(Click on images to enlarge)

Pauline Gibling Schindler, 1920. R. M. Schindler photo. (McCoy Papers, Archives of American Art)

Pauline Schindler’s mercurial relationship with husband R. M., her penchant to surround herself with artistically-minded, leftist intelligentsia and the creation of a salon-like atmosphere at the Kings Road House are all well-documented in Robert Sweeney’s highly recommended “Life at Kings Road: As It Was 1920-1940″ in the 2001 MOCA exhibition catalog The Architecture of R. M. Schindler organized by Elizabeth A. T. Smith and Michael Darling from which much of the material in this post is gleaned. All references will be denoted by (Sweeney). Sweeney recreated a fascinating story from the lively and voluminous correspondence preserved by Pauline Gibling Schindler (PGS).

I hope to build upon Sweeney’s findings by concentrating more deeply upon PGS’s considerable efforts to promote and market the brand of modernism produced by her notable circle of avant-garde architects, composers, musicians, designers, dancers, artists, writers, gurus and bohemian and radical friends and acquaintances.Her importance to a wider acceptance and appreciation of modern architecture and the arts in Southern California is much under-appreciated as her Kings Road, Carmel and Ojai salons, editorials, articles, exhibitions and lecture bookings generated numerous contacts which resulted in important clients for both her husband and his erstwhile partner and tenant Richard Neutra and others fortunate enough to have been in her circle.

Other useful sources were: R. M. Schindler by Judith Sheine, Phaidon, 2001. (Sheine), The Daybooks of Edward Weston, Volume II: California, edited by Nancy Newhall, Aperture, 1961, (Weston), Dione Neutra’s Richard Neutra: Promise and Fulfillment, 1919-1932, Southern Illinois University Press, 1986, (P&F), Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970, by Thomas S. Hines, (Sun-Hines), Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, Oxford University Press, 1982, (RN-Hines), and Esther McCoy’s Vienna to Los Angeles: Two Journeys: Letters Between R. M. Schindler and Richard Neutra, Arts + Architecture Press, 1979, (McCoy).

Pauline Gibling Schindler, from a prominent east coast family, studied music for four years at Smith College (see below) after which she moved to Chicago and taught music from 1916 to 1919 at Jane Addams‘ Hull House, a settlement house for the poor and center for social reformers and intelligentsia. During Pauline’s time at Smith, Addams and Emily Green Balch founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom for which both, on separate occasions, were to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Pauline’s mother Sophie became the Treasurer of the League. In 1919, Pauline met and married architect Rudolph Schindler, and moved with him to Taliesin, his employer Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio. Ironically, Richard Neutra would also briefly stay at Hull House upon his arrival in Chicago from New York in March 1924 where he taught children’s drawing classes to earn his keep. (RN-Hines, p. 48-9, P&F, p. 116).

Top center, Pauline Gibling and below center with cat, Dorothy Gibling, at a costume party, Smith College, 1915. (McCoy, p. 33).

Frank Lloyd Wright appointed Schindler superintendent of his office for the duration of his two year period in Japan supervising the construction of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. At the same time, with a large commission for the oil heiress, Aline Barnsdall, Wright set up office in Los Angeles, which is where the Schindler’s moved in 1920. The following year Schindler set up his own, independent practice and, in collaboration with Pauline’s college friend Marion Chace and her contractor husband John, designed and built the Kings Road House with financial support from Pauline’s parents. The Kings Road House, wrote the architectural historian Rayner Banham, “is perhaps the most unobtrusively enjoyable domestic habitat ever created in Los Angeles.” (Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Harper & Row, 1971, p. 182).

The house reflected Pauline’s social philosophy, a place of simplicity where people from all walks of life could meet together. Pauline had expressed this kind of open meeting house in a letter to her mother well before she had met Schindler. She presciently wrote from Hull House in 1916,

During this period, the lifestyle embodied in the design for their house was observed by the Schindlers (and the Neutras after they moved in in March 1925) through diet and exercise, psychoanalysis, education, and the arts of music, dance, painting and photography. The outdoor courts were dining rooms and playrooms for their toddlers, who ran free under the sun year round. They slept in the open air, ate simple meals of fruits and vegetables by the fireplaces, and wore loose-fitting garments of natural fibers closed with ties rather than buttons. At their parties, the terraces served as stages for musical and dance performances; in the audiences were many aspiring California artists, actors and writers.

Edward Weston was one of the earliest visitors to the completed house. Weston likely met the Schindlers at the Walt Whitman School around 1921 where Pauline taught and Weston’s sons Chandler and Brett were enrolled. The Schindlers visited Weston’s studio in the summer of 1922 and later “when the evening was ripe” the group moved over to Kings Road. Weston “[was] of course very much excited about the house, and wanting to see it by daylight. All of it a fearfully stimulating evening…RMS and I couldn’t sleep, with the stimulus of the music, and Mr. Weston’s pictures.” (Artful Lives: Margrethe Mather, Edward Weston, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles by Beth Gates Warren, p. 253 and letter from SPG to family, July 1922). The Schindlers, and later the Neutras, would become lifelong friends and collaborators with Weston and his sons.

Former Neutra employee Harwell Hamilton Harris’s very insightful introduction to Esther McCoy’s Vienna to Los Angeles: Two Journeys: Letters Between R. M. Schindler sheds much light on the Sunday evening open houses Pauline organized at Kings Road and the people who attended them, including himself after his first visit in 1928. His introductory comments were filtered through the lens of his wife, Jean Murray Bangs, who was a close friend of Pauline’s since her return to Los Angeles in 1921 from a radical foray in New York where she befriended idols of Pauline’s, Emma Goldman, Max Eastman and John Reed. (Harwell Hamilton Harris by Lisa Germany, University of Texas Press, 1991, p. 52).  He described, 

“Pauline – eager, ardent, ready for any new idea in any field – made an experience of everything and savored it to the full. … People who didn’t like her called her a poseur, which was unjust. She worked hard and did without almost all the things women commonly want, and did it with a grace few women in her position have achieved.” Harris continued, “The Schindler’s open house on Sunday evenings attracted the “arty” intellectuals of post-World-War I. … Hollywood drew them like a magnet. … Poets, playwrights, dancers, photographers and musicians were not the only visitors on these occasions. Socialists, reformers and intellectuals of all varieties were there. The talk was not chit-chat but about revolutionary ideas in all fields. The New, the Advanced. There were no fights because the participants, too, were advanced and so in fundamental agreement with one another. Most were locals; some were habitues; others were ones who came and went. Everyone felt free to bring a friend if he were interesting; it was a way to entertain.” (Two Journeys, pp. 13-14).

Harris then specifically recalled attendees Edward Weston, playwright and actor Maurice Browne, poet Robert Nichols, dancer John Bovingdon (see above), pianists Doris Levings and Max Pons, among others and finished with, “Whether the group was large, filling both studios and the garden, or small and restricted to one room or the patio, the place alone raised the common above the commonplace. It freed everyone’s expression. It was a tool Pauline and RMS used with imagination and skill and it deserves to be remembered.”

Thanksgiving at Kings Road, 1923. Clockwise from left, Herman Sachs, Karl and Edith Howenstein, Anton Martin Feller, E. Clare Schooler, unidentified, Betty Katz, Alexander R. Brandner, and obscured, Max Pons, to the right of Sachs. Not shown, the Schindlers and Dorothy Gibling. Photo by R. M. Schindler. From ”Life at Kings Road: As It Was 1920-1940″ by Robert Sweeney in The Architecture of R. M. Schindler, p. 97.

Despite the radical slant of most of the visitors to Kings Road, traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations were observed. The 1923 Thanksgiving feast seen above was attended by Herman Sachs, Karl and Edith Howenstein, A. R. Brandner, Betty Katz, Max Pons, E. Clare Schooler, Dorothy Gibling and others. Sachs, soon-to-be Schindler client and collaborator seen above left, established the short-lived Chicago Industrial Arts School at Jane Addam’s Hull House in 1920 and directed the Dayton Institute of Art in 1921-22 before moving to Los Angeles in 1923. Karl and Edith Howenstein (above back center) were also friends of the Schindlers in Chicago where Karl had also worked at the Art Institute before moving to Los Angeles to become Director of the Otis Art Institute. The Howensteins first lived in the Kings Road guest wing for two years between 1922-4.

Edward Weston, “Betty in Her Attic,” 1920. Betty Katz. Center for Creative Photography Weston Collection.

Former Kings Road tenant Viennese architect A. R. Brandner, who would later marry Katz in 1943, recalled, “Pauline made the gatherings but it was Schindler who enjoyed them.” The parties were, “…happy times, unique gatherings – the intelligentsia and desperate characters. Pauline preferred a serious party, but when Schindler and Sadakichi Hartmann got together it was glorious fun.” (McCoy, p. 14, 41). A multi-talented artist, writer, critic and actor, Hartmann played the role of the Chinese prince in Douglas Fairbanks’ The Thief of Bagdad in 1923. (See below). He was favorably reviewed in a July 5, 1923 L.A. Times article “New Faces and New Angles on Favorites” by Edwin Schallert. (For an interesting sidebar on the discontent caused by the film caused in China see “The Thief of Bagdad Uproar” and my “Krisel and Alexander in Hollywood“).

Sadakichi Hartmann, 1919, Edward Weston portrait. Photo courtesy of Center for Creative Photography. http://ccp.uair.arizona.edu/

“Hartmann Reading Poe at Schindler’s”, pen and ink, Boris Deutsch, January 8, 1928. From the exhibition catalog The Life and Times of Sadakichi Hartmann, 1867-1944, UC-Riverside, 1970.

Sadakichi Hartmann in The Thief of Bagdad, 1923.

Announcement for a February 22, 1930 talk on modern art at Kings Road. From Sweeney, p. 107.

Noted English playwright and theater troupe organizer Maurice Browne, in his autobiography Too Late to Lament wrote, “And Pauline Schindler, brilliant, warm-hearted, bitter-tongued, who was trying to create a salon amid Hollywood’s cultural slagheap, invited me to her home to lecture on Keyserling.” Sweeney writes, Pauline was effusive in anticipation: “[the party]…is going to be huge. We have never had more than a hundred guests before … But this will be overflowing.” (Sweeney, p. 96 & PGS letter to her mother, [n.d.] circa October, 1925).

Pauline’s mother Sophie, a frequent guest at Kings Road wrote in a December 16, 1926 letter to her husband,”…when company drops in [Pauline] is a most fascinating hostess. Sunday evening it struck me again how much atmosphere, uniqueness and charm there is about her parties, and what interesting people she collects.” (Sweeney, p. 104).

The marriage was not a peaceful one. Schindler was truly a Bohemian and did not respect the institution of marriage, and behaved accordingly.Pauline had wanted to consider the marriage a legal formality to satisfy her family, but was much more conventional in her response to it than she imagined she would be. (From http://www.ex-tempore.org/ExTempore96/cage96.htm). The painter Conrad Buff, who gravitated in both the Kings Road and Jake Zeitlin social orbits and commissioned Neutra in 1927 to design the garage and entryway for his Eagle Rock house and studio, said of Schindler in his UCLA Oral History, “Schindler, besides being a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, was a very handsome fellow. He was quite a ladies’ man, and part of his business was to make love to all the ladles he could. He had a very interesting wife, but that didn’t bother him. There was quite a group of people that used to meet down at Schindler’s house.” (Buff Oral History).

PGS and RMS’s relationship finally reached the breaking point in late August 1927. Pauline packed up and left with son Mark in secrecy to avoid a confrontation. (Sweeney, P&F, p. 167). She had just weeks earlier written a highly favorable two-part review of tenant Richard Neutra’s Wie Baut Amerika? which was published in the July 30 and August 6 issues of the Los Angeles City Bulletin. This was about the time that Philip and Leah Lovell, RMS clients and Kings Road salon habitues, commissioned Neutra to design alterations for  Lovell’s Physical Culture Center in downtown Los Angeles and what would become his tour de force Lovell Health House which launched his distinguished career.

The Neutra’s had previously moved into the Kings Road guest-studio in March 1925 and the Chace wing about a year later. Galka Scheyer, Kings Road guest-studio tenant while studying modern architecture with Schindler for three months over the summer of 1927, was not only witness to Pauline’s departure but apparently facilitated the Lovell Health House commission by talking to Lovell, Schindler and Neutra about their mutual concerns of who would (or wouldn’t) be working on the Health House design. (Sweeney, P&F, p. 171 and “Braxton Gallery, 1928-1929, Hollywood” by Naomi Sawelson-Gorse in The Furniture of R. M. Schindler, UCSB, p. 87).

“Recalling Happy Memories”, Peter Krasnow, summer 1927. Galka Scheyer lecturing on The Blue Four at Kings Road. From Galka E. Scheyer and The Blue Four: Correspondence, 1924-1945 edited by Isabel Wunsche, Benteli, 2006.

Barnsdall, eager to start her own theater company in Chicago and produce her own plays, offered to build Browne and Van Volkenburg a larger, more modern theater whom she commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design preliminary plans for in 1915. Aline put the plans on hold as she moved to California in 1916 and opened a theater in rented space in Los Angeles. She then commissioned Wright to begin Hollyhock House on Olive Hill, the Schindler’s raison d’etre for moving to Los Angeles, originally planning to add a theater later which never came to pass. (From Frank Lloyd Wright: Hollyhock House and Olive Hill by Kathryn Smith, Rizzoli, 1992, pp. 21-23). When the Chicago Little Theater failed the next year, Van Volkenberg and Browne headed up theater troupes in both Seattle and on Broadway in New York to much critical acclaim. (NY Times Archives). Pauline coincidentally also knew Ellen Janson from her early 1920s involvement with one of the members of Aline Barnsdall’s experimental theater group. (Sheine, note 27, p. 283).

 

From Carmel-By-The-Sea by Monica Hudson, Arcadia, 2006. Carmel Pine Cone Office and later the Denny-Watrous Gallery, Dolores Ave., M. J. Murphy Builder, Lewis Josselyn photo.

 

 

The July 11th cover featured a photo of Point Lobos by Johan Hagemeyer and a feature story “The Good Neighbor” under Pauline’s byline on her erstwhile mentor Jane Addams and her Hull-House. Pauline also included a brief article “Maurice Browne in a Second Edition” reporting on Ellen Janson Browne and four-year old Maurice, Jr. passing through town and the whereabouts of Maurice Sr. currently producing a play of George Bernard Shaw’s in London. Pauline wrote of Browne, “In Carmel he remains a memory and an influence, for Morris Ankrum, George Ball, and many others here busy with the stage have had their first dramatic training under the direction of this intense and passionate artist.”

