BIRTH OF THE COOL: CALIFORNIA ART, DESIGN, AND CULTURE AT MID-CENTURY TIMELINE CHECKLIST

Ahead of its time, the Gibson Flying V guitar is taken off the market due to disappointing sales. Produced from 1958 to 1959 as part of Gibson’s new line of futuristic electric guitars, the design’s distinctive aerodynamic form projected a sleek confidence consistent with popular culture’s interest in space-age technology. Gibson reissued the design in 1967 and the Flying V became a favorite of Jimi Hendrix, who owned three, including a black custom-designed left-handed model.

Real Guitar (re-issue)

As the American Civil Rights Movement continues to gain momentum, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King travel to India at the invitation of Prime Minister Nehru. The trip is an opportunity for the American leader to meet followers of Mahatma Gandhi, whose teachings inspired much of King’s own belief in the importance of nonviolence in promoting social change.

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October 24: Playboy’s Penthouse premieres on national television. Hosted by a young Hugh Hefner, the show is an insider’s view of the ultimate modern bachelor pad and lifestyle. The show becomes a platform for Hefner to promote his interest in jazz and popular culture and he invites stars of the day to sit together on his sofa, drink, joke, and discuss their work. As a result of the show’s racially mixed guest list many stations across the South refused to pick up the program. The series went off the air in 1960, later to be relaunched as Playboy after Dark in 1968.

Clip from Playboy’s Penthouse on 19” flat screen

Robert Frank’s The Americans is published in the United States. The book is composed of eighty-three carefully sequenced photographs selected from twenty-eight thousand pictures taken by Frank from 1955 to 1956 on cross-country trips sponsored by two Guggenheim Foundation grants. The seemingly mundane and trivial shots of everyday life, often taken in low lighting with a grainy texture, at first earned Frank harsh criticism from American reviewers. The photos sought to capture all sectors of America—poor and rich, black and white, North and South—revealing a true portrait of the country. The Americans is now considered one of the most important works of twentieth-century photography.

-- Framed print from The Americans series, Collection of Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles --The Americans book on lectern.

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July 13: Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say” is released by Atlantic Records. In August it reaches number six on the pop charts, becoming the artist’s first crossover hit. The song was created spontaneously by Charles when his band ran out of arrangements at a night club engagement and needed to fill the remaining twelve minutes of its contract. The song’s enormous success gives Charles the freedom to leave Atlantic Records for ABC-Paramount in 1960, leading to increased visibility for his music and allowing him greater financial control over his output.

--Album Cover—“What’d I Say” --CD Listening Station w/ headphones

August: The Mini is introduced by the British Motor Corporation. Sir Alec Issigonis designs the Mini with a transversely mounted engine and front-wheel drive, allowing for an overall size of only about ten by four by four feet. The car became a fashion icon in 1960s. In 1961 the Mini Cooper, a sportier version of the original, was created by Issigonis and race car designer John Cooper and became a very successful rally car.

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The all-female quartet the Primettes forms in Detroit as a sister act to the Primes (later the Temptations). In 1961 three of the Primettes’ four founding members—Florence Ballard, Mary Wilson, and Diana Ross—sign with Motown Records and are renamed the Supremes. One of the most popular singing groups of the 1960s, the Supremes had a record five number-one hits in a row from 1964 to 1965, performing throughout the United States and abroad.

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February 3: Rock and roll pioneer Buddy Holly is killed in a plane crash with fellow musicians Ritchie Valens and J. P. Richardson (the Big Bopper). Only twenty-three years old at the time of his death, Holly had a profound influence on the development of rock music through his songwriting and innovative arrangements. Numerous bands, including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, became inspired by his unique style. In 1971 Dan McLean wrote the tribute ballad “American Pie,” including the line “the day the music died” as a reference to the plane crash.

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April 29: An exhibition of Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture opens at the Stable Gallery in New York City. In her August 1959 review in Arts and Architecture, critic Dore Ashton asserts that the exhibition—part homage to Brancusi and part meditation on the arts of Greece and Japan, where Noguchi had worked—is a revelation of artistic maturity and confidence: “Noguchi’s fate, which indeed hung in the balance for many years, and drew him off into an astonishing number of secondary adventures, has at last been decisively revealed. He is one of the very few major sculptors we have.”

1) Sculpture on pedestal: Pregnant Bird, 1958 Marble on wood base Collection of the Isamu Noguchi Museum, New York

2) Small photo blow up the piece in the 1959 Noguchi exhibition at the Stable Gallery

July 8: American servicemen Dale R. Buis and Chester A. Ovnand are killed in Vietnam. Two of the earliest combat casualties in the Vietnam War, Buis and Ovnand are the first names listed on the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Their deaths mark the beginning of a conflict that will span a generation, take approximately 58,253 American lives, and result in more than five million Vietnamese casualties, combat and civilian, by the war’s end in 1975.

