers on the left enjoyed their headiest moment in 1911 when Socialist Job Harriman looked like the probable winner in that year’s mayoral election. Until, that is, the McNamara Brothers confessed to the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times and destroyed the credibility of Harriman’s campaign, leading to a crushing defeat for the Left in Los Angeles. Despite, or perhaps because of the extreme anti-left atmosphere that overtook Los Angeles during and after the Great War, progressives of many stripes settled again in Los Angeles during the 1920s, still hopeful of creating democratic movements to overcome the many injustices in this booming metropolis and beyond.
By the 1920s the Otis-Chandler oligarchs had won the battle for the public spaces of Downtown, but the avant-garde kept a visible presence in Jake Zeitlin’s bookstores in the Central Business District. For residence, much of the community clustered in “Edendale,” now called Silver Lake, just northwest of Downtown, north of Wilshire following Alvarado north into the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. This had been one of the earliest “movie colonies,” clustered around the Silver Lake Reservoir, including Walt Disney’s first studio on Hyperion Ave (1926-1939). Progressives and creative artists settled in this “Bohemia” on the shores of Silver Lake because, as Daniel Hurewitz has compellingly recounted, they found mutual support, the synergies of creative stimulation, and a physical setting that gave the sense of a pastoral retreat from the bustle and conflict of the city.
The most prominent leftist in Los Angeles during the 1920s was the prolific Upton Sinclair, whose circle included the lawyer-journalist Carey McWilliams and novelists Louis Adamic and John Fante. Zeitlin’s bookshop on Hope St near Sixth “became a mecca for a generation of unproven young artists, writers, and bibliophiles who found inspiration in Zeitlin’s enthusiasm…” Zeitlin’s bookshop always had an exhibition space, where he showed the photography of Edward Weston, and such Southern California painters who were then pushing boundaries, such as Millard Sheets and Milfred Zornes [5] McWilliams and Zeitlin, like many in their circle, lived in Edendale/Silver Lake.
The artist/bohemian colony in Edendale actually grew in symbiosis with the founding of several art schools in Westlake Park, just south of Siler Lake on Alvarado, at Wilshire Boulevard. The first, the Otis Art institute (1918), was partially underwritten by LA Times founder and publisher, Harrison Grey Otis himself. The second was founded by the Nelbert Murphy Chouinard (1879-1969). Chouinard developed a close working relationship with Walt Disney, as supplier of trained artists. Chouinard, personally directed by Nelbert Chuinard herself until its merger into CalArts in the 1960s, counted a long line of influential artists as alumni such as Edward Ruscha or sometime students, such as Jackson Pollock.[6] In 1945 longtime Chouinard instructor Herbert Jepson spun off his influential Jepson Art Institute at 2861 West 7th Street, which flourished in the early 1950s.
Silver Lake was not just inhabited, but shaped as a space by the architects among them, modernists in an emergent regional school, Southern California Modernism, led by Austrian émigrés Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra. During the 1890s, while the Chamber of Commerce oligarchs were still envisioning the future growth of Los Angeles, Chicago was recognized worldwide as the cutting-edge city of industrial modernity. There industrialism and immigration had produced a mighty metropolis from a swampy village in little more than fifty years. The White City exposition of 1893 drew millions of visitors, launched the University of Chicago, and drew attention to the revolutionary architectural ideas of Louis Sullivan. Sullivan and his partner Dagmar Adler were not only using steel skeletons to lift office buildings to new heights: they sought to remake aesthetics to match the modern era. Sullivan’s slogan, “form follows function,” spelled the doom of Victorian aesthetics and launched the great worldwide modernist movement in architecture and design.[7]
Excited by Sullivan’s vision were Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, professors of the Austrian Royal Academy in Vienna. Beginning in the 1860s, Hapsburg Emperor Franz Joseph I ordered the rebuilding of Vienna around the Ringstrasse as a showcase for his empire. The resulting jumble of historical styles provoked Wagner and Loos to lead the “Vienna Secession.” In 1895 Wagner published Modern Architecture, arguing that every age has its own style, and that the age of machines should have a style to match is functional logic. Loos went further in a provocative essay, equating ornament with crime.[8] Crusading to eliminate unnecessary decoration, Loos traveled to Chicago in the 1890s to see the work of Louis Sullivan for himself.[9] Meanwhile, another disciple in Sullivan’s Chicago office was the young Frank Lloyd Wright, who brought a concern for the natural landscape into the modernist architectural movement. Wright reinvented the home by balancing machine age functionality with the harmony of nature, creating dynamic spaces that opened outward into an integrated natural landscape, with an aesthetic that seemed also to grow from nature.