The July 18th issue featured a cover photo of Jane Addams and a headline announcement of her upcoming speaking engagement at the Golden Bough. It also included a letter “To Carmel With Love From Halcyon” from editorial board member Dora Hagemeyer who was spending the summer in the home of Ellen Janson and Maurice Browne and an announcement for the upcoming opening of an exhibition of the paintings of Henrietta Shore in the Hagemeyer Studio on Ocean Avenue. In her lengthy and insightful review of avant-garde pianist Henry Cowell’s performance at the Golden Bough which was illustrated with a Virginia Tooker woodcut, Pauline wrote, “The program was a study of the development of the tone cluster principle which used as a method by a versatile artist of unusually free imagination. Of these, some are small in range, and contribute a scintillating brilliance to simple diatonic material. It is as though the tones had passed through a sound prism, and been broken up into their parts and overtones.”

Shore’s “The Bull Fight” then appeared on the cover of the July 25th issue along with a poem by Dora Hagemeyer and an article discussing the financial crisis Edward Kuster was facing in his attempt to keep the Theatre of the Golden Bough open. Also in that issue, Pauline reported at length on the activities surrounding Jane Addams visit to Carmel. After a Wednesday luncheon in her honor at the Mission Tea House, Addams lectured on Sunday evening on “Governmental Steps Toward World Peace” to an overflow crowd at the Golden Bough Theatre which was followed by a reception at the home of Lincoln Steffens and Ella Winter. Addams (see below) was on her way to Los Angeles for four days of speaking engagements and a banquet in her honor at the Biltmore Hotel and then to Hawaii for the Pan-Pacific Women’s Congress and Congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.  (“Los Angeles Will Honor Sociologist”, L.A. Times, July 26, 1928, p. I-11). It is likely Addams and Neutra’s paths also crossed during her Los Angeles visit.

Jane Addams, Los Angeles, July 1928. George W. Haley photo for the L.A. Herald-Examiner. Courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection.

 

The August 1st issue featured Edward Weston’s “Shell” on the front cover, a review of Robinson Jeffers’ new book of poems Cawdor, and the marriage of Neutra and Schindler AGIC partner and Carmelite contributing editor Carol Aronovici. The August 15th number had Ellen Janson’s poem “Sirius” on the front page. The following week’s edition profiled San Francisco arts patron Albert M. Bender and reported on his visit to the Jeffers, Stanley Wood and the Steffens and his accompaniment by Mr. and Mrs. Ansel Adams.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Carmelite, March 20, 1929. (From my collection).

Richard Buhlig, 1922. Margrethe Mather portrait. From Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration by Beth Gates Warren, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2001, p. 97.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Carmelite, July 3, 1929, pp. 7 -8. (From my collection).

Henry Cowell, 1923. Margrethe Mather portrait. From Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration by Beth Gates Warren, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2001, p. 111.

 

Dione Neutra in performance at Kings Road, 1928. From Nature Near: Late Essays of Richard Neutra, edited by William Marlin, Capra Press, 1989, p. 47.

With Richard just wrapping up the design for the Lovell Health House, the Neutra’s took a much-needed week’s vacation for the lecture and concert. They stopped on the way to Carmel after a delightful drive along the coast to observe “the strange inhabitants of Oceano.” (P&F, p. 206). The Neutra’s son Raymond recalls his mother Dione “talking about walking in the Oceano Dunes and coming across a naked hermit friend in his hut.” (July 15, 2010 e-mail message from Raymond Neutra to the author). Dione’s description of the two stormy night events in Carmel are recorded in a December 1928 letter to her parents. (P&F, p. 173). 

 

November 20, 1926 Los Angeles Times announcement from ProQuest.

In 1929 Hazel Watrous became associated the Seven Arts Press which printed The Carmelite. (See above). In 1935 Denny and Watrous established Carmel’s now-famed annual Bach Festival, a continuing highlight of the town’s social season.

 

The Bruton Sisters, Helen, Margaret and Esther (right). Imogen Cunningham portrait. From “The Brutons and How They Grew” by Dorothy Puccinelli, California Arts & Architecture, October 1940, p. 18. (From my collection).

Pauline published wood block and linoleum cut prints by Esther Bruton (see above 2 images), Carmelite staff artist and early Kings Road visitor Virginia Tooker, Carmelite contributing editors Stanley Wood and Ray Boynton, also a faculty member at the California School of Fine Arts (see below) and others. She published a Special Robinson Jeffers issue featuring his poetry, and also published poems by Dora Hagemeyer (see above front page), wife of photographer Johan Hagemeyer, long-time friend of Edward Weston, and erstwhile Schindler House tenants and briefly roommates Galka Scheyer (see below) and John Bovingdon (see earlier). PGS also published Scheyer’s article “Free, Imaginative and Creative Work in Drawing and Painting” in the June 26th issue on the work of her art students at the Anna Head School for Girls in Berkeley which was selected for European and West Coast exhibition tours sponsored by the American Federation of Arts. (For more on this see my Foundations of Los Angeles Modernism: Richard Neutra’s Mod Squad).

 

Raymond Boynton, circa 1940. Imogen Cunningham portrait.

 

Ray Boynton woodcut. The Carmelite, March 27, 1929, front cover. (From my collection).

Left, poems by Galka E. Scheyer. Right, an example of Pauline’s crisp ad and page layout. The Carmelite, July 3, 1929, pp. 5 & 9. (From my collection).

Pauline’s circle ran ads in The Carmelite which she took great pleasure in designing, as she did redesigning the front page masthead beginning with the May 30, 1928 issue, her first at the helm as editor. (see earlier covers above). The page layout and ad design in the July 3, 1929 issue (above right) includes ads for contributing editors Edward Weston and Stanley Wood and supporter Dene Denny.

Robinson Jeffers, Carmel, 1929. Edward Weston portrait from Weston’s Westons: Portraits and Nudes by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. (From my collection).

Robinson Jeffers, Time, Vol. XIX, No. 14, April 4, 1929. Edward Weston cover photo.

In 1929 Pauline had a review of Robinson Jeffers’ poetry published in the prestigious literary journal Transition edited by Eugene Jolas in which she called him “a major American poet.” She was also likely responsible for the article “American Nature Photos” featuring Edward Weston’s work in the same issue.Pauline published a review titled “Poet on a Tower” of Jeffers’ latest book of poems, Dear Judas, in the April 30, 1930 issue of Survey Graphic. This period was the pinnacle of Jeffers’ fame as evidenced by Weston’s April 4, 1929 Time Magazine cover photo. (See above). Weston, (see portraits below) one of the earliest recruits to the Schindler’s Kings Road circle with his first enthusiastic visit recorded as being in May 1922, became a lifelong friend. (Sweeney, p. 92).

Left, Edward Weston circa 1940s. Ansel Adams Portrait. Photo courtesy of Center for Creative Photography. http://ccp.uair.arizona.edu/ Right, Weston portrait by Henrietta Shore, 1927. (From Henrietta Shore: A Retrospective Exhibition: 1900-1963, Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, p. 48).

“Edward Weston on the Way” by Pauline Schindler, The Carmelite, December 26, 1928, p. 2. (From my collection).

Johan Hagemeyer Studio, Carmel. Photo courtesy OAC and U.C. Berkeley Bancroft Library, Johan Hagemeyer Photo Collection.

 

Tired of city life, Weston moved to Carmel in early January 1929, trading spaces from a temporary stay in fellow photographer Johan Hagemeyer’s studio in San Francisco to renting his Carmel summer studio. Pauline’s article “Edward Weston on the Way” in the issue above announced the impending arrival of another friend from her Kings Road salons and soirees. Weston described the move at length in his Daybooks. (Weston, pp. 99-108). Pauline published Dora Hagemeyer’s poetry periodically in The Carmelite. (In 1923 Hagemeyer opened a portrait studio in San Francisco and also built a summer studio in Carmel which soon became a meeting place for artists and intellectuals. It was there that he met Weston, who encouraged Hagemeyer to further his career in photography). Weston and Hagemeyer had a falling out in late 1929 over the studio lease agreement. Weston then moved his studio to the Seven Arts Building upstairs from The Carmelite‘s offices in January 1930. (See photo below).

 

Left, Johan Hagemeyer, 1928. Edward Weston portrait. Photo courtesy of Center for Creative Photography. http://ccp.uair.arizona.edu/. Right, Johan Hagemeyer and Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, 1921. From Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration by Beth Gates Warren, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2001, p. 85.

In 1927 Lincoln Steffens and wife Ella Winter came to the U.S. and by chance to Carmel, where Steffens, looking for a quiet place to work, decided to settle. They bought a house from the artists Cornelis and Jessie Arms Botke on San Antonio near Ocean, which they called the Getaway. Steffens referred to it as a “refuge for any poor s.o.b. in a jam.” They lived there from 1927 to 1936. Typically, having avoided all of his friends by moving to a remote locality, he next invited them all to come visit. Their house became a gathering place for intellectuals far and wide. Robin and Una Jeffers and Edward Weston became their close friends. Winter and Steffens became contributing editors to The Carmelite beginning in 1928. Being used to the excitement of New York, Winter’s involvement with The Carmelite made living in “the sticks” bearable. Winter recalls in her 1963 autobiography And Not to Yield, “I became absorbed in the job. I was a journalist at last. It began to take all my time; when Pauline was away I did all her jobs.”  (For more on Winter and Steffens and Carmel in the 1930s see “Ella Winter: Gallant Fighter” by Connie Wright http://www.carmelresidents.org/News0505.html).

Ella Winter, 1932. Edward Weston Portrait. Photo courtesy of Center for Creative Photography. http://ccp.uair.arizona.edu/

 

Describing Pauline’s impact on the village’s intelligentsia Winter continued,

 ”She was the divorced wife of an Austrian architect in Los Angeles she always called Aramess – later I discovered they were his initials, R. M. S. – and she was in many ways the moving spirit of the village…Pauline had to be modern about everything, but in her undifferentiating enthusiasms she sometimes saw further than the rest of us. When her friend Galka Scheyer came in 1928, with pictures by Paul Klee and the Blue Four that people laughed at and wouldn’t think of buying, Pauline said Klee could be understood in either poetry or music. She was the first to introduce us to Dada, surrealism, Schoenberg…This “crazy nut” as we thought of her, kept everything at a boil, the sensible and the ridiculous all mixed up. “

“But she’s crazy in the best sense,” Harry Dickinson maintained; and it must be said that Pauline achieved a good deal. She started our art gallery to show the work of local painters and exceptional photographers, Edward Weston, Edward [Johan] Hagemeyer, Ansel Adams; helped set up a music society that became celebrated, with international artists stopping on their way from Los Angeles to San Francisco to perform in Carmel; and it was Pauline the flibbertigibbet who sparked off our weekly, The Carmelite…The whole village was drawn into The Carmelite’s orbit. At studio parties they didn’t discuss psychoanalytical plurality or “the inevitable polarity of thought,” but the paper, its style and vocabulary, its make-up, illustrations, circulation.”

Ironically, Ella Winter would later become an avid collector of the Blue Four after marrying author, screenwriter and fellow communist David Ogden Stewart in 1940 in Hollywood. In a backhanded compliment to Pauline Schindler and Galka Scheyer she wrote in “I Bought a Klee” which appeared in the July 1966 issue of Studio International, 

“My relation to Klee had been non-existent. In 1928 a woman had come to the art colony-by-the-sea where I then lived with an exhibition of Die Blau Reiter. We were used in that colony to very modern music, ultra-modern design, avant-garde poetry, but the latest in painting had not yet reached Carmel. I looked at the pictures and with the rest of our jeering art population I’m afraid I jeered. Galka Scheyer, the Swiss woman who brought them, and an old friend of Klee’s, tried to explain them, but I don’ think it made any impact. She left with as many as she brought.”

In January 1929, contributing editor Lincoln Steffens tried to gain control of The Carmelite and turn it over to his wife Ella Winter. Pauline published Steffen’s letter to the editor in the January 23rd issue:

“There are rumors in circulation of a conspiracy…to oust me and my gang from the Carmelite. We are leaving of our own free, mechanistic will. You have always been glad to have us do all the work we would, as long as what we did was up to the high-flying standard you kept mentioning…” Taking exception to her lack of business acumen and flighty editorial style, Steffens continued, “I lifted up my highbrows and thought such an editor would be happier if she had the time to dance and sing and compose music and music criticism unhindered by and unhindering the mere business of journalism…” (Sweeney, p. 105).  

UPS staff writer Frank H. Bartholomew reported on the controversy which was picked up as far away as Pittsburgh. “The staff of the “Carmelite” has quit en masse, and the blanket resignation includes such prominent names as Fremont Older, Lincoln Steffens, Mrs. Lincoln Steffens (Ella Winter), Charles Erskine Scott Wood and Sara Bard Field. Mrs.Pauline G. Schindler, the publisher, now holds the fort alone.” Pauline answered Steffen’s above diatribe thusly, “That staff tried harder to acquire the paper than to write for it.” (“Dispute Over Carmel Paper Amuses Coast”, Pittsburgh Press, February 15, 1929, p. 21).

Lincoln Steffens, Carmel, 1929. Edward Weston portrait from Weston’s Westons: Portraits and Nudes by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. (From my collection).

A comparison these two mastheads indicates who Steffens’ “gang” members might have been. Left is from the December 26, 1928 issue and right is from March 20, 1929. The additions of trusted friends Edward Weston, Galka Scheyer, and Richard Neutra from the Kings Road circle after Steffens’ and Winter’s departure and financial help from her father gave Pauline the strength to continue publishing for eight more months, maintaining The Carmelite‘s undeniably high editorial standards and crisp graphic design and modern typography. (See example below).

“I, being on the editorial staff, had to listen in until after midnight though bed called me, having retouched all day. Village gossip about the divorce of the Lincoln Steffens and Ella Winter. A letter from Una Jeffers, written on the train, again expressing their pleasure in the portraits. And a catalogue from Film und Foto – Stuttgart (see below): they reproduced my head of Galvan, and published my article, hung 18 of Brett’s photographs and 20 of mine. I sent 20 from each of us.”