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Verner Panton begins designs for the first cantilevered one-piece plastic stacking chair. In 1967 the German company Vitra helped Panton accomplish the technical feat of developing it for mass manufacture. This cool and graceful piece—with its slick, hard shell in bright colors—is now known simply as the Panton Chair. While the chair is emblematic of Panton’s pop-infused furniture and interiors of the 1960s and early 1970s, it remains a popular presence in film, television, and advertising today.

Chair on pedestal

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The microchip is patented. During 1958 two electrical engineers, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor, independently developed the monolithic integrated circuit and applied for patents the following year. The invention places previously separated transistors, resistors, capacitors, and connecting wiring onto a single tiny “chip” of semiconductor material. One of the most important technological advances in history, it makes microprocessors possible, leading to the development of portable, efficient, and affordable high-speed communication systems.

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The 1959 Plymouth Fury convertible features flamboyant tail fins, holdovers from middle-class America’s fascination with flashy automobiles in the mid-1950s that did not, however, fit in with the cool, understated style of the late 1950s. Plymouth nevertheless attempted to appeal to changing consumer tastes with a full-page advertisement in Life magazine that showed the car in front of a modernist home, ironically accompanied by the headline “Good Taste Is Never Extreme.”

Framed: original life magazine advertisement

May 28: Two small monkeys, Able and Baker, become the first living creatures to survive a space flight. They lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in a Jupiter Missile AM-18 and travel three hundred miles into space in fifteen minutes. Their successful journey helps the United States gain ground in the cold war “space race” with the Soviet Union. Although the Soviet Union had successfully launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, in 1957, it had not yet succeeded in keeping alive voyagers during a space mission.

Framed: Original Life Magazine

September 29: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis premieres on CBS. The sitcom was the first American television show to depict the world through the eyes of a teenager. Dobie, the main character, is an all-American boy with a crew cut who does not drink or smoke. His best friend, Maynard G. Krebs, however, is a beatnik who thinks fast, talks loose, and sports a goatee. Maynard’s cool, slacker attitude had not yet been depicted on American television. Despite the boys’ differences, they share a strong friendship and help each other deal with difficult parents, unrequited crushes, and other typical teenage problems.

DVD Clip on 19” flat screen

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April 10: The film Gidget opens, starring Sandra Dee. Adapted from the novel by Frederick Kohner, who based his story on his daughter’s adventures on Malibu Beach, the story centers on a peppy teenage girl who penetrates the masculine world of surfing, learns to “hang ten,” and falls in love, all in one summer. The film helps to popularize surfing slang, such as “out of this world!” and propels California surfing from an eccentric subculture to a national phenomenon. During the early 1960s a number of Hollywood studios produce spin-off surfing movies that celebrate the idea of endless summer fun.

Framed movie poster

Ruth Handler, co-founder of the Los Angeles-based toy company Mattel, introduces the first Barbie doll at the International American Toy Fair in New York City. The doll sports a ponytail, a black and white zebra-striped bathing suit, open-toed stilettos, sunglasses, and gold-colored hoop earrings. Handler created the doll as an ideal American young woman and named it after her daughter, Barbara.

2 vintage #1 Barbie dolls on a pedestal

October 2–3: The first annual Los Angeles Jazz Festival is held at the Hollywood Bowl. Organized by two young jazz enthusiasts from New York, the event is the first large-scale jazz festival held in Southern California, and evidences the region’s growing interest in jazz. The festival begins with a panel discussion on the role of jazz in the scoring of motion pictures and television, and follows with performances by Count Basie, Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughan, Coleman Hawkins, and many others.

Framed original festival program

July 1: Anatomy of a Murder, a film directed by Otto Preminger and starring James Stewart, is released. Duke Ellington wrote the film’s score, one of the first to be composed entirely of jazz. He was honored with three Grammy Awards for his work on the film: best musical composition, best performance by a dance band, and best motion picture sound track. The design of the cover of the original sound track record is based on Saul Bass’s animation for the film’s title sequence.

--Framed album cover --CD Listening Station w/ headphones

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June 25: The Dave Brubeck Quartet begins recording Time Out, a jazz album named for its innovative irregular meters. The album experiments with rhythms other than the usual 4/4 jazz beat, such as the 5/4 time signature used in the album’s biggest hit, “Take Five.” Brubeck and his band were influenced in part by the unique folk rhythms they heard while on tour in the Middle East and India in 1958. Despite its high level of experimentation, the record is a huge hit. It quickly goes platinum, and “Take Five” reaches the top of the pop charts.

