Weekly Hornet

Issue date: 10/24/07 Section: Entertainment

Step back half a century, enter a living room with chic, modern furniture and delicate Asian inspired light fixtures. Imagine the jazz of Miles Davis in the background and kids watching cartoons like Wile E. Coyote.

This is the experience given to visitors viewing the Orange County Museum of Art's new exhibit, "Birth of The Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury."

"Birth of The Cool," is an exhibit featuring various forms of art, including paintings, music, architecture and many other forms that helped create Southern California pop culture. The exhibit is interactive; visitors can listen to jazz, watch 1950s cartoons, as well as enjoy and step into an American '50s world.

The exhibit begins with paintings. The artwork featured in the exhibit is beautiful, refreshing and of course, cool. Although the paintings look like modern abstract expressionist art, it's different. The paintings do not represent anything and are merely explorations of colors, lines and shapes.

The art is not about an experience as often abstract expressionist art is. Rather, it's as if the artist isfascinated by the beauty of clean, clear, crisp color and lines. The paintings look like mazes, jigsaw puzzles, or the mathematical game, tangram. There is precision in the art despite its non-representational subjects.

Some of the paintings are crowded with various forms and designs; some are sparse, containing only a circle and a line. Some painting's colors are dull, grey, black and white, while others burst with cool and deep colors like bright orange, green, turquoise and burgundy.

The photographs in the exhibit mainly feature jazz musicians and the jazz scene; men with their trumpets and saxophones or a woman singing. However, some of the photos portray 1950s life. In a black and white photo, a couple, smartly dressed in a suit and princess-like dress, smoke their cigarettes by a hot dog stand at night.

Other photos show the interiors of contemporary, cosmopolitan homes. Aside from the photos, the exhibit features life size dioramas of those interiors including various fashionable, small, geometric chairs, sculptural decorations and even an old television set.

At the end of the exhibit, a multi media timeline of the 1950s illustrates exactly how important this decade was in shaping American culture and history.

This decade was important because jazz musicians and singers such as Buddy Holly influenced rock 'n' roll stars like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in the 1960s.

Barbie was created, John F. Kennedy ran his presidential campaign, Fidel Castro came into power in Cuba and our beach culture was further inspired by teen idol Gidget and her gang of surfers.

For a chance to see another side of the seemingly dull 1950s life, visit the Orange County Museum of Art exhibit and fully indulge in the birth of California cool.

Birth of The Cool: California Art, Design, And Culture At Midcentury
Orange County
Museum of Art
850 San Clmente Dr.
Newport Beach, CA
Wednesday-Sunday
11 a.m.-5 p.m.
Thursday
11 a.m.-8 p.m.
For more information, visit:
www.ocma.net

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