Film und Foto was a very important avant-garde traveling exhibition in which Richard Neutra, through his European publishing and Deutscher Werkbund connections, was responsible for America’s contributions.

Weston writes in his January 3, 1929 Daybook entry,

“… Neutra is always keenly responsive, and knows whereof he speaks. Representing in America an important exhibit of photography to be held in Germany this summer, he has given me complete charge of collecting the exhibit, choosing the ones whose work I consider worthy of showing, and of writing the catalogue forward to the American group. … I have busy days ahead.” (Weston, pp. 102-3).

Weston wrote in his catalog section introduction “America and Photography”,

“I have written of photography as direct, honest, uncompromising, – and so it is when it is used in its purity, if the worker himself is equally sincere and understanding in selection and presentation. Then it has a power and vitality which moves and holds the spectator. There can be no lie in such photography. No human hand of possible frailty has in the recording lessened its pristine beauty, nor misrepresented its meaning, destroying significance.”

Neutra’s choice of Weston to make the American selections provided the entree for him, son Brett and friend and future Group f.64 member Imogen Cunningham (along with Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, and others), to be included in this seminal show alongside the European avant-gardists. The below catalogue and exhibition poster as well as show installation were designed by El Lissitzky who also designed Neutra’s 1930 book Amerika (see directly below) which features a 1927 Brett Weston photo of a factory in Los Angeles in El Lissitsky’s cover photomontage and internal photos by both Brett and Edward. This was likely the first cover photo Brett had ever had published and it was also published in the Los Angeles Times as part of Athur Millier’s review of his first one-man show in July 1930 at Jake Zeitlin’s Book Shop. (Millier, Arthur, “”Photographs for Himself,” L.A. Times, July 25, 1930, p. III-12).

Amerika: Die Stilbildung des Neuen Bauens in den Verienigten by Ricard Neutra, Verlag Von Anton Scholl, 1930. 1927 Brett Weston photo of a Los Angeles factory included in the cover photo montage designed by El Lissitzky. From my collection.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Film und Foto exhibition catalog and poster, 1929, Deutschen Werkbunds, Stuttgart. El Lissistzky cover design and Willi Ruge poster design. Film und Foto

Right, Manuel Hernandez Galvan, 1924. Edward Weston portrait from above exhibition catalog.

On September 16th, the Steffens “gang” finally wrested control of The Carmelite from Pauline. The meeting she called to hopefully garner badly needed financial support turned into a palace coup. The September 20 issue of the Carmel Pine Cone reported in an editorial titled “Torn From the Arms of its Mother”, “Coolly, almost coldly then, the deal was put through. New papers were drawn, strictly legal: a pen was placed in the shaking hand of Mrs. Pauline Schindler; “Sign on the dotted line,” came the command. And Mrs. Schindler signed.” The Carmelite folded for good in December 1932. (Sweeney, p. 105).

 

A September 20, 1929 entry in Weston’s Daybook references Pauline’s freelance work and a peek into the Carmel social scene she was undoubtedly involved in. “Up at 4:00 and in my darkroom straightening prints from work of yesterday and the day before: work which was strenuous enough to put me to bed at 8:30. At last I have been printing the peppers. I had to have an excuse to do them for conscience’s sake, for orders are still behind: the excuse was Pauline’s request for several prints for Vogue. But I notice that instead of printing just one, I found it necessary to print five, – for selection! Well, they are gorgeous, – the strongest things I have done, outside of some portraits… A big mask party planned for tomorrow night, which Ramiel [McGehee] is engineering. Over fifty invited from all walks of life: Pebble Beach and Highlands Society to Carmel Bohemians! I am in the excitement only as a spectator: until the night!”

Weston’s Daybook entry for October 27, 1929 reads, “…Dr. and Mrs. Lovell arrived wanting to take Brett and me to a football game. Another day lost, at least for work. Friends arrive here on their vacation, and in vacation moods. One cannot always deny them.” This visit occurred just four days after receiving the certificate of occupancy for their new Neutra-designed Health House near Griffith Park in Los Angeles.PGS left Carmel a short time later but returned to visit often, especially for exhibition openings such as Edward Weston’s at the Denny-Watrous Gallery.For example, her review of Weston’s July 1931 retrospective exhibition was published in the July 29th issue of The Carmelite indicating that she was still actively participating in Carmel events although no longer officially associated with her old pride and joy. (See the 1946 MOMA exhibition catalogue The Photographs of Edward Weston edited by Nancy Newhall, p. 36).


For a period of years she gravitated between the Theosophist communities of Halcyon and nearby Oceano and Ojai where Mark was in enrolled in the private Ojai Valley School from October 1932 to June 1937. (Sweeney, p. 111). The Schindlers and Neutras were both involved with people associated with the Krotona Institute of Theosophy headquartered in Beachwood Canyon until it moved in 1926 into a complex of buildings near Ojai, California, designed by Robert Stacy-Judd. (Krotona Colony in Hollywood). Renowned Indian mystic and guru Jiddu Krishnamurti also set up shop for his Order of the Star sect in Ojai the same year where he was visited by wealthy Theosophist supporter J. J. (Koos) van der Leeuw, brother of future Neutra VDL Research House financier C. H. (Kees) van der Leeuw in 1928. (See article below). Koos gave numerous Theosophical lectures around Los Angeles during visits in 1924, 1928 and September 1931. (Los Angeles Times). He could very well have crossed paths with the architect as his Industrialist/Theosophist brother had visited Neutra in Los Angeles during May 1931 to view the Lovell Health House and Neutra’s other projects and lecture on “The Future of Modern Factories” at an Electric Club meeting at the Biltmore Hotel. (See “Architecture to be theme of Dutch Speaker”, L.A. Times, May 18, 1931, p. I-3. See also Richard Neutra and the California Art Club for more on Kees and Neutra).

 

 

 

 

Standing from left to right: Koos van der Leeuw, AM Cochius (Leerdam glass factory director), D. Rajagopal, Kees van der Leeuw. Sitting: Nityananda (Krishnamurti’s brother), Philip Baron van Pallandt, Krishnamurti, Harold Baillie-Weaver (teacher Krishnamurti), Count Fabrizi Ruspoli and Miss. Cornelia Dilkraaf, National Representative of the Association in the Netherlands. Photo taken 09-30-1923. From http://www.landgoedeerde.nl/Krishnamurti.htm

 

The above group portrait of a 1923 Theosophical get together at Castle Eerde is important as it links the van der Leeuw brothers, Krishnamurti and D. Rajagopal. Rajagopal’s wife Rosalind later had an affair with Krishnamurti and commissioned Neutra in 1934 to design a remodel of her apartment in Hollywood. (Discussed in more detail later in this article).

Jiddu Krisnamurti, ca. 1920s. Photographer unknown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiddu_Krishnamurti

“The more I see of the reaction the so-called ‘modern architecture’ causes at large, the more I can perceive the confusion this new style is creating in the minds of the public and the experts. Nobody seems able to distinguish between sincere contemporary work and the atrocities of the fashionable fakers. It is urgently necessary to explain the real meaning of the movement and to give the public a vocabulary thru which to understand it intelligently … I am not a professional lecturer but find myself forced to undertake such educational efforts as a matter of self defense.” (From Framed Space).

Henry Braxton Gallery, 1624 N. Vine, Hollywood, R. M. Schindler, 1929. Viroque Baker photos. (From Sheine, p. 144). Note the Schindler-designed Braxton Chair in the right photo.

There is evidence that PGS was collaborating with Galka Scheyer’s efforts to market the “Blue Four” as the Braxton Gallery (see above) was consecutively exhibiting Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Feininger and Klee from March through May, 1930. R. M. Schindler designed the “ultra-modern” gallery next door to the Hollywood Brown Derby Restaurant at Hollywood and Vine for art dealer Henry Braxton which opened in September 1929. (For much more on this see my Richard Neutra and the California Art Club). The nexus for the commission was none other than Pauline’s now close friend Galka Scheyer who introduced RMS to Braxton. Scheyer and Braxton had hammered out the details for a long-term collaboration the previous May in San Francisco. Scheyer probably knew Braxton through her connection to Edward Weston and art dealer Howard Putzel, as well as with Sam and Harriet Freeman, whose house guest she was in 1930 before staying again at Kings Road in 1931-32 in the Chace wing. Galka collaborated on the gallery design with Braxton and Schindler and helped plan the initial exhibitions in Braxton’s new space.

An agent without a gallery, the shrewd Scheyer was eager to associate with Braxton’s establishment, as she had with the Oakland Art Gallery in the Bay Area, to both mount exhibitions of the Blue Four and other avant-garde artists and to gain entree into Hollywood’s elite emigre circle, especially, Josef von Sternberg who had recently purchased 18 pieces from Braxton’s Archipenko show at his previous location. Schindler was also commissioned to design frames for some of her clients including Louise and Walter Arensberg. (See “Braxton Gallery, 1928-1929, Hollywood” by Naomi Sawelson-Gorse in The Furniture of R. M. Schindler, UCSB, p. 88).

The Blue Four Exhibition Catalogue, Braxton Gallery, Hollywood, 1930. Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute, Peg Weiss Papers.

Braxton and Scheyer had originally planned to open the new space with the “Blue Four” but their most important prospective client, movie producer and future Neutra client Josef von Sternberg, had already scheduled a trip to Europe. The duo substituted Peter Krasnow, close friend of Scheyer, Pauline and Edward Weston (see images below), for the inaugural show which included seven of his carved wood reliefs. RMS and Richard Neutra had recently collaborated with Krasnow on the design of a major commission for a ceremonial cabinet for Temple Emmanuel-El San Francisco described in a July 28, 1929 L.A. Times article “Krasnow’s Work Shown” as “an unusual thing of wood and glass which houses vestments and religious objects.” Krasnow carved the panels which were applied to the sides of the chest. Weston was shown the chest in December 1928 after which he wrote in his Daybook, “I take my hat off to you Peter, for a superb piece of work both in conception and technical execution. Tears came to my eyes,…” (Weston, p. 98). L.A. Times art critic Arthur Millier gave the avant-garde space a rave review with a September 15, 1929 article “‘Ultra’ Gallery Arrives: Hollywood Sees ‘Modern’ Spaces and Angles as Background for Art.”

An exhibition of Edward Weston photographs followed Krasnow and Scheyer’s “Blue Four” series of individual shows soon followed in March and April 1930 after von Sternberg’s return from Europe. All of the exhibits were favorably reviewed by Millier. Weston had a concurrent show open February 8th at the Denny-Watrous Gallery in Carmel. It seems logical that Pauline and Galka coordinated their efforts to draw bigger crowds to, and enhance the impact of, their related exhibitions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Left, Peter Krasnow, 1929. Edward Weston portrait. Photo courtesy of Center for Creative Photography. http://ccp.uair.arizona.edu/ Right, “The Photographer” (Edward Weston), lithograph, 1928, by Peter Krasnow. (From “Naturally Modern” by Victoria Dailey in LA’s Early Moderns, p. 78).

Schindler also was commissioned to draw preliminary plans for a beach house (see below) for Braxton and actress, author and screenwriter Viola Brothers Shore which never came to fruition possibly due to their move too New York not too long thereafter.

Henry Braxton and Viola Brothers Shore Residence, Venice Beach, 1928-30, unbuilt.

Not long after returning from Carmel, probably in early 1930, Pauline rented Frank Lloyd Wright’s Storer House at 8161 Hollywood Blvd. where she stayed for over a year. Galka Scheyer also stayed for a period of time and she also sublet an entire floor to Brett Weston where he established his first photographic studio. Weston wrote in his Daybook on February 21, 1931, 

“…it took me over an hour on the bus from Pauline’s, who lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house [Storer House] in the foothills. Brett has his studio there, so I stayed with him rather than Flora. Paul, I got to know and appreciate better than ever, to really love her.” (Weston, p. 204). 

 

Brett Weston portrait of Jock Peters, ca. 1930, likely commissioned by Pauline for her “Creative Contemporary Architecture of California” exhibition while Brett was staying at the Storer House. Image discovered by Melinda Gandara, archivist, UC Santa Barbara Art Museum, Architecture and Design Collections, Jock Peters Collection. 

In note 31, p. 247 in his Wright in Hollywood: Visions of a New Architecture, Robert L. Sweeney writes, “Mrs. Schindler had earlier justified moving into the house to her father, who was supporting her: she was there as a caretaker, paying a nominal sum each month; the house was to serve as a “background” for work she was “planning to do, – which involves an active association with four or five modern architects here, and which has the purpose of selling their design services to the rest of the world.”

Brett Weston, 1931. Edward Weston portrait. Photo courtesy of Center for Creative Photography. http://ccp.uair.arizona.edu/

In a  March 1, 1931 letter to Frank Lloyd Wright’s wife Ogilvanna from the Storer House (see photo below), Pauline wrote, “the room in which I sit writing is a form so superb that I am constantly conscious of an immense obligation to mr. wright. when my small son, – eight years old, – was feeling very tender toward me one day he said, “muv, i love you so much…as i love this room.” such superlative joy it gives us both. like a drama of sophocles, a violin sonata of haendel.” (Wright in Hollywood, p. 63). This letter could have been an attempt to mollify Wright after his refusal to participate the previous year in her “Creative Contemporary Architecture in California” exhibition and lecture series plans. It is hard not to see the irony (and the psychological interplay in her relationships with RMS and Wright) of Pauline’s staying in Wright’s Storer House with young son Mark so close to Kings Road.

Storer House, 8161 Hollywood Blvd., 1924, Frank Lloyd Wright. R. M. Schindler photo. From Wie Baut Amerika? by Richard Neutra, Julius Hoffmann, 1927, p. 61. (From my collection).

Pauline undertook another entrepreneurial venture while staying in the Storer House. She developed a line of stuffed animals called “Christopher Robin’s Friends” to hopefully take advantage of the “Winnie the Pooh” craze sweeping the country at the time. Her distinctive graphic design for the below ad appeared in the November 1930 issue of Toy World. An accompanying story by “Winnie-the-Pooh Rockets to Toy Stardom” in the same issue references “Pauline Schindler, Hollywood, maker of Christopher Robin’s Friends soft toys.” (Toy World, November 1930, p. 58). She more than likely was working with noted Stephen Slesinger, creator of comic strip characters and the father of the licensing industry, who had acquired US and Canadian merchandising, television, recording and other trade rights to Winnie-the-Pooh from A. A. Milne in the 1930s, and developed Winnie-the-Pooh commercializations for more than 30 years. Pauline might have learned a few pointers on the craft of toy making from erstwhile Kings Road salon habitue Barbara Morgan who was a renowned puppeteer, artist and art teacher at UCLA. (Annita Delano Oral History). Morgan’s husband Willard was also Richard Neutra’s photographer of record for his 1927 Jardinette Apartments and 1929 Lovell Health House. Pauline and Barbara shared interests in painting, theater, dance, exhibiting, puppetry, and music thus it is not a stretch to imagine her picking up some tips from Barbara on stuffed-animal making before she and Willard moved to New York in 1930.