Touring Europe in 1910, Wright brought his drawings to Germany, where Ernst Wasmuth published them in 1911. This Wasmuth Portfolio won instant acclaim across Europe. Amazed by Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolio were two brilliant Viennese students of Wagner and Loos: Rudolph Schindler (1887-1953) and Richard Neutra (1892-1970). As mentor to Schindler and Neutra, Loos taught them his “Raumplan” methods shaping a floor plan into dynamic, interlocking spaces. Above all, Loos implored both young men to go seek out Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago. Schindler did so in 1914, just before the outbreak of the Great War. By 1918, Schindler became Wright’s senior apprentice and office manager while Wright began his monumental Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Neutra remained in Vienna, was drafted and fought for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and eventually was decommissioned in 1918. Its militarists defeated, Germany underwent a period of massive restoration during the Weimar periods and Neutra went to Berlin to work for Germany’s most innovative modernist: the expressionist Erich Mendelsohn. With the founding of the Bauhaus school of design in 1919, Germany gained leadership in the modernist movement. Under the direction of its founding director, Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus promoted a social vision for architecture: Simple designs with strong modern materials made affordable and healthy housing for the working classes. Swiss prodigy Le Corbusier moved to Germany and published “Toward a New Architecture” in 1923. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe later came to direct the Bauhaus, steering it back in the rightward direction of aesthetic commercialism. This was the new generation of modernists: Gropius, Mies, Le Corbusier, Neutra and Schindler.[10]
Meanwhile, in 1919, Aline Barnsdall, Chicago patron of avant-garde theatre, transferred to Los Angeles and commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design her Hollyhock House (1919-21). Wright, still consumed with the Imperial Hotel, summoned Schindler to Los Angeles to supervise Hollyhock. In Los Angeles, Wright experimented with new materials and forms using textured concrete blocks.[11] Schindler, working with Wright’s eldest son Lloyd Wright, supervised Wright’s four landmark “textile-block” houses: Millard, Storer, Freeman, and Ennis houses (all 1923).[12] In the process of supervising Wright’s Los Angeles projects, Schindler came to see Southern California as the ideal environment for modern architecture. The new city welcomed new forms, but also offered a regional vernacular. Schindler made his first major statement with his own Kings Road House, completed in 1922. With his American wife Pauline, a progressive political activist, their home became the center of the Avant-garde modernists in Southern California.[13] Also in 1922, Neutra left Berlin to spend two years with Frank Lloyd Wright at the master’s legendary Taliesen studio in Wisconsin. But Schindler soon insisted that his former classmate Neutra join him in Los Angeles, and in 1925 Richard and his wife Dione Neutra moved into the Kings Road House. Together, Schindler and Neutra founded Southern California Modernism.[14]
Pauline’s first goal upon arriving in Los Angeles in 1921 was “hunting up Upton Sinclair,” the prolific novelist and socialist activist. Eventually, the Schindlers were invited to the Sinclairs for dinner, and Upton introduced them to Gaylord Wilshire, the “millionaire socialist” namesake of Wilshire Boulevard. Recounting their frenzied activities in June 1921, Pauline wrote:
“We are so far and so deeply ‘in’ the radical movement these days that we never have an evening at home any more ... Committee meetings for the Worker’s Defence [sic] League, for the Walt Whitman School, -- conferences large and small, -- supping in odd places with folk who tell us news impossible to get except ‘from hand to mouth’, --lectures; meetings at which we stop only long enough to make an announcement before going on to the next...”[15]
The Schindlers, in short, were part of the small but very active bohemian world of pro-labor, feminist, gay, socialist and social democratic Angelenos, a circle that included Carey McWilliams, the Aristotle of Los Angeles’ public intellectuals, who would eventually face-down the second Red Scare as the courageous editor of The Nation. Their arrival in Los Angeles in the 1920s coincided with the widespread repression of leftists throughout the United States. California had enacted the 1919 Criminal Syndicalism Act, which targeted the International Workers of the World (IWW). In 1927 Pauline was still consumed with labor activism, especially through the Worker’s Defense League. “This movement completely consumes my energies...my mind is...too much concerned with the absurd details of mass-meetings, and the raising of funds to defend workingmen prosecuted for working class activities.”[16]