--Photo blow up of Dave Brubeck Quartet --Framed album cover --CD Listening Station w/ headphones

August 17: Columbia Records releases Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz record of all time. The album brings together seven now-legendary musicians: Julian Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, and Davis. Based on the modal form of jazz, the music has a simple, steady background mode, over which soloists improvise melodies. This contrasts to other forms of jazz, such as bebop, that changed background chords more rapidly and relied more heavily on drums.

--Framed album cover --CD Listening Station w/ headphones

Pioneer computer animator John Whitney assists Charles and Ray Eames on the preparation of their seven-screen film Glimpses of the U.S.A. (1959). During this period Whitney developed a mechanical analog computer, built largely from surplus parts from World War II antiaircraft guidance systems, to make animation for motion pictures and television. Most famously, he used this early computer graphics engine to design the opening for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo.

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Charles and Ray Eames present their film Glimpses of the U.S.A. at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. In the 1950s the designers began to devote more time to communication design, creating exhibitions, films, and publications. The couple often used multi-image slide shows as a means to propose new associations between everyday objects. This technique proved very successful in Glimpses of the U.S.A., a twelve-minute presentation showing twenty-two hundred images on seven screens. Narrated by Charles Eames, the film was formatted to convey to Russian visitors a multitude of observations and perceptions about life in postwar America. The film was shown in the geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller for the exhibition.

Specially formatted clip on 19” flat screen

Photo of Charles and Ray Eames at leaving for Moscow fair

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July 28: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer releases Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest. Cary Grant stars as the movie’s main character, an advertising executive who is mistaken for a government agent. The film features shots of modern architecture including the antagonist’s home atop Mount Rushmore, which was modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural style, and the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.

--Movie Poster --Clip of modernist house on 19” flat screen

Gucci introduces an iconic new handbag that becomes a favorite of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Today, the bag continues to be a classic style sold in Gucci stores worldwide, and is named the "Bouvier" in honor of its greatest admirer.

Buckminster Fuller designs the pavilion for the American National Exhibition in Moscow in the form of a geodesic dome. The hemispherical frame is composed of triangular components linked by rods, independent of buttresses or vaults. This efficient, lightweight, and low-cost design offers ease of construction and the ability to cover a wide expanse of space.

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Architect Louis Kahn begins work on the Salk Institute for Biological Science in La Jolla, California. Kahn designs the seaside structure to be built out of low-maintenance reinforced concrete, wood, and marble. He structures it so that its angled windows and porches allow natural light to flood into the laboratories. The symmetrical design of the building is stark but elegant, and it is still considered one of the preeminent examples of modernist architecture today.

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October 21: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opens its first permanent home on Fifth Avenue in New York City, in a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright conceived the highly controversial building, now considered by many to be the crowning achievement of the architect’s career, as an inverted ziggurat. The radical design brought visitors to the top of the building by elevator, and then allowed them to view the art collection while strolling down the structure’s spiraling corridor.

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April 9: American architect Frank Lloyd Wright dies. During his long life and career (1887–1959), Wright built more than five hundred buildings and had an indelible influence on American architecture. His modernist style varied from his early “prairie houses”—characterized by low horizontal lines—to his “Usonian” homes—small, typically L-shaped, middle-income houses—to his larger public commissions. Leading modernist architects of successive generations studied and admired his work.

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October: Allan Kaprow stages the first “Happening,” 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, at the Reuben Gallery in New York. For this piece, Kaprow divides the gallery space into six makeshift rooms. Throughout the performance, the audience moves from one room to the next to observe eighteen Happenings that range from performers walking around the room mechanically to a performer squeezing orange juice into twelve glasses and then drinking it. Kaprow stated that his happenings sought to merge the distinctions between art and life, artist and audience.

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September 19: Four Abstract Classicists, organized by art critic Jules Langsner, opens at the Los Angeles County Museum. The exhibition brings together works by Southern California artists Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, and John McLaughlin. Langsner uses the term “hard-edge painting” to characterize these works’ nonfigurative geometry. In his catalog essay, he emphasizes the importance of form to this work, writing: “Forms are finite, flat, rimmed by a hard clean edge. . . . They are autonomous shapes, sufficient unto themselves as shapes.”

Painting from the 1959 exhibition Frederick Hammersley Sun Substance, 1958 Oil on canvas Collection of The Albuquerque Museum of Art and History

Lawrence Lipton publishes The Holy Barbarians. The text begins with interesting anecdotes from the lives of beat figures in Venice Beach, California. It then goes on at length to discuss the broader aspects of beat culture, from its beliefs about jazz and war, to its marijuana rituals, to what distinguishes a “beat” from a “square.” Intended as a sociological history of Southern California beat culture, it was interpreted by reviewers across the country as a guidebook to coolness.

