CALIFORNIA ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE
February 1942
Julius Shulman's Copy
Alvin Lustig [Art Editor], John Entenza [Editor]
Alvin Lustig [Art Editor], John Entenza [Editor]: CALIFORNIA ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE. Los Angeles: Western States Publishing Co., Volume 59, number 2, February 1942. Original edition. Slim folio. Stapled printed wrappers. 40 pp. Illustrated text and articles. Julius Shulman’s mailing label to front panel. Two postage stamps removed with some residue remaining. Wrappers lightly rubbed and worn, but a very good copy.
Art Editor Alvin Lustig’s updated masthead and overall design sensibility of John Entenza’s California Arts and Architecture made its debut in February 1942. Lustig developed a new typeface Euclid for the magazine, and his masthead type choice remained essentially unchanged for the next 25 years.
9.75 x 12.75 vintage magazine with 40 pages of editorial content and advertisements from leading purveyors of West Coast midcentury modernism, circa 1942. Primary photography by Julius Shulman.
- Articles
- Intellectual Conditioning Of Children Under The Nazis: Erika Mann. Great Alvin Lustig Isotype illustration!
- Whimsy Has Growing Pains: Gene Fleury on animated cartoons coming of age. From Dr. Grob’s Animation Review: “[Wackiki Wabbit] real stars however, are its outrageous backgrounds. Designed by Bernyce Polifka and painted by her husband, Gene Fleury, they are arguably the boldest backgrounds in any cartoon from the pre-UPA-era. The island is depicted in brassy, strangely colored, semi-abstract to abstract images, with no sense of three-dimensionality, whatsoever. Nevertheless, the clearly three-dimensional characters read surprisingly well against the outlandish backgrounds. Polifka had replaced John McGrew, who had worked with Fleury on experimental backgrounds for Chuck Jones cartoons like ‘Conrad the Sailor‘ (1942) and ‘The Aristo-Cat‘ (1943), but who had joined the navy in 1942. The couple shared McGrew’s boldness, and worked with Jones on ‘Hell-Bent for Election’ (1944), one of UPA’s earliest films. But apparently they left Warner Bros. somewhere in 1943-1944. In 1949 they worked for Lou Bunin’s part live action part stop motion feature ‘Alice in Wonderland’, but after this job, they seemingly disappeared from the animation world. So, ‘Wackiki Wabbit’ remains their most famous and greatest legacy. The backgrounds themselves can be admired on the late Michael Sporn’s excellent blogpost on this cartoon.
- New Furniture: Pacific Modern By Barker Brothers
- Dorothy Liebes: dynamic Lustig opening spread.
- Architecture
- House: William Wilson Wurster
- Kahn House: Richard J. Neutra
- House: Ross Bellah & Carl Anderson
- House: Lewis Hall
- House: John Ekin Dinwiddie
- Defense Housing: Eugene Weston, Jr.
- Special Features
- Art
- Books
- Music
- Shop-Wise
- Notes in Passing
- Products and Practices
“The design of a book is an extremely subtle and muted problem closer to a string quartet than to the grand orchestration of magazine design.” — Alvin Lustig, 1954
"By the time he died at the age of forty in 1955, [Lustig] had already introduced principles of Modern art to graphic design that have had a long-term influence on contemporary practice. He was in the vanguard of a relatively small group who fervently, indeed religiously, believed in the curative power of good design when applied to all aspects of American life. He was a generalist, and yet in the specific media in which he excelled he established standards that are viable today.
"Lustig created monuments of ingenuity and objects of aesthetic pleasure. Whereas graphic design history is replete with artifacts that define certain disciplines and are also works of art, for a design to be so considered it must overcome the vicissitudes of fashion and be accepted as an integral part of the visual language." -- Steven Heller
From Print Magazine, Oct/Nov 1956: The first jacket which Lustig did for a New Directions Book - the one for the 1941 edition of Henry Miller's Wisdom of the Heart- was quite unlike anything then in vogue, but it scarcely hinted at the extraordinary flowering which was to follow. It was rather stiff and severe - a non-representational construction made from little pieces of type metal chosen from the cases in the experimental printing shop he had set up in the hinter regions of a drugstore in Brentwood. A less fecund talent might have been content to work that vein for years, but not Lustig. A few months later, I remember, he was showing me how he made extraordinary forms by exposing raw film to different kinds of light in a friend's darkroom.