“Christopher Robin’s Friends” ad, Pauline Schindler, Toy World, November 1930, p. 19. Courtesy of Timothy Schwartz, 10-7-2010.

Scheyer and Schindler likely continued to coordinate their exhibitions and lecture bookingsas their “Blue Four” and “Creative Contemporary Architecture of California” exhibits traveled the circuit of West Coast galleries and Western Association of Art Museums. (See “The Impact From Abroad: Foreign Guests and Visitors” by Peter Selz in On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art 1900-1950, p. 102). As an example, either Pauline or Galka booked a lecture for RMS on the relationship of architecture to the Bauhaus at the Oakland Art Gallery in conjunction with Scheyer’s April-May 1930 Lyonel Feininger exhibition. (See “Modernist Photography and the Group f.64″ by Therese Thau Heyman in On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art 1900-1950, p. 249). (For a fabulous John M. Weatherwax character study of Galka Scheyer with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in San Francisco at about this time, go to Diego, Galka and Toby).

 

Edward Weston’s Daybook indicates that on April 7, 1930, Galka Scheyer, traveling between the Braxton Gallery and Oakland Art Gallery Feininger shows with Mark Schindler, visited him in Carmel for two days and critiqued his print of fish and kelp from Point Lobos. Weston wrote that she [Scheyer] was a “dynamo of energy”; her insight was “of unusual clarity”; she had “an ability to express herself in words, brilliantly…she is an ideal go-between for the artist and his public.” (Weston, p. 151-2). Weston’s account of a February 2, 1927 costume party hosted by Peter Krasnow, is indicative of the closeness of his friendship with Scheyer. He writes, “…Galka Scheyer begged my leather breeches, putees, pistola and Texano, so I got in exchange her outfit even down to panties, and a marvelous make-up job to boot. As a ravishing woman I was a success with the women. (Weston, p. 3).

An expanded version of the Pauline’s exhibition under the title “Contemporary Architecture, Decoration and Store Design” was exhibited at the new Plaza Art Center (see photo below) in October 1931 in the old Italian Hall Building’s newly remodeled second floor gallery space run by the Plaza Art Club. (See “Roundabout the Galleries”, L.A. Times, Oct. 11, 1931). Austrian emigre and Kings Road salon habitue F. K. Ferenz was responsible for remodeling the building and commissioning R. M. Schindler to design plans for remodeling the building’s arcade shops and a restaurant. (See “Plaza Art Center to Open”, August 16, 1931 Los Angeles Times and“Embassy Restaurant and Arcade,” 1931 project, in Schindler by David Gebhard, p. 200). Muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, after consulting with Richard Neutra and Sumner Spaulding on fresco techniques and materials, completed his Mural “Tropical America”, also commissioned by Ferenz, on the side of the building in 1932. (See photo below). (See my “Richard Neutra and the California Art Club” for much more on the Siqueiros mural. See also Eric Merrill’s excellent blog post for more on Siqueiros and Neutra’s involvement with the California Art Club. Thanks to Ellen Landau, Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve for alerting me to this link.). (See also the Ruben Martinez article “Uncovering L.A.’s whitewashed history” in the September 19, 2010 issue of the Los Angeles Times and “Bringing ‘America Tropical’ back to life” in the September 9, 2010 issue).

Italian Hall, Plaza Art Center, Olvera Street as it looks today. Note the 1932 David Siqueiros mural “Tropical America” on the side of the building.

The same participants were included in an exhibition at the New York Architectural League from April 18 to 25, 1931. Pauline’s curatorial work bringing together this group for the West Coast traveling show prompted Joseph Urban, who had been in contact with RMS since 1922, to write to show organizer Ely Jacques Kahn on December 12, 1930,

“Group of at least seven California architects, including Schindler, Neutra, Peters, Davidson, Webber [sic], Wright, are willing to send drawings for Architectural League Exhibition. Will be valuable stimulus to the progressive movement East. Can we give them a good room or alcove for them to show effectively together?” (Sheine, p. 256).

This show also preceded the 1932 MOMA exhibition by a year. Helping to grease the skids was Neutra’s presence in New York on a stopover during his world tour the date the letter was written. Three weeks later Neutra would have the honor of presenting an inaugural series of three lectures in Urban’s recently completed New School for Social Research Building’s new auditorium.

After initially agreeing to be part of the West Coast exhibition, and despite Pauline’s praise of his groundbreaking work and heartfelt recognition of his influence on her husband and Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright angrily requested to be removed from all future showings. He had apparently heard through son Lloyd, who had refused to participate, that the exhibition was being titled “Three Architects of International Renown” or as he later described it, “Frank Lloyd Wright middle, Neutra right, Schindler left” or as “Christ crucified between two thieves.” As Wright explained it in a letter to Lewis Mumford, “All novices, in the nature of the Cuckoo, have not hesitated to lay their eggs in my nest…” (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography by Meryle Secrest, p. 393 and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water by David Hoffmann, p. 88).

About this time PGS wrote Edward Weston trying to interest him in doing a book of his photographs. He replied quoting from her letter, “‘Let’s do a book on Edward Weston.’ I do not think he has had the nationwide publicity to warrant a publisher’s interest. They are not in business except to make money. My love and greetings, Edward.” (McCoy, p. 59). (Weston’s first monograph would be produced by his friend and patron Merle Armitage in 1932). Weston presented Pauline a portrait of Diego Rivera made in Mexico in 1924, possibly around this time. (McCoy, p. 60, n.d.).

Diego Rivera, Mexico, 1924. Edward Weston portrait. Photo courtesy of Center for Creative Photography. http://ccp.uair.arizona.edu/

Rendering of Schindler’s Wolfe House on Catalina Island announcing Schindler’s lecture at the Denny-Watrous Gallery. The Carmelite, September 4, 1930, p. 1.

 

Schindler lecture announcement. The Carmelite, September 4, 1930, p. 4.

Pauline had also been trying to arrange lectures by Neutra and Schindler at the Denny-Watrous Gallery in Carmel. Hazel Watrous guaranteed either a $25 fee, replying, “Schindler has a mastery and charm, Neutra has ideas about mass production. I’ll leave the choice to you…We have arranged with Galka Scheyer to have her exhibit here in June. Edward Weston has been showing his prints for several weeks.” (McCoy, p. 60).  PGS then booked a lecture for Schindler on September 6th. (See above). Still a frequent contributor since her ouster, Pauline introduced Carmelite readers to Schindler with an introductory article in which she wrote,

“Of the three architects [Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra and R. M. Schindler] it is often said that Schindler is most the creative genius. He sees first the pure form. His designs are uncompromising as far as period architecture is concerned. Those who have wondered why the modernist does not build himself a “Spanish house” will have an opportunity to hear the basic principles back of modern building when Schindler speaks on Saturday. An opportunity for questions will also be given, and slides of Schindler’s and Neutra’s buildings will accompany the talk.” (Schindler, Pauline, “Schindler, Modern, Speaks on Architecture,” The Carmelite, September 4, 1930, p. 7).

Long-time family friend and still on the Carmelite’s editorial board, Edward Weston took great exception to the treatment Schindler suffered at the hands of his patron John O’Shea after his gallery lecture.

“Schindler bore himself with dignity, he was a gentleman, the others were not. I admit John O’Shea had been drinking, good, – one’s character is revealed with a few drinks. After the lecture he made disparaging remarks, even indulging in personalities in a loud voice standing near Schindler, head turned toward him, face in a leering mask. Disgusting! I sat down and wrote The Carmelite an article giving full vent to my feelings, not using names, but several offenders were plainly enough indicated.” (Weston, p. 187).

Weston’s angry letter to the editor presciently ended with,

“Always the new in art, science, philosophy, has been ridiculed. But this time the joke is on the persecutors, for the new architecture has long ago been accepted, is spreading all over the world. It is for those who live today. Future generations, looking back upon the beginnings of the American Renaissance, which we are in, and being so close cannot recognize, will point out such names as Wright, Neutra, Schindler, who in the face of smirks and guffaws, went their own way – building with foreesight, faith and hard work.” (Weston, Edward,  ”Schindler,: The Carmelite, September 11, 1930, p. 6.

Soon thereafter, John O’Shea invited Weston to a stag party which he tried to get out of but finally attended. He wrote in his September 17th Daybook entry, “I spent my evening trying to keep them off art and keep my temper. Dickinson said, “Weston is too serious!” But they were the serious ones – that [Carmelite] article had a sting! I was sober enough to sit back and watch the others, especially John: and his face revealed much. I saw a man, soured, cynical, negative. Perhaps he knows he can never reach the heights he tried for. A fine painter, but nowhere near a great artist. I feel sorry for him, but that does not excuse his childish nonsense.”

In April 1932 Hazel Watrous asked Weston to write a review for The Carmelite for the Denny-Watrous Gallery John O’Shea exhibit and he agreed writing, “I sweat doing it, – because to a degree I had to resort to evasion…” Hazel, Dene, John and wife Molly all asked him to do the review. “Each one of these friends has not only been very kind to me, but has helped materially to raise my economic status. Of course I am trying to excuse my guilty conscience.” (Weston, p. 211-2).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Carmel Hours”, Pauline Schindler, Touring Topics, November 1931. Courtesy Los Angeles Public Library.

 

Pauline’s above 1931 slice-of-life story “Carmel Hours” with Edward Weston photos depicting a day in Carmel and surrounding area was published in editor Phil Townsend Hanna’ Touring Topics. (See my related post Phil Townsend Hanna). The article mentions many of her old friends and haunts and gives insight to her memorable days spent editing The Carmelite in 1928-29 where, in my opinion, she was at her creative best and was probably most happy.

John Varian, Halcyon, 1920s. Ansel Adams Portrait. Photo courtesy of Center for Creative Photography. http://ccp.uair.arizona.edu/

 

Temple of the People, Halcyon, Theodore Eisen, Architect, 1925

 

Edward Weston’s Daybook provides another link between Cowell and Halcyon with this August 24, 1930 entry, “Last night to Henry Cowell’s New Operetta, “the Building of Bamba,” given at the Forest Theater: So poorly produced that one could hardly say whether it had possibilities or not. Many of the cast were from Halcyon, colony of mystics. I have my doubts about the esoteric when it does not include the aesthetic! I certainly would not have gone to an opera, disliking stage bellowing, – worse combined with acting, even if the bellowers are good: these were awful, – most of them, but I had hopes this might be a new note, or new music from Henry. But no, much of it sounded like old church hymns poorly sung.”

Another close friend of the Varian’s was Irish poet and mystic Ella Young who, after emigrating from Ireland in 1925 to escape imprisonment for supporting the Irish Republican Army, lectured widely across the United States and taught Celtic mythology and Irish history at U. C. Berkeley before settling in Oceano. Ella’s audiences were enthralled – not only by her great knowledge but also by the beauty and romance of her words. She became an important literary and spiritual figure in California, much as she had been in Dublin, influencing people like poet Robinson Jeffers, photographers Ansel Adams and Edward Weston (see portraits below), artist John O’Shea, and composer Harry Partch. She found her faeries again in the sacred land of Point Lobos and in the isolation of her cottage garden on the dunes of Oceano . http://www.thesunsraven.com/dsellayoung.html

Ella was responsible for introducing her lifelong friend and fellow Irish Republican Army supporter Gavin Arthur, grandson of former President Chester A. Arthur, to the Varian’s, through which he discovered the Oceano Dunes. (see below). Arthur settled in the Dunes in 1930 with the vision of forming a utopian society of like-minded individuals there. Ella would visit often and christened the Dunite settlement Moy Mell, Gaelic for “Pastures of Honey.” She could feel the rhythms of the Dunes and the vibrations in the individual coves.

Chester Allen (Gavin) Arthur III, Moy Mell, 1932. Photo courtesy of Dr. Rudy Gerber. (From The Dunites by Norm Hammond, p. 56).

 

 

Ella Young and Virginia Best Adams in Santa Fe, NM, 1929. Ansel Adams photo. From Ansel Adams: An Autobiography, New York Graphic Society, 1985.

On a 1929 trip to Santa Fe to photograph people and landscapes, Ansel Adams and wife were accompanied by Ella Young whom Adams described, “Ella was an event! Superficially an eccentric, she was a brilliant and sensitive woman with an imposing career in law and politics and had been dangerously active in the Irish Revolution. Feeling that she had fulfilled her obligation to society, she turned to poetry and Irish myths. Ella believed in the Little People and said that she communicated with them often, especially her indentured pixie, Gilpin.”

Ella Young’s cottage in Oceano, 2008. Denise Sallee photo. http://www.thesunsraven.com/dsellayoung.html

 

In the August 29, 1929 issue of The Carmelite Pauline featured a Helen Bruton woodcut and a poem by John Varian on the front page and a Dora Hagemeyer article “A Day with Ella Young” which described her home and garden and John Varian installing a bookshelf for her. Ella Young sat for both Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, both of whom were very impressed by her persona and beliefs.

In his autobiography Maurice Browne described Ella Young as “looking like a six-thousand-year-old Druid priestess who had just sat to Rider Haggard for her portrait.” He recalled a picnic with her and Ellen Janson on the sand-dunes where Young invoked a spell on a firm of Los Angeles realtors who were selling lots to far-distant Middle-Westerners. “She drew a circle in the sand…and for an hour within that circle performed rites and in a language unknown to me chanted incantations. When finished she erased the circle and said: “I think that we should hurry home.” We hurried home. Within ten minutes over those few thousand square yards there broke a storm unparalleled, it was said later, in living memory.” (Too Late to Lament, p. 281).