While the metropolis around them mushroomed in a frenzy of capitalist production and exploitation, this small band of intellectuals and artists won occasional commissions from eccentric investors to put their ideals into practice. Schindler and Neutra’s collaborative projects included a stunning 1926 entry in the international competition to design the League of Nations building in Geneva. Also in 1926, Schindler executed a brilliant beach house design for Philip Lovell, a wealthy physician who advocated natural cures.[17]
That year—1927—in an attempt to win larger commissions, Schindler and Neutra formed the short-lived Architectural Group for Industry and Commerce (AGIC). As AGIC, Neutra and Schindler designed the Jardinette Apartments at the southeast corner of Marathon and Manhattan in Hollywood, for J.H. Miller, “an enigmatic developer” who “envisioned a veritable empire of luxurious Hollywood apartment houses ranging from five to fifteen stories.” Neutra, his wife Dione, along with Schindler and his wife Pauline, were all animated by the social reform possibilities of design embodied in the Jardinette Apartments. “Never before has the architect experienced such a flexibility of choice for expressing the modern conception of the home,” Pauline Schindler wrote in an anonymous review for the Christian Science Monitor. She asked the reader to imagine “seeing an entire city block built up with these garden apartments...These buildings would enclose a large community park area in the center of the block for the use of children and other apartment dwellers. Hours of time and labor would be saved by maintaining community laundries, day nurseries, complete garages and equipment, janitor services, and gardeners.” Miller, unfortunately, went bankrupt before the Jardinette was finished, skipped town to escape his creditors, and left AGIC with an unpaid commission.[18]
Miffed at rumors that Schindler had been sleeping with his wife, Lovell gave his next commission to Neutra, who designed his 1929 masterpiece, the Lovell Health House. Consequently, friction developed between Schindler and Neutra, ending their friendship and partnership. In 1932 Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock curated a major show at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, called “The International Style: Architecture since 1922” showcasing the work of Wright, Mies, Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Neutra.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Schinder, Neutra, Gregory Ain, Harwell H. Harris, and a gathering circle of modernist architects won a steady stream of commissions to design homes in the Edendale/Silverlake basin and more widely. When he and Dion moved out of the Schindler House, Neutra designed for themselves the “Research House” (1933) at 2300 E. Silver Lake Blvd, while Schindler designed the Oliver House (1933) high on the slope opposite the Silver Lake Reservoir. There followed, for Schindler, the Van Patten House (1934-5). Economic activity seems to have picked up in 1938, as Schindler completed three commissions: the Bubeshko Apartments (2036 Griffith Park Blvd) and the Wilson (290 Redcliff St) and Westby (1805 Maltman) Houses. Neutra left a concentrated stamp on Silverlake’s built fabric with a cluster of homes lining Silver Lake Blvd just south of his Research House, from 1948-1964: The Treweek and Sokal Houses (1948), the Reunion House (1949), the Yew House (1957), and the Ivandomi and Kambara Houses (1960).[19]
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.”[20] 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 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.[21]
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-desiecle 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, in fact, impossible to say what the CSH houses look like 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 the magazine 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.”[22] 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).[23]
In short, Arts & Architecture was a 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.[24] 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, PousetteDart, 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.”[25] 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...”[26]
The same issue of Arts & Architecture is dominated by a massive, 26-page advertisement by Kwikset Locks Incorporated, of Anaheim.[27] 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 Far 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.[28] 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!”[29] 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.”[30] 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.
Shulman published throughout the complete spectrum of magazines devoted to architecture. 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.[31] 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 indispensible to the popular aesthetics of Fifties America.
[1] Schrank (2009): 1-42.