Whatever the medium, he could make it do new things, make it extend itself under the prodding of his imagination. What the true nature of that imagination was I never fully understood until the last year, when he had lost his sight, and when, to our amazement, he not only continued to work, directing the eyes and hands of his wife and assistants as if they were his own, but produced some of his finest pieces, such as the final cover design for the magazine Perspectives USA.
In the middle years, when opening each envelop from Lustig was a new excitement because the range of fresh invention seemed to have no limits, I had supposed that his gift was a purely visual faculty. Or, watching him play with a pencil on a drawing pad, I thought that he had some special magic in his hands. Only at the end, when I knew he could not see the forms evolving on paper, did I realize that his creative instinct was akin to that of the poet or composer. The forms took shape in his mind, drawn from a reservoir seemingly as inexhaustible as that of a Klee of Picasso.
Lustig's solution of a book jacket problem was seldom a literary solution. He was no verbalizer; as a matter of fact, writing came hard to him. His method was to read a text and get the feel of the author's creative drive, then to restate it in his own graphic terms. Naturally these reformulations were most successful when there was an identity of interest, but it was remarkable how far he could go on alien ground.
In discussions of values in art the positiveness of his assertions occasionally suggested egotism; he would submit himself to it fully and with humility. I have heard people speak of the "Lustig style" but no one of them has been able to tell me, in fifty words or five hundred, what it was. Because each time, with each new book, there was a new creation. The only repetitions were those imposed by the physical media.
I often wish that Lustig had chosen to be a painter. It is sad to think that so many of his designs must live in hiding on the sides of books on shelves. I would like to have his beautiful Mallarme crystal or his Nightwood abstraction on my living room wall. But he was compelled to work in the field he chose because he had had his great vision of a new realm of art, of a wider social role for art, which would bring it closer to each and every one of us, out of the museums into our homes and offices, closer to everything we use and see. He was not alone, of course, in this; he was, and is, part of a continuing and growing movement. His distinction lay in the intensity and the purity with which he dedicated his genius to his ideal vision. — James Laughlin, New Directions
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.
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.
American photographer Julius Shulman's (1910 – 2009) images of Californian architecture have burned themselves into the retina of the 20th century. A book on modern architecture without Shulman is inconceivable. Some of his architectural photographs, like the iconic shots of Frank Lloyd Wright's or Pierre Koenig's remarkable structures, have been published countless times. The brilliance of buildings like those by Charles Eames, as well as those of his close friend, Richard Neutra, was first brought to light by Shulman's photography.
The clarity of his work demanded that architectural photography had to be considered as an independent art form. Each Shulman image unites perception and understanding for the buildings and their place in the landscape. The precise compositions reveal not just the architectural ideas behind a building's surface, but also the visions and hopes of an entire age. A sense of humanity is always present in his work, even when the human figure is absent from the actual photographs.
Today, a great many of the buildings documented by Shulman have disappeared or been crudely converted, but the thirst for his pioneering images is stronger than ever before. This is a vivid journey across six decades of great architecture and classic photography through the famously incomparable eyes of Julius Shulman.
“Some of his architectural photographs, like the iconic shots of Frank Lloyd Wright's or Pierre Koenig's remarkable structures, have been published countless times. The brilliance of buildings like those by Charles Eames, as well as those of his close friends, Richard Neutra and Raphael Soriano, was first brought to light by Shulman's photography. The clarity of his work demanded that architectural photography had to be considered as an independent art form. Each Shulman image unites perception and understanding for the buildings and their place in the landscape. The precise compositions reveal not just the architectural ideas behind a building's surface, but also the visions and hopes of an entire age. A sense of humanity is always present in his work, even when the human figure is absent from the actual photographs.” [Wikipedia]