Some very interesting interviews indeed of Ella Young herself, and Gavin Arthur and Ansel Adams specifically pertaining to Young and her circle can be listened to at the following link. http://www.dunescollaborative.org/EllaAudio.html

Gavin Arthur invited part-time Halcyon resident and Kings Road habitue Ellen Janson mentioned earlier and  friend Pauline to be assistant editors of his new publishing venture, Dune Forum. Pauline’s first recorded visit to Moy Mell was in September 1933. (Sun-Hines p. 325). The initial six-page “Contributors Number” (see below) published in late summer 1933 included an opening one-page editorial by Gavin describing the Dunes, their psychological importance being halfway between the two West Coast metropolises of San Francisco and Los Angeles, the aims of the magazine and solicitations for contributions of material from like-minded individuals. Later in the issue he describes the Dunes lifestyle in much detail.

Oceano Dunes, Drawing by John O’Shea. Front Cover, Dune Forum Contributor’s Number, circa August 1933.

Editorial Headquarters for Dune Forum, Moy Mell, 1933-4. Courtesy Schindler Family Collection, Friends of the Schindler House. (Sweeney, p. 111).

 

Ella Young then described Gavin and Janson:

Ellen Janson is a recognized poet whose work has appeared in such magazines as the London Mercury, Harper’s, Vogue, Poetry. Born and brought up in Seattle, she is a westerner of the modern generation, tall, free, forward-looking. Although she has spent just enough time in London, Paris, Berlin, New York to be thoroughly cosmopolitan, her heart has always been on this Coast, her home in Los Angeles, her chief inspiration in the Dunes. Her exquisite taste, her sure sense of beauty, will bring to the Dune Forum a distinction of which it will have the right to be proud.”

Janson can be seen in the below 1948 photo on the deck of her Schindler-designed home during the most serious period (late 1940s and early 1950s) of their likely long-term relationship. Schindler apparently previously received the steep hillside lot in payment for design of the Laurelwood Apartments. (Sheine, note 27, p. 283). Janson also wrote the first significant Schindler biography in 1938 which was later included in a “book” he assembled compiling all of his published written articles, a map, notes, a directory, and a list of works which was sent to various publishers in the late 1940s, including Peter Blake at the Museum of Modern Art to try to promote interest in a monograph of his work. (Sheine, p. 265).

Ellen Janson, 1948, Janson Residence, R. M. Schindler. Photo courtesy of the Architecture and Design Collection, UC Santa Barbara. (From The Architecture of R. M. Schindler, p. 164).

 

Envelope for a letter from RMS to Ellen Janson, postmarked October 22, 1947. From LA Modern Auctions Catalog, February 10, 2008, lot 61, Rudolph M. Schindler ephemera. Lot included numerous letters from Rms to Janson spanning a 20-year period.

Letter from RMS to Ellen Janson, dated October 28, 1947. From LA Modern Auctions Catalog, February 10, 2008, lot 61, Rudolph M. Schindler ephemera. Lot included numerous letters from RMS to Janson spanning a 20-year period.

 

Arthur closes Dune Forum’s Contributors’ Number with acknowledgments to: John O’Shea who did the cover drawing, Ella Young, Leone Barry, and Harwood White; and for the promised co-operation of Jack Conroy, Lincoln Steffens, Robinson Jeffers, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Sara Bard Field, Charles Erskine, Scott Wood, J. Paget Fredericks, Marie Welsh, Roderick White, Stewart Edward White, and the many other good friends of the Dune Forum.

All seven issues of Dune Forum are available in their entirety in PDF format on-line at Dune Forum.

Pauline wrote the above article, “Oceano Dunes and Their Mystics” in the fall of 1933 and submitted it to editor Phil Townsend Hanna’s Touring Topics to hopefully help market Dune Forum. By the time it was published in February 1934, the magazine had changed it’s name to Westways and Dune Forum was into it’s third issue. The article describes the Dunes and surrounding environs and local inhabitants including Ella Young and Gavin Arthur and the impending publication of Dune Forum. I speculate that the two people saluting the sun on top of the Dunes are nudists Elwood Decker and Pat O’Hara who had to don bathing suits for the photo shoot. One of them, most likely O’Hara, wrote a “Rejoinder” to Loring Andrews’ article “Nudism – What Is It?” for the January 1934 issue under the nom de plume “A Goofy Nudist.” Maurice Browne expounded at length on the Dunites in his autobiography. “Near a tumbledown jetty jutting into the ocean stood a cluster of dilapidated hovels. Here for eight or nine months of the year lived the hobo commoners, … Unseen in the sand-dune desert, the hobo aristocracy [the Dunites] lived all year round.” (Too Late to Lament, p. 279).

Oceano Dunes, 1933, Brett Weston. From The Photographer and the American Landscape, Museum of Modern Art, 1963.

 

The January 15, 1934 issue of Dune Forum above featured a cover photo by Brett Weston and an editorial by Pauline titled “North South” in which she reports on a school to be designed by Richard Neutra and Krisnamurti’s impending visitation to Ojai. The issue also contained poetry by Ella Young and an article on Communism by Ella Winter, who continued to contribute to The Carmelite after Pauline’s ouster. Her page 5 contributor’s bio reads, “Ella Winter is known to many as Mrs. Lincoln Steffens. She is a writer and lecturer highly valued by the Communist Party. She is the author of “Red Virtue”, and represents The New Masses in California.”

 

 

The February 15th issue features a Willard Van Dyke cover photo of the dunes. Edward Weston, a longtime friend and mentor of Van Dyke and fellow Group f.64 member along with Ansel Adams, visited the Dunes with him for the first time just weeks earlier, more than likely through his connection with Pauline, to obtain cover photos for this and future issues.

 

Willard Van Dyke, 1932. Edward Weston portrait. Photo courtesy of Center for Creative Photography. http://ccp.uair.arizona.edu/

 

The opening editorial reviews Ella Winter’s article in the previous issue, “In Carmel, Lincoln Steffens and Ella Winter seemed equally convinced that unless every intelligent person throws himself body and soul into the Communist Cause we will soon have a Fascist Terror in this country that will put both Mussolini and Hitler into the shade…” and references composer John Cage’s first visit to Moy Mell and includes his “Counterpoint” to Roderick White’s critique on “Modern Music.” Poetry by John Varian was published posthumously. This may have been about the time Pauline’s relationship with Pat O’Hara temporarily ended and her affair with John Cage began. Cage stayed at Kings Road at the end of 1933 and staged concerts there which might have been where they met. (Sweeney, p. 110 and Sun-Hines, p. 325).

Cage attended the February issue editorial meeting at Moy Mell and possibly began the affair with Pauline shortly thereafter. Cage visited Pauline in Ojai on several occasions in early 1935 and dedicated his 1934 “Composition for Three Voices” to her. Their affair is documented in the letters at the following link. (http://www.ex-tempore.org/ExTempore96/cage96.html)The letters indicate a couple references to Pat [O'Hara] thus John was likely aware that Pauline may have been seeing him concurrently. They also discuss mutual composer friends such as Henry Cowell, Richard Buhlig, Schoenberg, Edgar Vardse and others.

The first letter references his February visit to Moy Mell and was written on the back of his “Counterpoint” typescript written for the February issue. It reads:

“Dear Pauline:

Gavin gave me Roderick White’s article and asked me to answer it and it somehow gave an impetus with the attached result. Hazel [Watrous] and Edward [Weston (most likely his first visit to the Dunes)] have not yet returned and Mary [McMeen, acting secretary to Dune Forum], Don [Sample, Cage's companion], and I are having dinner tonite at the Dunes with Gavin [Arthur]. Probably by tomorrow we will leave as Don is very anxious to get settled. Dr. Gerber was over last nite and proved very stimulating. Henry Okuda made sukiyaki. The pump stopped working according to Don, W.C.’s up the Western Coast cease functioning as we approach.

Love to you and Mark.

John.

How’s Mozart?

Don sends his love too and thinks of you often”About this same time Cage was introduced to Jawlensky’s work by Galka Scheyer and purchased on of his pieces on the installment plan. (From “It is a Long, Long Road.” John Cage and Galka Scheyer by Maria Muller in The Blue Four: Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Kleen in the New World, p. 272).

John Cage circa 1935. Photographer unknown. From “It is a Long, Long Road.” John Cage and Galka Scheyer by Maria Muller in The Blue Four: Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Kleen in the New World, p. 272.

 

 

Pauline also included in this issue estranged husband RMS’s seminal and oft-cited three-page piece, “Space Architecture” which defined his architectural design philosophy. He wrote that the modern architect would be “dealing with a new medium as rich and unlimited in possibilities of expression as any of other media of art: color, sound, mass etc. This gives us a new understanding of the task of modern architecture. Its experiments serve to develop a new language, a vocabulary and syntax of space.” After reading many of PGS’s other writings I speculate that she may have had a hand in editing this article.

 

 

The March 15th number features another John O’Shea drawing of the Dunes on the cover, another article by Ella Winter, “Outside Agitators” on farm labor activism, and an article by Henry Cowell, “Double Counterpoint” critiquing Roderick White’s and John Cage’s articles on modern music in the previous issue.  “Four Dune Poems” by Ellen Janson, and “Los Angeles: The Ugly Duckling” a love-hate critique by editor Dunham Thorp were also included. Pauline’s issue-ending two-page article, “The Guilty Liberal” was basically a call-to-arms for liberals to make their voices heard more loudly.

 

The April 15th issue cover featured a recent Edward Weston photo, likely his first published photo of the Dunes, and presaged his now iconic 1936 Oceano Dunes portfolio. Also included are poems by Gavin Arthur and fellow Dunite Hugo Seelig, and numerous articles by editor Dunham Thorp.

 

Ansel Adams, 1933. Willard Van Dyke portrait. (From “Modernist Photography and the Group f.64″ by Therese Thau Heyman in On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art 1900-1950, p. 249).

The May 15th number, which would turn out to be the illustrious publication’s last, featured the above Ansel Adams cover photo. In this issue Pauline placed Richard Neutra’s three-page article, “Balancing the Two Determinates of Creation” which discoursed upon architectural functionalism. She was also likely responsible for former Kings Road tenant Dr. Alexander Kaun‘s article, “With Trotsky in Prinkipo” being published. Kaun commissioned Schindler to design a beach house for him in Richmond that same year. Kaun’s contributor’s bio reads, “Dr. Alexander Kaun is Professor of Slavic Languages at the University of California in Berkeley. It was last summer on his way back from the Balkans that he had this interview with Trotsky.”

Dr. Alexander Kaun. Portrait by Johan Hagemeyer, April 5, 1932. Photo courtesy OAC and U.C. Berkeley Bancroft Library, Johan Hagemeyer Photo Collection.

Kaun Beach House, Richmond, 1934, R. M. Schindler. Uncredited photo. From “A beach house for Dr. and Mrs. Alexander Kaun, Richmond, Calif. R. M. Schindler, Architect”, California Arts & Architecture, May, 1937, p. 26. (From my collection).

Coincidentally, Pauline’s influence was beginning to pay off for both RMS and Neutra as Schindler’s Kaun beach house in Richmond (see above) and Neutra’s house for Galka Scheyer in the Hollywood Hills (see below) were being completed just about this time.

In his Daybook, Edward Weston mentions a January 3, 1929 dinner party he attended at Kings Road a week before his move to Carmel hosted by the Neutra’s which included Greta and J. R. Davidson and the Kauns,

“…I like Richard Neutra so much, and found Kaun and the others stimulating, so the evening was a rare gathering I do not regret. Even the showing of my work was not the usual boresome task. Neutra is always keenly responsive, and knows whereof he speaks, Representing in America an important exhibit of photography to be held in Germany this summer (see reference and covers of the Film und Foto exhibition above), he has given me complete charge of collecting the exhibit, choosing the ones whose work I consider worthy of showing, and of writing the catalogue foreword to the American group.” (Weston, p. 102-3).

 

Galka Scheyer House with painting by Lyonel Feininger, Hollywood Hills, Richard Neutra, 1934. Arthur Luckhaus photo. From RN-Hines, p. 117.

 

In his Neutra monograph Hines wrote that the Neutras surmised that Richard was chosen over RMS for the Scheyer commission due to the breakup of a stormy affair between her and RMS directly after Pauline’s departure in the summer of 1927. (RN-Hines, p. 116). In a 1970s letter to Diana Balmori Esther McCoy wrote,

“A woman professor of art [Peg Weiss] is doing a book about Galka Scheyer; we’ve talked on the phone several times. She is at Univ. of Syracuse. Tom Hines, discouraged at trying to find proof of Schindler’s affair with Leah Lovell (not true) he grabbed the next at hand—Galka Scheyer. U. of S. researcher says “no way” so do Galka’s closest friends. But it makes a racy story for Hines.” (Courtesy of author Susan Morgan who is currently working on Esther McCoy’s biography and has an Esther McCoy Reader scheduled for release this fall).

It is not hard at all for me to imagine the philandering Schindler having a fling with Scheyer as early as her three-month stay at Kings Road during the summer of 1927 upon viewing the below photo.

 

 

Galka Scheyer at Kings Road, circa 1931. (From Frida Kahlo: Her Photos, edited by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Editorial RM, 2010, p. 333)

 

Also during 1934 Neutra was completing a second-story addition to a town house in Hollywood for Rosalind Rajagopal, caretaker and secret lover of Krishnamurti and later founder of Happy Valley School, whom he met through C. H. van der Leeuw, financier of his VDL Research House.(See group photo of the van der Leeuw brothers, Krishnamurti and Rosalind’s husband D. Rajagopal earlier in this article).Rosalind and Galka Scheyer also became close friends at about the same time. Scheyer gave painting classes to Rajagopal and renowned ceramicist Beatrice Wood, also a big Krishnamurti follower, who later moved across the street from him in Ojai. Wood and Krishnamurti also played major roles in establishing Happy Valley School which was attended by Raymond Neutra and Erica Weston, Brett’s daughter. (July 23, 2010 e-mail message from Raymond Neutra, Happy Valley School and Lives in the Shadow With J. Krishnamurti by Radha Sloss, Universe, 2000, p. 136).

 

(From Beatrice Wood Biography)

 

Rajagopal Remodel, Gower St., Hollywood, 1934, Richard Neutra. Raymond Neutra photo. (Raymond Neutra Photo Archive)

The May issue also included an Ella Young review of John O’Shea’s April 23-May 21 one-man show at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Arthur paid Young a fitting tribute in her contributor’s bio, “Ella Young needs no introduction, having herself introduced the editors in the initial number. She it was who christened this oasis Moy Mell which in Irish means the “Meadow of Honey”—the part of the Celtic Heaven world set apart for poets. She is likewise the Godmother of the Dune Forum.”