Also, avant-garde is another grounded metaphor. These avantistas literally traveled to new places, made new places. They understood intuitively that they needed to take their radicalism, socialism, feminism, and modernism from Chicago, New York, Vienna, London, and many other places where they had imbibed it, and inscribe a new landscape with it, to achieve genuine democratic spaces. Bravely, brashly, sometimes naively, and not a little Quixotically, they chose Los Angeles, a land of experimentation that was already dominated by the reactionary, counter-revolutionary Otis-Chandler regime.
To identify with an avant-garde in the first decades of the 20th century also meant an embrace of modernism, which sought not only new forms of visual art but also to revolutionize culture and society. A bewildering variety of such avant-gardes branched apart, associated (or not) with scores of political ideologies, including anarchism, socialism, liberalism, communism, and fascism, and hundreds of varieties within those labels. In the United States, the mainstream left in culture and politics called themselves “progressives,” a term that usually overlapped with social democracy and feminism. In spite of the first Red Scare repression of 1917-21, and the disillusionment caused by the Great War itself, “progressive” arts and politics survived and even thrived in 1920s Los Angeles, aided by the emigration of many talented Europeans, and by the attractions of the rapidly expanding motion picture business, which was always hungry for creative artists of all kinds: writers, composers, performers, and of course visual artists.
An arts colony already flourished in Los Angeles in Pasadena in the 1890s. The dominant aesthetic of Pasadena was Craftsman, with all the anti-industrial, medieval nostalgia that William Morris and his followers could muster. The other cultural salient inscribing itself into the landscape between Downtown and Pasadena, along the Arroyo Seco, “Dry Canyon,” was the Mission Revival school revolving around Charles Fletcher Lummis. “Arts” in this context were usually deployed as part of the Anglo conquest, re-interpreting the Spanish and Mexican pasts into quaint melodramatic stories, like Ramona and the Mission Play, framing these non-Anglos as part of bygone days, declaring an end to the Latino past long before it was never conquered.
Nevertheless, a left did thrive in Pasadena. The most important exception to the Craftsman craze was the work of the architect Irving Gil (1870-1936), who practically invented rectilinear modernism by himself from the model of the Spanish-Mexican adobe, prior to its independent arrival via Vienna and Frank Lloyd Wright’s students. Among the reformers in Pasadena were socialists and feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who was associated with Edward Bellamy’s “nationalist” clubs. They exchanged ideas about the coming reform of western society and one of the most important architectural landmarks in Los Angeles grew from this milieu: the Bradbury Building (George Wyman, 1893). Wyman’s daring design was inspired by the socialist utopia envisioned in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1889). Bellamy’s futuristic novel envisioned large apartment complexes with cooperative child care and cooking facilities that would allow women to pursue careers, Gilman’s leading argument as a founder of modern feminism: the structure of gendered work relations needed to change in order for women to win true equality. [1]
The first fine-arts avant-garde emerged in a decidedly Downtown context: the Art Student’s League, founded by a circle of regional Impressionists who also founded the California Art Club in the same year, 1906—the year of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. The organizers were Hanson Puthoff, trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the LA Times’s new art critic, Anthony Anderson. While content with an orthodoxy of Puthoff’s adaptation of Impressionism to the Southern California landscape, they welcomed more experimentation in the Art Student’s League, modeled after the original, in New York City, which had produced several strong innovations. These founding influences, Chicago, San Francisco and New York City, are typical of the implantation of new institutions in a new metropolis. Those institutions took place on the top two floors of the Blanchard Music and Art Building, (1899) at 233 South Broadway. The League moved again to 115 N. Main St and then to space on Spring Street, between Second and Third Sts, above the Lyceum Theater.[2]
