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  • California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way ed. by Wendy Kaplan
  • Sarah Lowengard (bio)
California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way. Edited by Wendy Kaplan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Pp. 359. $60.

How do you demonstrate that you are modern? For a time, from the end of the Second World War until the mid-1970s, you established your relationship to modernity through the purchase and use of items in bright colors and those decorated with elements that might be whimsical or abstract but never ponderous. You preferred simple architectural lines that integrated well into their surroundings and you championed the adoption of industrial materials into innovative consumer uses. You, the modern person, looked to film (photography, cinema, television) as your arbiter of glamour. In short, as California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way shows, being modern meant adopting California style, California fashion, California attitude.

California Design is the catalog of a 2011 exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum as a component of Pacific Standard Time. Pacific Standard Time, an initiative of the Getty Foundation and Getty Research Institute, told the history of art in the Los Angeles region throughout the twentieth century and particularly after the Second World War. More than sixty institutions participated, each covering a different aspect of art or its ideas. As an exhibition catalog, California Design must nod to the big picture of the Pacific Standard Time project as it expands on general and specific themes of the exhibition. So, in addition to the essays, lavish illustrations, and a checklist of the more than 300 items displayed, California Design makes the case for a positive answer to the question "is there such a thing as 'California Design'"?

In her introductory chapter, curator Wendy Kaplan qualifies that question by describing California Design as a look rather than a single movement. Both the exhibition and the book argue that the postwar consumer revolution—the shifts toward youth and space and light, and away from the dark and cluttered old worlds—had a special resonance in Los Angeles. Under those guidelines, the ten essays consider such topics as the pre-history (1930-41) of design in California, the immediate and delayed effects of the Second World War—seen in both the design and deployment of new materials and in the presence of creative, largely Germanophone émigré artists and designers in Los Angeles—and the wobbly relationship among art, design, craft, and mass production during this period. Other authors consider the pressures created on design and design reform by California's explosive population growth and the broader dissemination of the postwar California dream of light, easily cared-for things, from houses to tableware.

One result of the broad range and no-single-movement approach adopted here is that essays often repeat themes and information without clearly extending them; many contributions are best considered separately. [End Page 421] Certain disparities emerge, too. It is difficult for every author to confine the locus of all California Modern Design to the Los Angeles region, for example, just as it is difficult to claim that all modernist urges achieved completion only on arrival in California. As Kaplan's essay also notes, despite ethnic influences in the designs, "Latinos, Asians and African Americans were mostly marginalized from participation" (p. 51) as consumers or designers. Both text and images make obvious that this was a design revolution for the middle and upper-middle classes, divorced from the needs or desires of the Joads or their postwar descendants. The lessons of the Case Study Houses, three-dozen model, modern homes designed between 1945 and 1964 which showcased prefabrications and the new-style indoor/outdoor living, were employed indirectly, if at all, in low-income housing.

These disparities recede on further consideration, however. The book catalogs the establishment and rise of regional design at that point just before such regionalism began to disappear in the United States. If the forms of the "California Modern" house have been abandoned, their ideas of functionalism are now wholeheartedly accepted. The California Look in clothing, furniture, and interior design has certainly made its mark—supported, no doubt, by the modern glamour...

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