Depression era financial reality finally set in and publication ceased after the May number. Gavin Arthur left Moy Mell shortly thereafter. The next place he pops up in print is the November 26, 1934 issue of Time Magazine in which an article, “Recovery: Utopians Eastward” reports on the whereabouts of Arthur and Dunham Thorp after Dune Forum folded earlier that year. They had moved to Utopian Society founder Eugene John Reed’s Greenwich Village apartment in New York. “Men strange to the janitor had indeed been climbing the stairs to visit the new tenants of No. 23 Barrow St., Apartment 4 C. Greenwich Village. The chief tenant was Eugene John Reed, 47, who was once a partner in an investment banking house in Denver. His co-tenants were Chester A. Arthur Jr., 33-year-old grandson of the 21st President of the U. S., and Dunham Thorp, onetime editor of a literary magazine (Dune Forum) in California. All three had taken up residence in Greenwich Village with a small table, some wicker chairs, a few cots. Thus did Utopia move East.” (Time Magazine).

The last significant event to take place at Moy Mell occured on Christmas Day, 1934. Although accounts differ somewhat, it appears that Gavin met world-renowned Indian mystic and spiritual master Meher Baba on a trip to Los Angeles earlier that year and invited him to come to the Dunes for a visit. Baba did indeed pay a visit with eighteen of his followers, including Norina Matchabelli, wife of Georges Matchabelli, known for the popular perfume brand. Norina had previously arranged for a special cabin to be built for Baba, but he chose instead to stay in Gavin’s cabin. Gavin, by then in New York was not there to host Baba and his entourage. (See below).

 

“Portia Once Screen Star: Trial Unmasks Olga Grey”, Los Angeles Times, Jun 10, 1935, pg.I-1, 8. From ProQuest.

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The above cover of the March, 1940 issue of California Arts & Architecture featuring a cross-section of Harwell Hamilton Harris’s masterpiece, the Weston Havens House in Berkeley, represents a major milestone in his life as well as John Entenza’s. For Harris it marked the end of his very productive involvement with the publication most responsible for establishing his career. For Entenza it heralded the beginning of his long and illustrious editorship of a publication which had been evolving since 1935 into one of the most respected purveyors of modernism in the country. The story of  this watershed event in the history of the magazine and the lives of the men unfolds below.

For a detailed look at Harwell Hamilton Harris’s life I strongly recommend the Lisa Germany monograph “Harwell Hamilton Harris”, University of Texas Press, 1991 (see above) featured in my recent post on Harris http://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2009/12/harwell-hamilton-harris-houses-of.html and from which I obtained much of the following material (to be cited below as “Germany”). Also see Esther McCoy’s “The Second Generation”, Gibbs Smith, 1984 (McCoy SG) for a very insightful chapter on Harris. Harris’s oral history, “The Organic View of Design Oral History Transcript” is also another great source of material on his life and can be viewed online at at  http://www.archive.org/details/organicviewofdes00harr (UCLA). For material on John Entenza I recommend “Case Study Houses 1945-1962″ by Esther McCoy (CSH), Barbara Goldstein’s “Arts & Architecture: The Entenza Years” (Goldstein), “Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses” edited by Elizabeth A. T. Smith (BFML) and Taschen’s  “Arts & Architecture: The Complete Reprint 1945-1967.”

Harwell Hamilton Harris was born on July 2, 1903, in Redlands, California. Harris moved to Los Angeles in 1923, where he transferred from Pomona College after his second year to Otis Art Institute to pursue his studies in sculpture and painting. He also studied under noted abstract colorist Stanton MacDonald-Wright beginning in 1925. A visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House circa 1927 suggested by fellow sculpture student Ruth Sowden, who was then having a house built by Lloyd Wright, and immediately afterward viewing Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolio at the L.A. Public Library was an epiphany for him to study architecture instead. At the age of 25 he applied to University of California Berkeley to that end and was accepted for the fall of 1928. (McCoy, SG).

Meanwhile another Otis student told Harris about Richard Neutra’s Jardinette Apartments then under construction in Hollywood. Noting the architect’s address on the project sign, Harris went to Schindler’s Kings Road House where he received another indoctrination in modern architecture and met both Schindler and Neutra. Ironically, it was Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolio that also influenced both Schindler and Neutra to emigrate to the United States to meet Wright and begin their brilliant careers. Neutra, needing help at the time, convinced the impressionable Harris that he would learn much more by going to work for him and taking night classes than he ever would in college. He canceled his plans for Berkeley and immediately started working in the Schindler House drafting room on completing the finishing touches on the working drawings of the Lovell Health House. (McCoy SG).

Moderne Bauformen, August, 1932, Lovell Health House. Willard Morgan photo. Courtesy Neutra Papers, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

While working for Neutra alongside Gregory Ain until 1933, Harris learned the importance of publishing one’s work in furthering one’s career from master publicist Richard Neutra. The publicity Neutra generated must have been very influential and inspiring indeed as he had at least 250 articles published all over the world featuring the Jardinette Apartments, his ground-breaking Lovell Health House, all of the various manifestations of Rush City Reformed, the Vienna Werkbundsiedlung Model House, and Neutra’s personal residence, the VDL Research House during Harris’s employment. Harris also saw how Neutra’s ability to get his built and unbuilt projects globally published established a foundation from which to build his practice.

Neutra’s 1927 book “Wie Baut Amerika? and 1930 book “Amerika” (see above) must have instilled a sense of pride in Harris to be working for some of such international renown. Neutra also published an article under Harris’s byline in the April 1930 issue of Die Form “Ein amerikanischer Flughafen” describing the Lehigh Portland Cement Airport Design Competition which was also incorporated into Rush City Reformed. During this period, Harris became familiar with the principles of the Modernist movement and served as secretary of the American chapter of the Congrés Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) which was headed by Neutra. Harris and Ain prepared various elements of Rush City Reformed for Neutra to present at the 1930 CIAM III conference in Brussels during his well-received year-long world lecture tour following completion and extensive publication of his Lovell Health House.

Harris was also witness to how Neutra was able to parlay this recognition into inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal Modern Architecture: International Exhibition in 1932. (See exhibition catalog below). Harris worked on the Lovell Health House model below which was included in the MOMA exhibition.

Under Neutra’s direction Harris also played a significant part in bringing the show to Los Angeles. The exhibition needed monied local sponsors to guarantee a venue so Neutra assigned Harris and Ain the task of calling businessmen for support. Harris called John Bullock and convinced him to become one of the directors of institutions subscribing to the exhibition (listed as such in the below catalog) and the show opened in his recently opened art deco showplace, Bullock’s Wilshire Department Store, in the summer of 1932. (Germany). Neutra published a review of the exhibition in the July-August, 1932 issue of California Arts & Architecture which included a photo of his Lovell Health House. The show garnered much local coverage with 20 articles in the L.A. Times beginning in February through August 20, 1932 coinciding with the closing of the Summer Olympic Games also being held in Los Angeles. (“International Stylists’ Designs Thrill Crowds“, Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1932, pp. 16-17).

Neutra enlisted Harris to build the above Lovell Health House model for an exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry for which he was paid $600 in 1930. The model eventually made its way to a museum in Rockefeller Center in New York. (“Life and Shape” by Richard Neutra, p. 259.)

Harris left the Neutra office in 1933 to establish his own independent practice in Los Angeles. His first commissions were for small homes based on the modular modernist principles he had learned from his mentors, Neutra and Schindler. His first significant built project, the Pauline Lowe House (1934) in Altadena, was first published in the October, 1934 issue of House Beautiful, one month after Neutra’s first appearance in the same magazine with his Sten-Frenke House.

Harris’s association with Richard Neutra’s circle paid big dividends as he was included in the January, 1935 special modern architecture and design issue of California Arts & Architecture which was guest-edited by Pauline Schindler, a longtime friend of his wife, Jean Murray Bangs whom he had first met in 1931. Harris was featured with a two-page spread of his 1934 Pauline Lowe House and an article under his byline, “In Designing the Small House.” This was possibly the first issue of a magazine in Southern California dedicated entirely to modern architecture and also included work by Richard Neutra (Lovell Health House, VDL Research House, Koblick, Mosk, Beard and Sten-Frenke Residences), R. M Schindler (Oliver, Gibling and Wolfe Residences), J. R. Davidson, Kem Weber, Lloyd Wright, Jock Peters, Morrow & Morrow and a tribute to Frank Lloyd Wright, “Modern Architecture Acknowledges the Light Which Kindled It” by Pauline Schindler.

This same cast of characters (minus Harris) were the subject of a traveling exhibition “What is Modern Architecture?” with venues at UCLA, the California Art Center at Barnsdall Park and the Plaza Art Center during 1930-31. (“Art Club Presents Exhibition: Contemporary Creative Architecture To Be Shown”, L.A. Times, June 22, 1930 plus many other articles). This small tribe of early L.A. Moderns seemingly headed by Neutra were in a constant struggle to spread the gospel of Modernism to the uneducated masses as a means to drum up commissions. Harris must have been thrilled to have finally been included with this crowd and their gradually growing portfolio of built work.

Publisher George Oyer’s courageous January editorial, “California – As We See It” reads, “For some months we have been considering the advisability of recording some of the work of our California modern designers. To the layman, the term modern applies to any house or building with dominating horizontal or vertical lines: to any shop front with polished aluminum or bronze wainscoting. The term modern applied to architecture and interior furnishings has but a vague meaning….It is quite impossible to show all of the distinctive work of our outstanding architects, nor are we able to include in this issue the work of all of our California modernists. In the selection of photographs and articles we are grateful to Miss Pauline Schindler for her able assistance. Whether or not you like it, is beside the point. It is here so we acknowledge it.”

Esther McCoy wrote in “The Second Generation”, “The small band of Moderns was fortunate in having California Arts & Architecture to publish its buildings.” (SG, p. 42). Likewise, Lisa Germany states on p. 71 of her 1985 University of Texas exhibition catalog Harwell Hamilton Harris, “Throughout the 1920s and ’30s and into the ’40s, the California House became widely known as the latest in residential design. During these years the magazine California Arts & Architecture was the sounding board for all things Modern, particularly those having to do with architecture.” She goes on to list the seminal January, 1935 modern architecture issue and many soon to follow articles as examples.

This issue met with much negative criticism in the East Coast establishment architectural press with H. Van Buren Magonigle, FAIA writing in the March, 1935 issue of Pencil Points dismissed the movement in California as a “flurry.” “Modern houses, he wrote, looked alike wherever they were built, and nothing about them suggested a home. They do not seem to be built for real people leading real lives.” He further chastised the editorial advisory board’s AIA members for their involvement. (McCoy SG, p. 42). Modernist architect Irving F. Morrow whose work was also included in the January issue penned a full-page rebuttal to Magonigle’s on-going tirade against modern architecture in the June issue.

Harris gained much favorable publicity when his Lowe house design was plagiarized as an entry in the 1934 General Electric Small Homes Competition by architects R. Paul Schweikher and Theodore W. Lamb who won the $2,500 first prize. After seeing the news of his stolen design winning the competition in April 1, 1935 issue of Time Magazine Harris convinced California Arts & Architecture publisher George Oyer to run an expose in his May issue. The article, “Concerning Competitions” compared the almost identical floor plans and nearly verbatim descriptive language and concluded, “While Messers. Schweikher and Lamb win the money, we still insist that a “Californian Wins HONORS in National Competition.” Oyer concurrently sent his article to other publications and Architectural Forum (“California Charges“, June 1935, p. 42) and Aperitif (“What constitutes Plagiarism?” by Pauline Schindler, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1935) published similar pieces garnering overwhelmingly favorable national publicity for Harris over the scandal.

From that point on, Harris was the fair-haired boy of California Arts & Architecture which thereafter was the first to publish all of his work. (UCLA, p. 130). The November, 1935 issue featured Harris’s Graham Laing House under the title, “A Frank Lloyd Wright House with a Hat On.” (See below). Oyer died shortly thereafter and Harris and fiance Jean Murray Bangs, also an occasional contributor to CA&A, became very close friends with his former assistant and successor, Jere Johnson who became publisher in 1936. It didn’t hurt that their offices were by then on the same floor at 2404 West 7th St., Los Angeles. (UCLA).

It was also about this time that a young writer named John Entenza stopped by Harris’s office to meet him, intrigued by the Lowe House and subsequent scandal he read about in the pages of CA&A in January and March. (Germany, p. 53, UCLA, p. 129). Coincidentally, during 1935 Harris was also designing a house for Stella Gramer, law partner of Entenza’s father Tony.

Harris’s and wife Jean Murray Bang’s personal residence, the award-winning Fellowship Park House completed in 1935, won the 1936 House Beautiful Small House Competition, First Prize in the 1937 Pittsburgh Plate Glass Institute Competition (outdoing two houses by Neutra), and received an Honor Award from the Southern California Chapter of the AIA firmly establishing his reputation in California. The house was first published in the March, 1937 issue of CA&A seen below and was thereafter widely publicized in the local and national press.

Harris’s Helene Kershner House appeared a month later in the August, 1937 issue of CA&A (above left) followed by the Marion Clark House (above right) in Carmel-by-the-Sea in the March, 1938 issue. (Both from my collection).

The completed Entenza House made it’s CA&A debut in the May, 1938 issue. (See above left and right from my collection).

Harris’s house for Greta Granstedt appeared in CA&A in July, 1938 and his Mr. and Mrs. George C. Bauer Residence in August, 1939 (above left (renderings by Whitney Smith) and right from my collection).

California Arts & Architecture, January, 1940. (From my collection).

The January, 1940 number, an extremely important issue in editor-publisher Jere Johnson’s legacy, featured the Kershner House living room lighting (above right) and also had the distinction of being Julius Shulman’s first cover photo (above left). Johnson was by then beginning to recognize the value of Shulman’s eye in enhancing the magazine’s image and gave the fledgling photographer his first opportunity to appear on a cover, no doubt providing a huge boost to his confidence and marketing ability for future work. See my related post at the following link. http://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2009/12/julius-shulmans-first-cover-photo.html Harris’s work was also included or mentioned in a few other miscellaneous issues in 1939-40. Having learned Neutra’s publicity lessons well, Harris by this time was quite established and well-known through his articles first appearing in CA&A and then being picked up by the editors of other regional and national publications which had reciprocal subscriptions.