The most important influence to emerge from the League was Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who had been one of the first to graduate from the Art Student’s League. Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell had founded “Synchromism—an abstract painting movement based on the analogy between color and music—in Paris in 1913. The movement gained attention there and later in New York, where Macdonald-Wright became affiliated with Alfred Stieglitz and his legendary 291 Gallery.” Macdonald-Wright returned to Los Angeles in 1920, teaching at the Art Students League, and in 1923 becoming its director. Known for his “fiery rhetoric, aggressive intellectual probing, and sheer artistic talent,” MacDonald was also an institutional force, later a major regional presence as director the New Deal Arts program in the 1930s. Cross-pollination with the motion picture industry began immediately. The future director John Huston (1906-1987) studied at the League under Macdonald-Wright in 1923 and credited him with his “experimentalist” influence. [3]
In Los Angeles, modernists, “progressives” in the arts and politics at the beginning of the 20th century emerged from a Downtown milieu that was a wide-open profusion of race-ethnic diversity, class confrontations, heady Socialist “street speaking,” and appalling police repression. The Los Angeles City Council, frightened by the strength of the Left in the Downtown “red wards” and on the central public spaces of La Placita and Central Park, passed a series of ordinances blocking-off scores of blocks as “no speech zones,” spaces where naked class power literally suspended the First Amendment.[4]
Socialists, feminists, and other reformers on the left enjoyed their headiest moment in 1911 when Socialist Job Harriman looked like the probable winner in that year’s mayoral election. Until, that is, the McNamara Brothers confessed to the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times and destroyed the credibility of Harriman’s campaign, leading to a crushing defeat for the Left in Los Angeles. Despite, or perhaps because of the extreme anti-left atmosphere that overtook Los Angeles during and after the Great War, progressives of many stripes settled again in Los Angeles during the 1920s, still hopeful of creating democratic movements to overcome the many injustices in this booming metropolis and beyond.
By the 1920s the Otis-Chandler oligarchs had won the battle for the public spaces of Downtown, but the avant-garde kept a visible presence in Jake Zeitlin’s bookstores in the Central Business District. For residence, much of the community clustered in “Edendale,” now called Silver Lake, just northwest of Downtown, north of Wilshire following Alvarado north into the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. This had been one of the earliest “movie colonies,” clustered around the Silver Lake Reservoir, including Walt Disney’s first studio on Hyperion Ave (1926-1939). Progressives and creative artists settled in this “Bohemia” on the shores of Silver Lake because, as Daniel Hurewitz has compellingly recounted, they found mutual support, the synergies of creative stimulation, and a physical setting that gave the sense of a pastoral retreat from the bustle and conflict of the city.
The most prominent leftist in Los Angeles during the 1920s was the prolific Upton Sinclair, whose circle included the lawyer-journalist Carey McWilliams and novelists Louis Adamic and John Fante. Zeitlin’s bookshop on Hope St near Sixth “became a mecca for a generation of unproven young artists, writers, and bibliophiles who found inspiration in Zeitlin’s enthusiasm…” Zeitlin’s bookshop always had an exhibition space, where he showed the photography of Edward Weston, and such Southern California painters who were then pushing boundaries, such as Millard Sheets and Milfred Zornes [5] McWilliams and Zeitlin, like many in their circle, lived in Edendale/Silver Lake.
The artist/bohemian colony in Edendale actually grew in symbiosis with the founding of several art schools in Westlake Park, just south of Siler Lake on Alvarado, at Wilshire Boulevard. The first, the Otis Art institute (1918), was partially underwritten by LA Times founder and publisher, Harrison Grey Otis himself. The second was founded by the Nelbert Murphy Chouinard (1879-1969). Chouinard developed a close working relationship with Walt Disney, as supplier of trained artists. Chouinard, personally directed by Nelbert Chuinard herself until its merger into CalArts in the 1960s, counted a long line of influential artists as alumni such as Edward Ruscha or sometime students, such as Jackson Pollock.[6] In 1945 longtime Chouinard instructor Herbert Jepson spun off his influential Jepson Art Institute at 2861 West 7th Street, which flourished in the early 1950s.
