 Image credit Julius Shulman (1910–2009), photographer, Pierre Koenig, architect, Stahl House (Case Study House #22), Los Angeles, 1960 © J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library, Getty Research Institute (2004.R.10  event venue
The Los Angeles County Museum of ArtLACMA 5905 Wilshire Boulevard CA 90036 Los Angeles United-States T 323 857-6000 social| Published | April 5, 2012 at 05:55pm | | Seen | 881 times |
ExhibitionCalifornia Design, 1930–1965: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Design, Los Angeles, United-States
Monday October 1, 2012 - Sunday June 3, 2012 - Event ended. This exhibition is the first major study of California midcentury modern design. With more than 300 objects—furniture, ceramics, metalwork, fashion and textiles, and industrial and graphic design—the exhibition examines the state’s role in shaping the material culture of the entire country.Organized into four thematic areas, the exhibition aims to elucidate the 1951 quote from émigré Greta Magnusson Grossman that is incorporated into the exhibition’s title: California design “is not a superimposed style, but an answer to present conditions…It has developed out of our own preferences for living in a modern way."
Pacific Standard Time is an unprecedented collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, coming together to tell the story of the birth of the LA art scene. Initiated through grants from the Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time will take place for six months beginning October 2011.
“California is America, only more so,” the author Wallace Stegner famously declared in 1959. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the state symbolized the good life in America. After 1945 a burgeoning, newly prosperous population—intoxicated by the power to purchase after the deprivation years of the Great Depression and the wartime rationing of goods—turned the state into America’s most important center for progressive architecture and furnishings. This exhibition explores how the California of our collective imagination—a democratic utopia where a benign climate permitted life to be led informally and largely outdoors—
was translated into a material culture that defined an era.
To illustrate how California provided the ideal environment for modernism to flourish in a way particular to the state, the exhibition is divided into four sections: “Shaping,” “Making,” “Living,” and “Selling.”
The exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and funded through a lead grant from The Getty Fondation.
Additional funding was provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, Debbie and Mark Attanasio, Martha and Bruce Karsh, and LACMA's Decorative Arts and Design Council.
Catalogue
The accompanying 360-page catalogue, edited by Wendy Kaplan, is copublished by LACMA and MIT Press, and features essays by Kaplan and Bobbye Tigerman, along with other leading architecture and design historians.
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