Ironically, January’s issue was also to be the last under the editorship of Johnson, who was by then very close friends with the Harrises. Johnson named frequent contributor Harris to the magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board beginning with the October 1939 issue based on his rapidly growing national reputation. Jean Bangs Harris was also listed on the masthead Guest Editor for the October 1939 issue, likely on board to help out during Johnson’s pregnancy. Johnson asked the Harrises to recommend a substitute editor to hold down the fort until she returned from maternity leave and they suggested John Entenza. (Germany, p. 217, note 9). Entenza’s name first appears on the masthead as editor in the February, 1940 issue.

The March, 1940 issue, again pictured below right, Entenza’s second as caretaker editor, has on the cover a cross-section of Harris’s most renowned project, the Weston Havens House in the Berkeley Hills. Little did Harris know at the time but this would be one of his last CA&A appearances as he and Jean would within a few months have a falling out with Entenza over the way he was to gain control of the magazine from their dear friend. The Harrises sincerely believed Johnson had been cheated by Entenza’s lawyer father and his aforementioned partner, Stella Gramer who they believed had put undue pressure on Johnson to sell. (Germany, note 2, p. 217). In the interim, they introduced him to east coast magazine editors at Architectural Record and Architectural Forum and the directors of the Museum of Modern Art in an effort to get him started on the right foot. (Germany, note 4. p. 217).

Excerpt from an 11/08/1987 Harris letter to Esther McCoy, 

“Stella Gramer had done the dirty work for John when it came to completing the contract with the builder of my house for John. In the case of the contract for John’s house, John and I sat in the outer office and the contractor was taken into Stella’s office; when they came out the contract document had been altered and signed for only $3,120, which was considerable less than the earlier figure. John looked and acted and probably felt entirely innocent…Jean admired Stella as a lawyer. Jean always said that what she wanted in a lawyer was a fighter and not a legal expert who told her why something couldn’t be done…” (Source: Author Susan Morgan).

The March cover reflects a new masthead design with new font. Also never before had a CA&A cover included a cross-section of a project. Comparing with the January, 1940 issue below left with the Julius Shulman first ever cover photo of Paul Laszlo’s Rosenson House illustrates that Entenza’s influence was quickly having an impact on the magazine. Entenza would stick with this masthead until hiring Alvin Lustig in early 1942 to design a makeover which first appeared on the April, 1942 cover. (See later in this post).

The intervening February issue, Entenza’s first at the helm as supposedly the temporary editor, contained a more boldly structured title page (see later below) and also the first appearance of his monthly editorial column “Notes in Passing” which opened with his strength with insightful reviews of recent new plays debuting in Los Angeles. Entenza worked in an MGM experimental film production unit from 1932 until 1936 when it folded due to the depression. (Goldstein). Also a playwright before accepting the CA&A post, he had limited success on the Hollywood stage with his comedy-drama “A Notorious Lady” starring Laura Treadwell having a nice run at the Vine Street Theater in the summer of 1935. (‘Notorious Lady’ Player Has Three Varied Careers’, Los Angeles Times, Jun 15, 1935, p.5).

Entenza’s changes to the title page, creation of his “Notes in Passing” column, and his new cover masthead design his first two months on the job as custodial editor were quite remarkable in my opinion and presaged his ambition and desire to find a way to acquire the magazine. He was like a dog marking his territory and signaling that he was ready, willing and able to take over, not only as editor, but also as publisher and as quickly as possible.

Harris stated in his 1985 oral history,

“[Entenza] acquired [CA&A] with very little money, just as he built his house with very little money. Largely on account of the pressure that his father, and particularly his father’s partner, a young woman, I’ve forgotten her name for the moment, [Stella Gramer] for whom I also designed a house which wasn’t built. For her I did move a house that Neutra had built as an exhibition house. Anyway, they were able to put pressure on various ones, whether it was on a contractor to build a house for John or on others to acquire the magazine for him. It was our feeling that Jere had really been cheated in this. That caused our break with John. So when a little bit later he was starting his Case Study program and asked me to design a house for the magazine, I refused to do it.” (UCLA, p. 129).

Entenza’s apparently hostile takeover was complete by the June-July issue when Johnson’s name no longer appears on the masthead. By August the physical separation was also complete as Entenza had moved the magazine’s offices from the same floor as Harris’s in the Elk’s Club Building at 2404 West Seventh St. to 3305 Wilshire Blvd. where he held court until he sold the magazine to David Travers in 1962. Entenza first offered to sell the magazine to Harris, most likely because of his initial recommendation of him for the editorship and expressed interest in the magazine’s continued well-being at the time of the ownership change. (UCLA, p. 132).

“The Rancheria of Mr. and Mrs. Cliff May in Mandeville Canyon, California, Cliff May, Builder, Interiors by Paul Frankl, A.I.D.” California Arts & Architecture, August 1939, cover, 24-25. Photos by W. P. Woodcock. (From my collection).

Other notable casualties of Entenza’s coup d’etat were Pauline Schindler’s father Edmund Gibling and Cliff May. Gibling was added to the advertising staff by Jere Johnson in February 1939 shortly after he and his wife moved from Chicago to their Schindler-designed Westwood residence. (See February 1940 masthead later below). Gibling likely obtained the position through Harris’s wife Jean Murray Bangs’ close friendships with both Pauline and Jere Johnson. Bangs had been a Kings Road habitue and confidant of Pauline’s since 1922. Gibling’s last appearance on the masthead was in the March 1940 issue as he, out of loyalty to the Harrises, chose to also disassociate himself from Entenza due to his ouster of Johnson.

Cliff May, who like Harris also had his work championed by Johnson, had five projects featured between his first appearance in February 1938, including his first cover story on his personal residence in the August 1939 issue (see above) and his last appearance in another cover story in the February 1940 issue. (See below). Unfortunately for us all, May’s romanticist Spanish hacienda-influenced ranch houses simply did not fall within the modernist vision Entenza wanted to move towards.

“The Residence of Mr. and Mrs. H. F. Tucker Residence, San Diego, California, Cliff May, Designer and Builder,” California Arts & Architecture, February 1940, cover, 28-29. Photo by Robert Churchill. (From my collection).

Harris’s by now considerable national reputation, soon to be further enhanced by his March, 1940 profile, “Houses by Harwell Hamilton Harris” in Architectural Forum and global Havens House publicity, prompted Entenza to keep him on the masthead as an Editorial Advisory Board member. Harris’s name was finally removed in the May, 1946 issue when his refusal to participate in the Case Study House Program probably became apparent.

Excerpt from an 05/18/1989 Harris letter to McCoy,

“Jean and I were good friends of Jere Johnson who was the owner and editor of C.A. &A. My office and the C.A.A. offices were on the same floor of 2404 West Seventh Street (across from Westlake Park (later McArthur Park), and each of my houses was published in C.A. & A. before it appeared elsewhere. At length Jere told Jean she was expecting a baby and she didn’t know who to get to run the magazine while she was out of the running. Knowing that John could at least write and probably edit, we immediately suggested him for the job. At the time John knew very little about Architecture, so his only contribution at the very beginning was “Notes in Passing.” John took it over and Jere never got it back. We never knew the details of the takeover. I suppose Jere was too chagrined at her foolishness to want to talk about it. Stella was very sharp and undoubtedly directed John’s maneuvers. This ended John’s and our friendship.”  (Source: Author Susan Morgan).

In her 1987 oral history McCoy also leaves us a clue regarding the bad blood between Harris and Bangs and Entenza with the comment, “I was writing to Harwell Harris yesterday, telling him this, because he had said some nasty things about John Entenza to Carter Manney, and Manney had told me, and was hurt by them,…” (An interview of Esther McCoy conducted 1987 June 7-Nov. 14 by Joseph Giovannini, for the Archives of Anerican Art, p. 60).

Despite having all of his previous work published first in CA&A, Harris never again submitted material to Entenza for publication. His reputation secured, from that point on he focused his considerable Neutra-taught publicity skills on national and international publications.

Virtually every source since McCoy’s above erroneous assertions has used 1938 as the beginning of the magazine’s “Entenza Years.” Barbara Goldstein in her introduction to her “Arts & Architecture: The Entenza Years” states that “Entenza published and edited Arts & Architecture from 1938 until 1962.” She later confusingly writes, “…and later, through his father’s law partner (Stella Gramer), he began working as an editor of California Arts & Architecture magazine, a rather stolid provincial publication…” Later in the introduction she states, “By 1939, it was beginning to publish a substantial amount of modern architecture…” McCoy also contributed the essay “Remembering John Entenza” to this publication as well as authorship of some of the anthologized articles and was also a frequent contributor during, and listed on the masthead as Contributing Editor of, Goldstein’s valiant four-year attempt to resuscitate Arts + Architecture in the early 1980s. The pair also collaborated on Guide to U.S. Architecture: 1940-1980, by Esther McCoy & Barbara Goldstein, also published by David Travers’ Arts + Architecture Press in 1982. (See my related Selected Publications of Esther McCoy).

Elizabeth A. T. Smith is clearly disingenuous in the opening two pages of her otherwise excellent essay “Arts & Architecture and the Los Angeles Vanguard” in the essential 1989 MOCA exhibition catalog Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses which she also edited and which also contains McCoy’s aforementioned essay “Arts & Architecture: Case Study Houses.” She states in her opening paragraph, “From 1938 until it ceased publication in September 1967, Arts & Architecture encapsulated a world view that was intensely modern in all areas of the arts and social sciences.” She starts the next paragraph with, “Upon purchasing California Arts & Architecture in 1938, publisher John Entenza gradually began to change its direction.” The next paragraph begins, “A look at California Arts & Architecture of the pre-1938 era is instructive to better appreciate the changes wrought by Entenza.”

Smith disingenuously juxtaposed the below January 1938 (left) and February 1942 (right) covers on her opening page to accentuate her point that CA&A up until 1938  “Featured for the most part luxury homes, traditional in style, it included only a smattering of modern work.” This statement would have been correct had she chosen 1932 or 1933 instead of 1938.

From“Arts & Architecture: The Vanguard Years” by Elizabeth A. T. Smith, in “Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses“, p. 144.

Left, Halliburton Residence by Alexander Levy, Miles Berne photo. Right, Living room by Paul Laszlo, Julius Shulman photo.

A more accurate before and after comparison of the 1940 transition from Jere Johnson’s editorship to Entenza’s would have been to show something along the lines of the above November 1937 (left, before) and December 1941 (right, after) issues or the below August 1934 (left, before) and the September 1941 (right, after) issues featuring covers by Brett and Edward Weston. (See also my Sands of Time: Oceano Dunes and the Westons for more details). Although Entenza’s impact on the magazine during his first year is evident, it wasn’t nearly as dramatic as McCoy, Goldstein, Smith and David Travers (see later below), would lead one to believe.

Left, Brett Weston, “Oceano Dunes”, 1934. Right, Edward Weston, “Neil Weston, Boat Builder”, 1935.

Smith’s next essay paragraph begins, “Between 1938 and February, 1939, the date as Entenza’s formal listing as editor on the magazine’s masthead, Arts & Architecture began to address modern subjects, particularly architecture and interiors, more extensively, albeit alongside traditional work. In November 1938 the magazine announced a new departure, of publishing lower-cost houses, with the first of a series of features on “Small Homes of the West.”

Unfortunately Smith was a full year early on the date of Entenza’s editorship and appearance on the masthead so credit rightfully belongs to editor and publisher Jere Johnson for the “Small Homes of the West” series announced by future Case Study House architect Sumner Spaulding who was a long-time member of the publication’s editorial advisory board. If Smith had only gone back a couple more years she would have also seen the “Small House Series” begun by editor Mark Daniels in April of 1936 which ran the rest of that year. Below are the articles announcing the 1936 and 1938 series.

California Arts & Architecture, April, 1936 and November, 1938. (From my collection).

Smith muddles matters even further by then stating,

“The presence of new editor John Entenza was strongly felt in the February 1940 issue of California Arts & Architecture, which featured a bolder, restructured title page and the first lengthy article published on art. The issue also contains the first of Entenza’s “Notes in Passing” columns which were to become a regular feature…”

Firstly, this was in no way the first lengthy issue on art in California Arts & Architecture. (See my related post The Sands of Time: The Westons and the Oceano Dunes for more discussion of Merle Armitage’s articles on modern art in and modernizing influence on California Arts & Architecture beginning in 1932). Secondly, what Smith also disingenuously fails to mention is that this new and improved title page in the February 1940 issue seen below also boldly lists “Publisher, Jere Johnson” directly above Entenza on the masthead and lists her again as “Published by Jere Johnson, 2404 West Seventh Street, Los Angeles, California” elsewhere on the page and that this issue is the correct first appearance of Entenza on the masthead as editor, not February 1939 as she mentions earlier. This also contradicts her earlier statement that Entenza purchased the magazine in 1938. These totally unnecessary manipulations of the facts do not do justice to Entenza’s otherwise truly remarkable and legendary achievements.

California Arts & Architecture, February, 1940, title page. (From my collection).

David Travers, who purchased the magazine from Entenza in 1962, writes in his introduction to Taschen’s Arts & Architecture: The Complete Reprint 1945-1967, “By 1933 the Great Depression had starved it down to 30 pages and subsequently into bankruptcy, where John Entenza found it in 1938. Modern had yet to touch the magazine.” As to the statement regarding modern having not touched the pages of the magazine, see the July-August 1932 Neutra CA&A article below announcing the opening of the legendary Museum of Modern Art’s traveling “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” then on display at Bullock’s Wilshire in conjunction with the 1932 Summer Olympic Games. In it Neutra wrote,

“The old California tradition of a home life half in-doors and half (the better half!) out-of-doors, the friendly openness of domestic architecture to a kind Nature surrounding houses of the Pacific Coast meets with the general trend of new architecture the world over. California ideas of dwelling, so to speak, are practically being accepted in Amsterdam, Paris and Vienna and an abundance of natural aeration and light influx is cherished under climactic conditions which are much more severe than those in California.”

Neutra, Richard, “Exhibition of the New Architecture”, California Arts & Architecture, July-August, 1932.

