The contemporary spirit of the architecture, furniture, design, painting, photography, music, film and animation on view might shock you especially when you calculate that most of it is at least 50 years old.
“We wanted to introduce this highly creative period in Southern California art and design to St. Louis," Kemper director Sabine Eckmann, who spent five years in Los Angeles before coming to St. Louis, said in a walk-through of the exhibition last week.
Even though the installation was far from finished, I couldnt keep myself from being excited. In a gallery that set the stage, a video monitor played The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis the TV comedy that introduced beatnik Maynard G. Krebs to America. In the jazz lounge, Chet Baker sang Lets Get Lost in his languorous, too-sexy-for-his-voice manner.
In the design gallery, a grid of vintage chairs by Charles and Ray Eames caused lust in my heart. In the painting gallery, reductive abstractions by John McLaughlin that owed more to Japan than Europe might have been made in LA but occupied timeless Zen space the there and then, the here and now, the forever.
The mingling of art, photography, architecture, design, film and video that is so common today was first experimented with in LA, Eckmann said. As a museum that serves both an art and architecture school, it seemed the perfect show for us to take. The exhibition, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and on an extensive national tour, is divided into three broad sections. Eckmann and assistant curator Meredith Malone talked about it during our walk-through.
The Introductory Gallery is divided into two parts: a timeline that focuses on the eventful year 1959, and a jazz lounge where visitors can chill listening to Chet Baker, Miles Davis and June Christy while sitting on chairs designed by Eero Saarinen.
The 1959 timeline a snapshot, as Eckmann put it sets you up for whats to come. It includes video clips, not only that Dobie Gillis episode but a session with Ella Fitzgerald performing on Hugh Hefners Playboy Penthouse; news photos of Nixon and Khrushchevs famous kitchen debate; a shockingly young Fidel Castro addressing the press after taking over Cuba; and several artifacts.
Eckmann picked out a Gibson Flying V guitar, made only in 1958 and 59 as something not to miss.
The jazz lounge is all about music. Eckmann had a hard time deciding between a wall of period record covers and photographs by William Claxton as the not-to-be-missed highlight. Claxton was the preeminent jazz photographer of the LA scene, she said. His photographs were made as photojournalism, but now theyre being looked at as art.
