Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

September 19, 2008 to January 5, 2009

Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury takes a look at the broad cultural zeitgeist of "cool" that informed the visual, graphic, and decorative arts, furniture, architecture, music, and film produced in Southern California in the 1950s and early 1960s. The exhibition, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art, includes a jazz lounge; a media bar with film, animation, and television programming; a period art gallery of hard-edge abstract paintings; selections of art, architectural, and documentary photography; and an interactive timeline that presents a snapshot of California, national, and international culture and history of that era.Birth of the Cool examines the dynamic community of artists who overlapped and interacted in Southern California at midcentury--Chet Baker, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Charles and Ray Eames, John Lautner, Richard Neutra, Helen Lundeberg, and others who played a seminal role in the development of the iconic high modernist style.

"The show is inevitable fun ... The exhibition also represents a small seismic tremor for the way postwar LA art history is finally coming to be understood." Los Angeles Times

"Both entertaining and thought provoking. What emerges is not just a style but a spirit and an ethos that are in many ways diametrically opposite those of East Coast Abstract Expressionism. Angst-free, not monumental, anti-grandiose: California cool is laid back yet cleanly articulated, impersonal yet intimate, strict yet hedonistic, and seriously playful." New York Times

National Tour
Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts
Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri
Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

Exhibition Catalog
Birth of the Cool is accompanied by a 300-page, fully illustrated book that provides a thorough reassessment of this important period. The art writers and cultural historians contributing to the catalog include Thomas Hine on the culture of cool in midcentury art and popular culture; Elizabeth Smith on aspects of the domestic in midcentury modern architecture; Lorraine Wild on graphic design and advertising; Frances Colpitt on the hard-edge abstract painting of the 1950s; Dave Hickey on West Coast jazz; Bruce Jenkins on the crossover between animation and experimental film; and Michael Boyd on the migration of modernist architecture and design from Europe to California. Curator Elizabeth Armstrongs introduction explores the parallels and affinities among the distinctive rhythmic and formal vocabularies found in these various cultural forms and attitudes and the resurgence of interest in this period and style today. This retrospective volume also includes a timeline, bibliography, and contemporaneous texts from key publications of the period.

Traveling Exhibition Support
Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury is organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and is curated by Elizabeth Armstrong, deputy director for public programs and chief curator. Major support for Birth of the Cool is provided by Brent R. Harris, The Segerstrom Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Significant support is provided by Bente and Gerald Buck, Twyla and Chuck Martin, Jayne and Mark Murrel, Pam and Jim Muzzy, Barbara and Victor Klein, and Victoria and Gilbert E. LeVasseur Jr. Additional support is provided by Toni and Steven Berlinger and Patricia and Max Ellis.

Corporate sponsorship is provided by

Local Exhibition Support
Additional support for the St. Louis presentation of Birth of the Cool is provided by the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; the Regional Arts Commission; James M. Kemper, Jr.; the David Woods Kemper Memorial Foundation; the Hortense Lewin Art Fund; Centro Modern Furnishings; and individual contributors to the Kemper Art Museum.

Julius Shulman, photograph of Case Study House #22 (Pierre Koenig, architect, Los Angeles, 195960), 1960. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute

Lorser Feitelson, Dichotomic Organization, 1959, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 in. (152.4 x 152.4 cm), Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, Marie Eccles Caine Foundation Gift. © Feitelson Arts Foundation

Charles and Ray Eames, prototype plywood chairs (photograph by Charles Eames, c. 1950), Boyd Collection

Album cover for Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool (Capitol Records, 1957). Courtesy Blue Note Records

Karl Benjamin, Black Pillars, 1957, oil on canvas, 48 x 24 in. (121.9 x 61 cm), private collection. © Karl Benjamin, courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood.