I checked this book out a while back and I confirm it’s a must have. Here’s a quote from the New York Times.
The story is well told in “Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury,” an exhibition here at the Addison Gallery of American Art. Organized by Elizabeth Armstrong, chief curator at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, Calif., where it originated, the show examines cool style of the ’50s in several disciplines, including painting, furniture design, architecture, film and photography.
The multidisciplinary approach could be confusing, but it all hangs together in ways 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. …
read more here: Birth of the Cool – California – Art – Review – New York Times
Thanks to Lou Smith.
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