Framed vintage book copy

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Olympia Press publishes William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in Paris. The novel, written in a hotel room in Morocco between 1954 and 1957, uses language in a jerky, hallucinogenic fashion that mirrored the ramblings of a heroin addict’s thoughts. The book deeply influences the writing of modern narrative fiction. When it is published in the United States in 1962, it brings about a landmark obscenity trial that results in the end of literary censorship in America.

Framed vintage book

Truman Capote begins researching the murders of the Clutter family in rural Kansas with his close friend Harper Lee. Capote becomes acquainted with everyone involved in the case, including the two men accused of the murders. After many years of following and researching the crime, Capote writes his “nonfiction novel” about the events, In Cold Blood, first published by The New Yorker in 1965.

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May 9: Los Angeles sheriff deputies forcibly evict the last remaining residents of Chavez Ravine in order to make way for the construction of Dodger Stadium. In the 1940s the city hired prominent architects Robert Alexander and Richard Neutra to design improved low-income housing for the area. During the heightened communist fears of the 1950s, however, the city canceled the project in order to develop a new stadium on the prime site. The forced removal of the last residents, the family of Manuel and Abrana Arechiga, becomes a signal moment in the long and bitter struggle between city officials and low-income residents. Dodger Stadium officially opens on April 10, 1962.

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July 24: American vice president Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev engage in the “Kitchen Debate” at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. The exhibition showcases American consumer goods in model rooms of a middle-class American home. In the model kitchen, the leaders debate the merits of each of their country’s political systems by focusing on the relative strengths of American or Soviet kitchen appliances, televisions, and washing machines. Nixon claims that the suburban American home exemplifies the nation’s freedom: “To us, diversity, the right to choose, is the most important thing. . . . We have many different manufacturers and many different kinds of washing machines so that the housewife has a choice.”

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A group of members of the African National Congress (ANC) break away to form the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a South African liberation movement. This political party promoted the severing of all ties with white African governments in favor of an overall black nationalism.

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February 16: Fidel Castro becomes premier of Cuba after leading a group of rebels to overthrow the government of Fulgencio Batista. Beginning in 1956 Castro and guerilla leaders, including Raul Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, led attacks against Batista’s armed forces in a series of small battles in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra Mountains. By December 31, 1958, the rebels had captured the provincial capital of Santa Clara and on January 1, 1959, Batista fled to the Dominican Republic. The revolutionary leaders then moved into the cities of Santiago de Cuba and Havana, attaining control of the country.

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Members of the Palestinian diaspora found Fatah, a political party calling for Palestinian liberation. The party becomes the principal component of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), under the leadership of Yasser Arafat.

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Florence Knoll sells Knoll Associates which she formed in 1946 with her husband Hans, staying on as design director. In addition to being a highly influential interior planner and designer, she helped Knoll Associates become one of the most important midcentury American furniture manufacturers. The company produced Florence Knoll’s designs, modernist classics such as Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona series, Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel pieces, Anni Albers’s textiles, and iconic 1950s designs such as Isamu Noguchi’s rocking stool, Eero Saarinen’s Womb and Tulip chairs, and Harry Bertoia’s Diamond chair.

Photo blow up (Florence Knoll and Eero Saarinen with the tulip base)

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Hy Hirsh creates his short film Chasse des Touches in Paris. This abstract animated film opens with colored lines twisting over rectangles set to the cool jazz of Thelonius Monk. Chasse de Touches is a prime example of Hirsh’s work, as described by film historian William Moritz: “The brilliance of Hy Hirsh's films often arises not so much from their technical originality as from their canny coupling of imagery with music that perfectly matches its mood.”

Film clip on 19” flat screen

December 16: The landmark exhibition Sixteen Americans opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Curated by Dorothy Miller, it includes groundbreaking works by Jay DeFeo, Jasper Johns, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella.

“Sixteen Americans” exhibition catalog on lectern

April 9--John F. Kennedy, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, opens a seven-city, six-speech swing through Wisconsin, testing the waters for a run in the Presidential campaign of 1960. During the early campaigning of 1959 the senator is established as the likely Democratic nominee for President, as he and his wife Jacqueline become symbols of youthfulness and hope. On August 24, 1959 Jacqueline Kennedy makes one of her first magazine appearances on the cover of Life with the headline “A Front Runner’s Appealing Wife.” On July 20, 1960 John F. Kennedy accepts the Democratic nomination at the party’s convention in Los Angeles and on November 8, 1960 he is elected 35th President of the United States.

Photo blow up—John F. Kennedy campaigning 1959

Framed cover of Life magazine with Jacqueline Kennedy and JFK, 1959

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