In 1981, the satirist Tom Wolfe wrote From Bauhaus to Our House, a witty takedown of the streamlined architectural modernism pioneered at Germany’s Bauhaus school, 60 years before. In its time radical and utopian, the clean-lined Bauhaus aesthetic had become by the 1950s and 1960s the rote style of postwar corporate capitalism in America and allied countries. Wolfe likened the steel and glass towers of the International Style to boxes for refrigerators.
Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes and others counterattacked, pointing out Wolfe’s lack of architectural expertise—lacking as well in art history and theory, the target of his previous book, The Painted Word (1975), about abstract painting—but Wolfe’s witty iconoclasm struck many non-specialist readers as a common-sense, emperor’s-clothes response to fad, fashion, and snobbery.
(If you have seen the 1949 movie based on Ayn Rand’s bestselling novel The Fountainhead, you may remember the scene in which the visionary architect hero played by Gary Cooper appears, bare-armed and sweaty, wielding a jack hammer, keening along the same quasi-iconoclastic lines: a beefcake pinup for the credulous.)
Fads and fashion change, and the creative heroism of one generation becomes the stultifying strait-jacket of the next. We’ll see how the playful, ironic eclecticism of the postmodernists, which superseded the modernist Bauhauslers, plays in coming years, as building and energy costs soar, supply chains constrict. and the superior American standard of living, once thought eternal and absolute, falters. Will we look back on America’s postwar years, often viewed as a white-man’s monoculture, as a lost utopia?
One artist who is clearly fascinated with Modernist architecture is the San Francisco native Michael Murphy, who studied and worked in Mexico, Ireland, and London. Finding the utilitarian aspects of architecture limiting, he began making drawings of the memorable San Francisco buildings of his youth: e.g., the Russell House in the Presidio, and the Buddha and Li Po Lounges in Chinatown. Murphy says, “I wanted to highlight buildings that to me had faded into the background of what people see. They may see them everyday but they don’t actually see them anymore.”
The resultant images, which the artist has dubbed Supersonic Modernism, perhaps due to his affinity for the glamorous Jet Ageand the travel posters of TWA’s David Klein, constitute his “personal interpretation of modern architecture and memory,” commemorating and combining the real and the unreal, “architecture, built and imagined … coupled with a non-cynical acknowledgement of American consumerism.”
Supersonic Modern is the name of Murphy’s small gallery in North Beach, as well as his website, offering fellow Midcentury Modern enthusiasts his stunning prints. The images expertly balancing Cubist collage, Pop color, sleek travel design, and abstract composition to celebrate —with hints of David Hockney and Ed Ruscha—the romance and glamor of modernity. Two abstract collages of airport interiors could almost be by another enthusiast of modern life, Stuart Davis.
Supersonic Modernism is also the name of the current Avenue 12 Gallery show (through August 16) of some 40 small to medium-sized acrylic paintings on canvas from the artist’s Paint and Ink series of the past decade. They allow the artist freedom to, in the terminology of the Abstract Expressionists, “push paint around,” in dialogue with the materials, exploring varied rendering styles and a fuller palette of moods and feelings ranging from witty humor to darker satire on the human condition.
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Dark skies streaked with wisps of cloud and smoke and inchoate tangles of improvised abstract brushwork, akin to the dibasic calligraphy of Abstract Expressionism and the motion-blur mists from Francis Bacon’s much-touted “nervous system,” hint at mysteries antithetical to the most advanced machines for living. Murphy’s balance of realism and minimalist abstraction suggests affinities with the mid-century Precisionism of painters Ralston Crawford and Charles Wheeler, whose famed 1955 oil “Golden Gate,” with the deep blue sky framed by the diagonals of the burnt-orange bridge tower, could, aside from the extreme perspective foreshortening, almost be by Murphy.
Golden Staters will enjoy the artists’s painterly, witty reinterpretation of our longstanding postwar landmarks. For Angelenos, there are the Pan Pacific Auditorium; the hillside stilt houses, including the flying-saucer Chemosphere House; the car-friendly restaurants, Johnie’s and Norms; and the hip and happening Sunset Strip (with its punning title, “Sunset Trip,” and collage composition referring to Sixties drugs and split-screen cinema).
For San Franciscans, there are Marin County’s Civic Center and former Birkenstock headquarters (soon to itself become a museum featuring mid-century design); Telegraph Hill’s bars and restaurants, Upper Grant Avenue’s Savoy Tivoli and Green Street’s Gino and Carlo; and the Transamerica Pyramid, Embarcadero Center, the threatened Vaillancourt Fountain, and the Chinatown Holiday Inn—semi-abstract structures from the ideal city that their designers envisioned; and, finally, three nearly identical stucco houses from The Great Highway, facing the Pacific at Ocean Beach, labeled “The Painted Ladies,” with their unassuming, anonymous aesthetics in witty contradistinction with the postcard-scenic Victorian Painted Ladies of Alamo Square.
It’s a trip back in time, to a present that can still feel like the future.
SUPER SONIC MODERNISM runs through August 16 at Avenue 12 Gallery, SF. More info here.