Silver Lake was not just inhabited, but shaped as a space by the architects among them, modernists in an emergent regional school, Southern California Modernism, led by Austrian émigrés Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra. During the 1890s, while the Chamber of Commerce oligarchs were still envisioning the future growth of Los Angeles, Chicago was recognized worldwide as the cutting-edge city of industrial modernity. There industrialism and immigration had produced a mighty metropolis from a swampy village in little more than fifty years. The White City exposition of 1893 drew millions of visitors, launched the University of Chicago, and drew attention to the revolutionary architectural ideas of Louis Sullivan. Sullivan and his partner Dagmar Adler were not only using steel skeletons to lift office buildings to new heights: they sought to remake aesthetics to match the modern era. Sullivan’s slogan, “form follows function,” spelled the doom of Victorian aesthetics and launched the great worldwide modernist movement in architecture and design.[7]
Excited by Sullivan’s vision were Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, professors of the Austrian Royal Academy in Vienna. Beginning in the 1860s, Hapsburg Emperor Franz Joseph I ordered the rebuilding of Vienna around the Ringstrasse as a showcase for his empire. The resulting jumble of historical styles provoked Wagner and Loos to lead the “Vienna Secession.” In 1895 Wagner published Modern Architecture, arguing that every age has its own style, and that the age of machines should have a style to match is functional logic. Loos went further in a provocative essay, equating ornament with crime.[8] Crusading to eliminate unnecessary decoration, Loos traveled to Chicago in the 1890s to see the work of Louis Sullivan for himself.[9] Meanwhile, another disciple in Sullivan’s Chicago office was the young Frank Lloyd Wright, who brought a concern for the natural landscape into the modernist architectural movement. Wright reinvented the home by balancing machine age functionality with the harmony of nature, creating dynamic spaces that opened outward into an integrated natural landscape, with an aesthetic that seemed also to grow from nature.
Touring Europe in 1910, Wright brought his drawings to Germany, where Ernst Wasmuth published them in 1911. This Wasmuth Portfolio won instant acclaim across Europe. Amazed by Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolio were two brilliant Viennese students of Wagner and Loos: Rudolph Schindler (1887-1953) and Richard Neutra (1892-1970). As mentor to Schindler and Neutra, Loos taught them his “Raumplan” methods shaping a floor plan into dynamic, interlocking spaces. Above all, Loos implored both young men to go seek out Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago. Schindler did so in 1914, just before the outbreak of the Great War. By 1918, Schindler became Wright’s senior apprentice and office manager while Wright began his monumental Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Neutra remained in Vienna, was drafted and fought for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and eventually was decommissioned in 1918. Its militarists defeated, Germany underwent a period of massive restoration during the Weimar periods and Neutra went to Berlin to work for Germany’s most innovative modernist: the expressionist Erich Mendelsohn. With the founding of the Bauhaus school of design in 1919, Germany gained leadership in the modernist movement. Under the direction of its founding director, Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus promoted a social vision for architecture: Simple designs with strong modern materials made affordable and healthy housing for the working classes. Swiss prodigy Le Corbusier moved to Germany and published “Toward a New Architecture” in 1923. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe later came to direct the Bauhaus, steering it back in the rightward direction of aesthetic commercialism. This was the new generation of modernists: Gropius, Mies, Le Corbusier, Neutra and Schindler.[10]
Meanwhile, in 1919, Aline Barnsdall, Chicago patron of avant-garde theatre, transferred to Los Angeles and commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design her Hollyhock House (1919-21). Wright, still consumed with the Imperial Hotel, summoned Schindler to Los Angeles to supervise Hollyhock. In Los Angeles, Wright experimented with new materials and forms using textured concrete blocks.[11] Schindler, working with Wright’s eldest son Lloyd Wright, supervised Wright’s four landmark “textile-block” houses: Millard, Storer, Freeman, and Ennis houses (all 1923).[12] In the process of supervising Wright’s Los Angeles projects, Schindler came to see Southern California as the ideal environment for modern architecture. The new city welcomed new forms, but also offered a regional vernacular. Schindler made his first major statement with his own Kings Road House, completed in 1922. With his American wife Pauline, a progressive political activist, their home became the center of the Avant-garde modernists in Southern California.[13] Also in 1922, Neutra left Berlin to spend two years with Frank Lloyd Wright at the master’s legendary Taliesen studio in Wisconsin. But Schindler soon insisted that his former classmate Neutra join him in Los Angeles, and in 1925 Richard and his wife Dione Neutra moved into the Kings Road House. Together, Schindler and Neutra founded Southern California Modernism.[14]
Pauline’s first goal upon arriving in Los Angeles in 1921 was “hunting up Upton Sinclair,” the prolific novelist and socialist activist. Eventually, the Schindlers were invited to the Sinclairs for dinner, and Upton introduced them to Gaylord Wilshire, the “millionaire socialist” namesake of Wilshire Boulevard. Recounting their frenzied activities in June 1921, Pauline wrote:
