Surf’s up in Southern California as the modern art world invades Nixonville and Regan City in the 1950s. A fascinating look at the start of something big: modern art in Los Angeles.
Morgan Neville’s documentary, “The Cool School,” is about the birth of the Californian modern art scene in the 1950s. It is told in the context of the Ferus Art Gallery, founded by Walter Hopps and Ed Kienholtz in 1956. As the story goes, they met for lunch at a hot dog stand and drafted a brief compact on the back of a hot dog wrapper. The compact stated they would jointly found and run a modern art gallery for five years.
They didn’t make it much longer than that before the gallery itself fell victim to its own success.
This is the film on the history of modern art in Southern California in the 1950s, when 99.99% of the population thought modern art was either a joke or a communist plot. As it turned out, the biggest joke was on the artists themselves, who could hardly believe it when their work started to sell. Some of them didn’t survive the experience.
The Ferus was temporarily closed in 1957 after local police arrested and charged Wallace Berman with obscenity as a result of his exhibition at the Ferus. How can you lose with luck like that? Apparently Berman lost, as it was his last show. He never recovered from the humiliation of being judged by police and local bureaucrats. But the gallery struggled on and a year or two later was actually making some sales.
The exhibition space, which at first hosted shows that looked like surfer parties, began hosting shows in the mid-1960’s with people in actual evening wear. This happened after Andy Warhol had his first, ever, exhibition of the fabled soup can paintings. Selling for $500 each, they competed well with the “real thing” advertised” for 25 cents at the grocery store down the street.
After they sold a dozen or so, Warhol decided he wanted to keep the 25 or so silk screens of the various Campbell’s products together, as a group. The curators went out and got them all back; preserving the package that today is worth millions. Go figure.
This film intersperses fascinating tapes of modern art legends Ed Ruscha, Frank Gehry, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Irving Blum, and Dean Stockwell with a never ending stream of art work peppered with interviews of locals, including Dennis Hopper. The end result is a picture of a bunch of guys who, while happy enough that their work was recognized, never quite knew what hit them. Many of the artists appear to have been taken advantage of in one way or the other by people up the food chain who had a better handle on the laws of supply and demand.
Beautiful archival footage of the L.A. urban landscape in the days when it looked more like unreclaimed desert than a city. Hugely wide streets look too big for the stores on either side, like oversized paws on a Great Dane puppy. As the stores and the traffic grew, the streets seem to shrink and soak up the bulk of the exploding population. But the artists in the old haunts stayed largely the same, even if the curators moved on, and the Ferus closed in 1967.
As the film says, the artists who made the Ferus simply grew up. Too many of them received too many offers they couldn’t refuse.
The original music is by Dan Crane and is one of the best surfer / 60’s / 70’s soundtracks you will ever run into. Great fun to watch for the archival footage, the soundtrack and the unique personalities of a time and place that we will never see again.
Release: March 28, 2008
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