ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE
June 1952
John Entenza [Editor]
John Entenza [Editor]: ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE. Los Angeles: John D. Entenza, Volume 69, No. 6, June 1952. Slim quarto. Stapled printed wrappers. 38 pp. Illustrated text and articles. Cover by Ruth Lanier [Asawa] photographed by Imogen Cunningham. Rear panel with mailing label and stamped cancellation. Wrappers lightly worn with soiling from handling, but a very good copy.
9.75 x 12.75 vintage magazine with 38 pages of editorial content and advertisements from leading purveyors of West Coast mid-century modernism, circa 1952. Staff photography by Julius Shulman. In terms of decor, there is none of that Chippendale jive here-- every residential interior is decked out in full midcentury glory.
- Gyorgy Kepes: Katherine Kuh
- An Art Museum Eyes The Naked Truth: Bartlett H. Hayses, Jr.
- House: Joseph F. Moodie
- Projects: Isamu Noguchi; Yoshiro Taniguchi
- Garden & Sculpture for Reader’s Digest Tokyo Office: Isamu Noguchi, Antonin Raymond, L. L. Rado
- House: Wendell H. Lovett
- Two Rental Projects: Craig Ellwood
- House: Worley K. Wong & John Carden Campbell
- Pacifica, Furniture & Accessories: work by Muriel Coleman, Peter Rooke-Ley, Luther Conover, etc.
- Office Furniture: work by George Nelson for Herman Miller and Florence Knoll and Eero Saarinen for Knoll.
- Music
- Currently Available Product Literature And Information
- Notes In Passing
- Ads for Gruen Lighting, Howard Miller Clocks, new chairs from Charles Eames for Herman Miller, Van Keppel-Green, etc.
- and more.
Editorial Associates for Arts and Architecture included Herbert Matter and Charles Eames. Julius Shulman was the staff photographer. The Editorial Advisory Board included William Wilson Wurster, Richard Neutra, Isamu Noguchi, Eero Saarinen, Gardner Dailey, Sumner Spaulding, Mario Corbett, Esther McCoy, John Funk, Gregory Ain, George Nelson, Gyorgy Kepes, Marcel Breuer, Raphael Soriano, Ray Eames, Garret Eckbo, Edgar Kaufman, Jr. and others luminaries of the mid-century modern movement.
“I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It’s still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.” — Ruth Asawa
From the SFGate Obituary, California sculptor Ruth Asawa dies, published on August 6, 2013: “Ruth Asawa, one of California's most admired sculptors and the first Asian American woman in the nation to achieve recognition in a male-dominated discipline, died Monday night of natural causes at her home in San Francisco. She was 87.
“Ms. Asawa's name perhaps will serve as a reminder of the importance of preserving artwork. This year, a proposed Apple Store threatened her early 1970s "Hyatt on Union Square Fountain," on steps between the Hyatt Hotel and a now-closed, adjacent Levi's store.
“After furious public protest, the city rejected Apple's plans and told the company to redo them to ensure that the fountain sculpture survives.<p>
“Ms. Asawa's other notable public work includes the "Japanese American Internment Memorial" in San Jose and the "Andrea Mermaid Fountain" at Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco. In addition, the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, which honored Ms. Asawa with a career retrospective in 2006-07, has dedicated the ground-floor lobby area of its tower to ongoing display of her work.
"Ruth Asawa will be remembered for the extraordinary wire sculptures that so beautifully interweave nature and culture," said Timothy Burgard, curator of American art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He characterized her "as a pioneering post-World War II modernist whose works have transcended the multiple barriers she faced as an Asian American woman artist working with traditional 'craft' materials and techniques. She lived to see all of these confining categories challenged and redefined."
“Ms. Asawa's signature works consist of lattices or dendrites of woven or entwined wire, defining volumes almost without mass. Her bronzes take the more robust form of human figures and other images modeled in relief or in the round. Ms. Asawa's place in the history of modern art in California is secure, but the wider art world has been slower to acknowledge it.
“That changed abruptly this spring when Christie's auction house in New York presented a sensitively installed exhibition of her wire works, preceding an auction in which a particularly elegant and complex 1960s hanging sculpture by her sold for more than $1.4 million.
“In 1982, Ms. Asawa was a founder of what is now called the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, a San Francisco Unified School District arts high school, which is slated for relocation to the Civic Center arts district. Her prestige bolstered successful efforts on the part of the San Francisco Unified School District to retain arts programs when so many other districts eliminated theirs.
“Born Jan. 24, 1926, in Norwalk (Los Angeles County), Ms. Asawa was the fourth among seven children of immigrant truck farmers whom state law then prohibited from owning land or applying for citizenship. During childhood, Ms. Asawa did farm work with her family and attended both public school and a "Japanese cultural school," where she learned calligraphy and her parents' native language. Her teachers appreciated her drawing ability.
“In 1942, the federal government began to implement the executive order mandating internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Ms. Asawa's father was separated for six years from the rest of her family, who were housed initially in the Santa Anita racetrack stables, and eventually at an internment camp in Rohwer, Ark.
“Ms. Asawa continued drawing and learned as she could from older internee artists. She completed high school in the camp and won a scholarship to Milwaukee State Teachers College.
“Because of anti-Japanese prejudice, Ms. Asawa was unable to obtain mandatory teaching credentials. She instead entered Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an educational experiment that in its brief life span became a hotbed of artistic innovation. It attracted future luminaries such as Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Franz Kline, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and Bauhaus exile Josef Albers who, improbably, acted as Ms. Asawa's mentor.
“Ms. Asawa left Black Mountain after three years, emboldened to devote her life to art. She had met there, and soon married, architect and designer Albert Lanier (1927-2008), with whom she had six children. Ms. Asawa served on the San Francisco Arts Commission and on the board of trustees of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. She received honorary doctorates from San Francisco State University, the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts.”
In 1938, John Entenza joined California Arts and Architecture magazine as editor. By 1943, Entenza and his art director Alvin Lustig had completely overhauled the magazine and renamed it Arts and Architecture. Arts and Architecture championed all that was new in the arts, with special emphasis on emerging modernist architecture in Southern California.
One of the pivotal figures in the growth of modernism in California, Entenza's most lasting contribution was his sponsorship of the Case Study Houses project, which featured the works of architects Thornton Abell, Conrad Buff, Calvin Straub, Donald Hensman, Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, J. R. Davidson, A. Quincy Jones, Frederick Emmons, Don Knorr, Edward Killinsworth, Jules Brady, Waugh Smith, Pierre Koenig, Kemper Nomland, Kemper Nomland Jr., Richard Neutra, Ralph Rapson, Raphael Soriano, Whitney Smith, Sumner Spaulding, John Rex, Rodney Walker, William Wilson Wurster, Theodore Bernardi and Craig Ellwood. Arts and Architecture also ran articles and interviews on artists and designers such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, George Nakashima, George Nelson and many other groundbreakers.