“We are so far and so deeply ‘in’ the radical movement these days that we never have an evening at home any more ... Committee meetings for the Worker’s Defence [sic] League, for the Walt Whitman School, -- conferences large and small, -- supping in odd places with folk who tell us news impossible to get except ‘from hand to mouth’, --lectures; meetings at which we stop only long enough to make an announcement before going on to the next...”[15]
The Schindlers, in short, were part of the small but very active bohemian world of pro-labor, feminist, gay, socialist and social democratic Angelenos, a circle that included Carey McWilliams, the Aristotle of Los Angeles’ public intellectuals, who would eventually face-down the second Red Scare as the courageous editor of The Nation. Their arrival in Los Angeles in the 1920s coincided with the widespread repression of leftists throughout the United States. California had enacted the 1919 Criminal Syndicalism Act, which targeted the International Workers of the World (IWW). In 1927 Pauline was still consumed with labor activism, especially through the Worker’s Defense League. “This movement completely consumes my energies...my mind is...too much concerned with the absurd details of mass-meetings, and the raising of funds to defend workingmen prosecuted for working class activities.”[16]
While the metropolis around them mushroomed in a frenzy of capitalist production and exploitation, this small band of intellectuals and artists won occasional commissions from eccentric investors to put their ideals into practice. Schindler and Neutra’s collaborative projects included a stunning 1926 entry in the international competition to design the League of Nations building in Geneva. Also in 1926, Schindler executed a brilliant beach house design for Philip Lovell, a wealthy physician who advocated natural cures.[17]
That year—1927—in an attempt to win larger commissions, Schindler and Neutra formed the short-lived Architectural Group for Industry and Commerce (AGIC). As AGIC, Neutra and Schindler designed the Jardinette Apartments at the southeast corner of Marathon and Manhattan in Hollywood, for J.H. Miller, “an enigmatic developer” who “envisioned a veritable empire of luxurious Hollywood apartment houses ranging from five to fifteen stories.” Neutra, his wife Dione, along with Schindler and his wife Pauline, were all animated by the social reform possibilities of design embodied in the Jardinette Apartments. “Never before has the architect experienced such a flexibility of choice for expressing the modern conception of the home,” Pauline Schindler wrote in an anonymous review for the Christian Science Monitor. She asked the reader to imagine “seeing an entire city block built up with these garden apartments...These buildings would enclose a large community park area in the center of the block for the use of children and other apartment dwellers. Hours of time and labor would be saved by maintaining community laundries, day nurseries, complete garages and equipment, janitor services, and gardeners.” Miller, unfortunately, went bankrupt before the Jardinette was finished, skipped town to escape his creditors, and left AGIC with an unpaid commission.[18]
Miffed at rumors that Schindler had been sleeping with his wife, Lovell gave his next commission to Neutra, who designed his 1929 masterpiece, the Lovell Health House. Consequently, friction developed between Schindler and Neutra, ending their friendship and partnership. In 1932 Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock curated a major show at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, called “The International Style: Architecture since 1922” showcasing the work of Wright, Mies, Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Neutra.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Schinder, Neutra, Gregory Ain, Harwell H. Harris, and a gathering circle of modernist architects won a steady stream of commissions to design homes in the Edendale/Silverlake basin and more widely. When he and Dion moved out of the Schindler House, Neutra designed for themselves the “Research House” (1933) at 2300 E. Silver Lake Blvd, while Schindler designed the Oliver House (1933) high on the slope opposite the Silver Lake Reservoir. There followed, for Schindler, the Van Patten House (1934-5). Economic activity seems to have picked up in 1938, as Schindler completed three commissions: the Bubeshko Apartments (2036 Griffith Park Blvd) and the Wilson (290 Redcliff St) and Westby (1805 Maltman) Houses. Neutra left a concentrated stamp on Silverlake’s built fabric with a cluster of homes lining Silver Lake Blvd just south of his Research House, from 1948-1964: The Treweek and Sokal Houses (1948), the Reunion House (1949), the Yew House (1957), and the Ivandomi and Kambara Houses (1960).[19]
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.”[20] 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 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.[21]
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-desiecle 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, in fact, impossible to say what the CSH houses look like 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 the magazine 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.”[22] 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).[23]
In short, Arts & Architecture was a 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.[24] 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, PousetteDart, 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.”[25] 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...”[26]
The same issue of Arts & Architecture is dominated by a massive, 26-page advertisement by Kwikset Locks Incorporated, of Anaheim.[27] 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 Far 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.[28] 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!”[29] 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.”[30] 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.
