From Golden State to golden culture
It's not as if the rest of the country all of a sudden discovered California in the 1950s. Since the Gold Rush, a century earlier, it had served as an ever-more-powerful magnet for newcomers: an American Eden that beckoned rather than banished. Distinctly Californian contributions to American culture were as various as they were notable: the novels of Frank Norris and John Steinbeck; the architecture of Bernard Maybeck and Greene and Greene; the photography of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams; above all, that alluring assembly line collectively known as "Hollywood."
Demonstration, not discovery, is what the rest of the country experienced with California in the '50s - a demonstration that it had come of age as full cultural partner and was now influencing the other 47 states. The Golden State was entering a golden age - not just economically and socially, but also culturally. It was now doing to the East Coast what the East Coast had long done to Europe: appropriating, absorbing, popularizing.
What had once seemed like cultural adjuncts and afterthoughts - "The Boys in the Back Room," Edmund Wilson had dismissively called California writers in the early '40s - emerged as a set of viable alternatives, all the more attractive for their sun-splashed surroundings. Remove roof and walls, and a back room becomes a patio. And in the great post-war boom years of affluence, expansion, and suburbanization, well, who didn't want a patio?
Among the many virtues of "Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury," which runs at the Addison Gallery of American Art, in Andover, through April 13, is that it lets us see the ease and confidence of a state in the midst of turning into a state of mind. (The show lets us hear that transformation, too, with many opportunities to listen to West Coast jazz.)
The exhibition is somewhat misleading. Organized by the Orange County Museum of Art, "Birth of the Cool" is biased toward Southern California. We get the furniture of Ray and Charles Eames, the cool school of jazz released on the Contemporary and Pacific Jazz labels, the architecture of Richard Neutra, the hard-edge abstraction of such painters as John McLaughlin and Helen Lundeberg.
Yet so much of the most interesting cultural activity in California during the '50s was taking place in and around San Francisco: the Bay Area Figurative School of painting, with such artists as David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, and Wayne Thiebaud; Darius Milhaud, as both teacher and composer, at Mills College, in Oakland; and, of course, the Beat writers. For a few years anyway, Shakespeare was proven right: Bohemia really did have a coast, and it was hard by the Golden Gate.
San Francisco and environs were also home to "Vertigo." Hitchcock's thriller is surely the great California film of this period. Hitchcock reveals a Golden State on the verge of cultural high noon: a sense of dislocation and questioning of identity amid so much lushness and, yes, desire.
Nor did coolness, by any means, define all California culture of that time. Much of the best postwar art and music there were hot - turbulent, even. The Beats had their Zen side, but there was nothing laid back about "Howl" or "A Coney Island of the Mind." The coolness of artists like Billy Al Bengston and Edward Kienholz, both associated with LA's Ferus Gallery, had everything to do with topicality and nothing to do with temperature. And the jazz players who came of age on Los Angeles's Central Avenue - Charles Mingus, Dexter Gordon, Teddy Edwards, later on Ornette Coleman - made music far removed from the unemphatic, even pallid sounds of such stalwarts of West Coast jazz as Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, and Dave Brubeck.
The point is how culturally varied and rich California was in the '50s - and how good the state was at what we'd now call 2.0. It wasn't just the Beats who started out back East. The most revolutionary figures in '50s Hollywood - James Dean, Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan - were products of New York theater. "West Coast jazz" as a style began in Manhattan, with the recording sessions that became Miles Davis's "The Birth of the Cool." The effect of Abstract Expressionism on both hard-edge abstraction and the Bay Area painters is patent. Even suburbanization - that supreme act of Californication - began 3,000 miles away, with the three Levittowns.
Yet California wasn't just remaking (and often advancing upon) what had first been achieved elsewhere. It was also often democratizing it. Eastern elites had craved the Old World paradigm of aristocratic art as a means of self-validation and social differentiation. California - casual, spacious, open air - naturally gravitated to mass rather than class. In doing so, it exemplified a very different Old World paradigm. There are two fundamental strains to Modernism: the exalted apartness of the alienated self (think of Kafka, "The Waste Land," "Wozzeck") vs. the ideal of a better world for all through better art for all (Brecht, the Bauhaus, Soviet silent cinema). In California the latter ideal came closer to fruition than it ever did anywhere else - especially if one extends "art" to include the arts of living.
With the '60s would come the full flowering of a uniquely California culture, one requiring neither condescension nor importation from anywhere else. Might there be a successor show to "Birth of the Cool"? Think of the material it would have to work with. Diebenkorn started his luscious, transfixing "Ocean Park" series. Lou Harrison brought East and West together in his compositions. Joan Didion published her first books of both reportage and fiction. At once beguiled and horrified, Thomas Pynchon's novel "The Crying of Lot 49" celebrated the freeways' "concrete surf."
David Hockney, of the Yorkshire Hockneys, and Frank Gehry, of the Ontario Goldbergs, spectacularly transformed their own art into something we now think of as organically, even quintessentially, Southern Californian. The Beach Boys' genius wasn't to transcend where they came from, but instead to make the rest of America, and much of the world, yearn to live there, too. For that matter, Hugh Hefner moved from Chicago to LA in 1971; and the next year "The Tonight Show" relocated from midtown Manhattan to beautiful downtown Burbank. Politically, California was part of the United States. Culturally, in so many ways, the United States was now part of California.
The idea of California culture hardly seems distinguishable any more. Didion moved to Manhattan 20 years ago. Gehry has become a global brand name. The latest institutional addition to the state's art world, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which opened last month as part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is, in its sleek, Renzo Piano-designed way, as much a pharoanic statement as any 19th-century Beaux Arts pile back East.
Yet the beauty of it all is that the museum's namesake and chief benefactor, Eli Broad, made his billions as a developer of single-family homes. Think of how many of them must have had patios.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com. 