Shulman published throughout the complete spectrum of magazines devoted to architecture. 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.[31] 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 indispensible to the popular aesthetics of Fifties America.
[1] Schrank (2009): 1-42.
[2b] Hayden (1981)
[3b] South, Yoshiki-Kovinick, and Armstrong-Totten (2008): 1-4.
[4b] South, Yoshiki-Kovinick, and Armstrong-Totten (2008): 4, 7.
[4] Wild (2005)
[5] Hurewitz (2007): 81.
[6] Plagens (1974): 21.
[7] The Arts and Crafts movement was actually the first to criticize the historicism of the Victorian era, inventing a simple style that emphasized utility, comfort and craft. But the Arts and Crafts movement was actually anti-modernist, seeking a return to earlier, pre-industrial ways of life. On Sullivan’s ideas and early buildings, Szarkowski (1956).
[8] Loos’ most famous essay, “Ornament and Crime,” was delivered as a lecture in 1910 and first published in French translation in Les cahiers d’aujourd’hui in June 1913. It was not published in German until 1929, in the Frankfurter Zeitung (24 October). Tournikiotis (2002): 23.
[9] Accounts vary as to the nature of Loos’s American sojourn. Sources agree that he was in the United States from 1893 (to see the Chicago World’s Fair), through 1896. According to Sarnitz (2003): 91, Loos worked “in several different professions, but not as an architect.” According to Tournikiotis (2002):10, Loos “never met Adler or Sullivan,” but that “his memory was indelibly marked by the Chicago School...”
[10] Schorske (1981); Sarnitz (1993); Smith and Darling (2001); Hines (1982).
[11] Smith (1992).
[12] Storrer (1982): 214-217.
[13] Sweeney (2001): 87-115.
[14] McCoy (1979).
[15] Quoted in Sweeney (2001): 91.
[16] Quoted in Sweeney (2001): 91.
[17] Miffed at rumors that Schindler had been sleeping with his wife, Lovell gave his next commission to Neutra, who designed his 1929 masterpiece, the Lovell Health House. Consequently, friction developed between Schindler and Neutra, ending their friendship and partnership. In 1932 Philip Johnson and HenryRussell Hitchcock curated a major show at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, called “The International Style: Architecture since 1922” showcasing the work of Wright, Mies, Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Neutra.
[18] Hines (1982), pp. 69-76. Quotations at 73 and 74-5, respectively. The authorship of this unsigned review, which appeared in the 12 June 1928 edition of Christian Science Monitor, has been attributed by Thomas Hines to Pauline Schindler since the publication of his book. Personal communication with author.
[19] Gebhard and Winter (1977): 166-78; Moore, Becker, and Campbell (1998): 221-264.
[20] McCoy (1990): 13.
[21] McCoy (1990): 9.
[22] Arts & Architecture (February 1947), p. 15.
[23] Arts & Architecture (February 1947), pp 14-50.
[24] “Modern Jewelry” by Albert E. Herbert, Jr, Arts & Architecture (January 1951), p. 39.
[25] Arts & Architecture (January 1951), p. 26.
[26] Arts & Architecture (January 1951), p. 23.
[27] The Kwikset commercial insert covers pp. 43-66 of the January 1951 issue of Arts & Architecture.
[28] McGirr (2002): 99, 102.
[29] “Satisfaction 165 Miles High!” advertisement, Arts & Architecture (April 1953) p. 39.
[30] Crow (1996): 35.
[31] Thanks to Julius Shulman for help in this classification.
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- Inscribing Los Angeles: Governing, Producing, and Living Landscapes Phil Ethington
- Narrative Essays Phil Ethington