Two-and-a-half years earlier Pauline Schindler favorably reviewed the then recently completed Bullock’s Wilshire Department Store for the exhibition in CA&A’s January 1930 issue. The article described in glowing terms the new modernist venue and the interiors designed by Jock Peters, John Weber and Kem Weber. Of the store she wrote, “It constitutes an unmistakable advance in the movement of contemporary design. (“A Significant Contribution to Culture: The Interior of a Great California Store as an Interpretation of Modern Life” California Arts & Architecture, January 1930 (PGS). Also see my Foundations of Los Angeles Modernism: Richard Neutra’a Mod Squad for much more on Bullock’s Wilshire).

In rebuttal to this misinformed statement, an average page count from 1935-39 reveals: 1935-36 pp; 1936-40 pp; 1937-42pp; 1938-42 pp; and 1939-40 pp.. Comparably, the page count under Entenza grew to the high 50s during the height of the Case Study Program advertising bonanza between 1945-50 and then quickly tapered off to slightly less than CA&A prior to his takeover in early 1940. Below I will refute once and for all the totally inaccurate statement that “Modern had yet to touch the magazine” stated by Travers and implied by Smith.

Travers also writes “Although aware of it, the East Coast professional and trade press – Progressive Architecture, Architectural Record, Architectural Forum, AIA Journal, House & Garden – had largely ignored the West Coast Revolution in residential design until the 1950s.” This is also a confusing statement as in Harris’s and Shulman’s experience, having their work appear first in CA&A opened doors to this same East Coast press (see citations elsewhere in this post). Until 1940 when he cut ties with Entenza, all of Harris’s work first appeared in CA&A and virtually all of the same work was shortly thereafter picked up by the East Coast editors. Shulman also had close to 150 articles with his photographs published in CA&A-A&A prior to 1950, 100 in Pencil Points-Progressive Architecture, 75 in Architectural Record, 110 in Architectural Forum, and 60 in House & Garden with a significant portion of the East Coast articles first appearing in CA&A.

Both Harris and Shulman (and many others) have Neutra (and R. M. and Pauline Schindler to a somewhat lesser extent (PGS)) to thank for sparking the initial interest of East Coast editors in West Coast modern residential architecture. Neutra’s pioneering publicity efforts beginning in the late 1920s and early 1930s resulted in prior to 1950: 100 articles appearing in CA&A-A&A, 50 articles in Pencil Points-Progressive Architecture, 80 in Architectural Record, 125 in Architectural Forum, and 40 in House & Garden. CA&A more than any other regional publication in the country kindled East Coast editor’s (and architects) love affair with West Coast work.

Lisa Germany, who must be given credit for bringing the apparently distasteful circumstances surrounding the change of ownership of CA&A to light in her Harris monograph, cited 1938 as when the takeover occurred. (Germany, P. 127).

Noted architectural historians David Gebhard and Harriette Von Bretton wrote in their excellent “L.A. in the Thirties: 1931-1941″, Peregrine Smith, 1975, “In February 1941 John Entenza took over as editor of California Arts & Architecture, and by 1943 he had recast the magazine into an open propoganda vehicle for the new architecture. A similar change occurred in architectural photography with the  emergence of Julius Shulman as dominant interpreter of the new architecture.” (p. 153). Also in note 103 on p. 157 they state “For the February 1944 issue, Entenza dropped “California” from the magazine’s name, suggesting that it had fully attached itself to the Modern International Style.” This was the only source I have found to date that errs on the long side of 1940 but the date “California” was finally dropped was correct. Many authors must have been confused with so many conflicting dates present in the literature from so many respected historians.

I have found only one source to date which correctly identifies the month of Entenza’s ascension to the masthead which is Victoria Dailey’s well-researched essay “Naturally Modern” in the highly recommended L.A.’s Early Moderns. She states in end note 72 on p. 99 that “after careful examination, I did not find Entenza listed as editor until the February, 1940 issue.” I personally have in my collection a complete run of the magazine from 1935 through 1940 and I concur with her findings that February, 1940 is indeed Entenza’s first appearance on the masthead. There is also much material on Neutra and Harris in Natalie Shivers’ essay, “Architecture: A New Creative Medium” in the same book. Harris was indeed one of  “L.A.’s Early Moderns.”

Dailey also favorably and accurately discusses the evolution of CA&A from a luxury magazine aimed at a genteel reader to a journal advocating modernism in all its forms beginning in 1935-36 under the editorship of architect Mark Daniels who remained until 1938. Beginning in 1935 the magazine took a marked turn towards featuring the small, modern house. Dailey writes, “California Arts & Architecture underwent a redesign in 1936. The change in appearance was striking.” She likened CA&A‘s conversion to the one taking place at Touring Topics under Phil Townsend Hanna’s editorship attributing the makeover possibly to modernist art collector and book designer Merle Armitage’s membership on the CA&A‘s Editorial Advisory Board from 1933 to 1938. Armitage’s modernizing influence on California Arts & Architecture can be seen as early as 1932 with his contributions of articles on modern artists such as Edward Weston, Eugene Maier-Krieg and others for whom he was also simultaneously publishing fine press editions of their work. See my related post ”The Sands of Time: The Westons and the Oceano Dunes” for more discussion on this. Also see my related post “Touring Topic/Westways: The Phil Townsend Hanna Years” for much on Merle Armitage’s modernizing influence on that publication as well.

http://twls.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=190016

The above are a sampling of CA&A covers from 1935 through 1937. CA&A was ahead of the national editorial pack in terms of “modern” graphic design, layout and content. The use of cover illustrations and photos of modernist architecture began in 1935. It would be years before such national journals as Pencil Points, Architectural Forum and Architectural Record began using cover illustrations and/or photos. See the examples of their “plain wrapper” period covers below.

The below right July, 1937 Pencil Points Neutra Issue cover was it’s most progressive design to date undoubtedly influenced by Neutra himself. Ironically, Pencil Points had progressed from publishing the Magonigle diatribe against the modern architecture presented in CA&A‘s January, 1935 issue to running an an entire issue devoted to Neutra’s hard-edged “International Style” work only two-and-a-half years later. A year-by-year comparison of the national journals and CA&A during this period clearly shows that CA&A led the way in providing coverage of the modern small single family home and the percentage of its pages devoted to same. Again, Harris’s work was influential in this being the case.

Above left, Architectural Forum, July, 1936. Above right, Pencil Points, July, 1937. (Both from my collection).

What critics of the pre-Entenza CA&A are usually guilty of is not comparing apples with apples, i.e., publications of the same time period as I do above. Graphic design evolves just as does architectural design and architectural photography for that matter and comparisons must be made within the context of these evolutionary processes. Another consideration critics don’t always take into account is that there just wasn’t a whole lot of modern architecture to publish in the mid-1930s. It took a while to catch on as they say. The true test of a publication is in the courage of its editorial staff to publish material that will influence the direction of cutting-edge work which CA&A certainly began to do with the January, 1935 issue. The fact that the East Coast press always wanted to publish Harris’s work after it first appeared in CA&A is a good case in point. (Germany, note 3. p. 217).

Following is a year-by-year look at the “Modern” small house content of CA&A. Besides the January Special Issue on Modern Architecture & Design, 1935 also featured Harris’s Graham Laing Residence, and other smaller modern houses by Case Study Architects William Wilson Wurster and Richard Neutra, Edgar Bissantz,  Eugene Weston, Jr., Milton J. Black, Cliff May, H. Roy Kelley, Erle Webster & Adrian Wilson, Winchton Risley, Miller & Warnecke, Donald McMurray, Thomas D. Church (landscape), Frederick L. Confer, Lilian J. Rice, Kenneth Wing, John Byers & Edla Muir, and others.

In 1936 editor Mark Daniels embarked upon “The Small House Series” in April which featured a different aspect of small, affordable, modern house design in each issue for the rest of the year. Architects whose crisp, contemporary, non-revivalist smaller homes were featured included: H. Roy Kelley (A House of New Ideas), Earl T. Heitschmidt (Las Palmas Demonstration Home), Eugene Weston, Donn Emmons, editor Mark Daniels, Donald D. McMurray, Charles O. Matcham, Milton J. Black, Edgar Bissantz, Roland Coate, Miller & Warnecke, Ralph C. Flewelling, Donald B. Kirby, Kenneth S. Wing, Winchton L. Risley, Kenneth A. Gordon, Earl R. MacDonald, Erle Webster & Adrian Wilson, Frederick L. Confer and others. Future Case Study House architect Sumner Spaulding and furniture and interior designer Paul Frankl were by then on the magazine’s editorial advisory board.

Besides Harris’s Fellowship Park, John Entenza and Helene Kershner Houses, CA&A in 1937 featured contemporary small homes of modernists R. M. Schindler (with Julius Shulman photos), future Case Study House architects Richard Neutra, William Wilson Wurster and Kemper Nomland, Milton J. Black (with Julius Shulman photos), Paul Frankl, Paul Laszlo, Douglas Honnold, Van Evera Bailey, Mario Corbett, John Byers & Edla Muir, Garrett Eckbo, Thomas D. Church, Harold J. Bissner, Leo Bachman, Harold G. Spielman, Charles O. Matcham, Garrett Van Pelt & George Lind, Eugene Weston, Jr., Floyd Brewster, Edgar Bissantz,  H. Roy Kelley, John Ekin Dinwiddie, Manfred De Ahna, Charles A. Hunter, Carleton Winslow, Wesley Eager, Harold G. Elwell, Arthur L. Herberger, Winchton L. Risley, Lyle Nelson Barcume, Curtis Chambers, Miller & Warnecke, Palmer Sabin, Erle Webster & Adrian Wilson, Alexander Levy, Edward Weston photo of Robinson Jeffers, and much more.

CA&A‘s 1938 issues featured Harris’s Marion Clark House in Carmel and John Entenza House, and other contemporary small house designs by Case Study architects Sumner Spaulding, William Wilson Wurster, and Richard Neutra (with Julius Shulman photos), Paul Frankl, Kem Weber, Paul Laszlo, William Lescaze, John Porter Clark, Douglas Honnold, George Vernon Russell, Cliff May, Theodore Criley, John Hudspeth, Garrett Van Pelt & George Lind, Erle Webster & Adrian Wilson, Charles O. Matcham, Cliff May, Harold J. Bissner, Eugene Weston, Jr.,  Edgar Bissantz, Hart Wood, Homer Rice, H. Roy Kelley, Ralph Flewelling, Milton J. Black, Meyer & Holler, Wesley Eager, Pacific System Homes, Leo Bachman and “Small Homes of the West Series.”

Small Homes Issue, California Arts & Architecture, July 1939. (From my collection).

1939 featured Harris’s essay on his most important design element,”Wood,” his George C. Bauer Residence and a photo of the fireplace in his Campbell House, a continuation of the “Small Homes of the West” series, a special Small House Issue in July, and small contemporary homes by Case Study architects Richard Neutra (with Shulman photos), William Wilson Wurster, Kemper Nomland and Sumner Spaulding, Lutah Maria Riggs, Paul R. Williams (prefabricated model home and furniture), Alvar Aalto furniture, Paul Laszlo (with Shulman photos), Kem Weber, Paul Frankl, Cliff May (cover story on his personal residence), John Porter Clark, James R. Friend, John Byers & Edla Muir, Francis Joseph McCarthy, Mario Corbett, Douglas Honnold & George Vernon Russell, Donald Beach Kirby, Ralph Flewelling, Wurdeman & Becket, Gardner Dailey, Theodore Criley, Joseph Weston, Harold J. Bissner, Frederic Barienbrock, Lockwood de Forrest, Ralph Cornell, Arthur T. Raitt, Adrian Wilson, Winchton Risley, Theodore Criley, Arlos Sedgley, Robert Dennis Murray, Wesley Eager, Carroll Sagar, Clarence W. Mayhew, Paul L. Burkhard, Kersey Kinsey, Meyer & Holler, L. B. Scherer, John Knox, Warren Vesper, William Allen, Vincent G. Raney, L. Frederick Richards, Brewster & Benedict, Charles A. Hunter, Robert H. Ainsworth, Allen G. Siple, Doris Suman, Chester J. Carjola, Allen G. Siple, H. Roy Kelley, Henry W. Howell, Ulysses Floyd Rible, William Mellenthin, Kenneth A. Gordon, Georgius Y. Cannon, Raymond M. Kennedy, Paul Hunter, Caro M. Brown, Paul D. Fox, Kenneth A. Gordon and others.

Thus, early 1940 was a distinct parting of the ways between the Harrises and John Entenza. Thanks to CA&A‘s George Oyer, Mark Daniels and Jere Johnson, Harris’s reputation was already firmly secured. The Weston Havens House seen in the opening cover and below soon became Harris’s most publicized project and opened doors for him everywhere. The preliminary cross-section on the cover was its only CA&A appearance. When his inverted-gabled tour de force was completed in 1941, Harris took a page out of Neutra’s publicity book and began sending off the iconic Man Ray (see below), Maynard Parker and Roger Sturtevant photos of the house to a plethora of global publication editors. Multiple photo layouts of the house soon began appearing in publications such as Life Magazine, House Beautiful, Architectural Record, Architectural Forum, AIA Journal, Magazine of Art, American Builder, Architectural Design, House & Home, Revista de Arquitectura, Nuestra Arqiuitectura, Byggmastaren, Studio, Pageant, Household and many others. For more information on the house and its now iconic and National Register of Historic Places status go to the following link http://www.havenshouse.org/family_history.html

Weston Havens House, Berkeley, 1941. Man Ray photo. http://twls.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=145774

Later Harris projects continued to appear in the above publications and others including Sunset, Pencil Points, Progressive Architecture, Practical Builder, Interiors, New Republic, Harpers, Mademoiselle, Ladie’s Home Journal, House & Garden, Better Homes & Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Women’s Home Companion, Time, Holiday, Costruzione Casabella, Kentiku Sekai, El Arquitecto Peruano, Architects’ Journal, Architectural Review, and many others. Harris also had his work anthologized in most of the important period books compiling modern architecture and interiors and exhibitions and catalogs of same. It is interesting to note that Harris’s name does not appear once in the index to Taschen’s “Arts & Architecture: The Complete Reprint 1945-1967″ despite A&A contributing editor Esther McCoy’s championing of his career in “The Second Generation.”

Harris’s CA&A ending was Entenza’s beginning. When Entenza became caretaker editor in February, 1940 he must have immediately seen the potential of what the magazine could become. Even though it was already ahead of the editorial curve modernistically speaking, he more than likely envisioned taking the magazine to new heights. He obviously knew the “modern” pedigree he was being entrusted with as he had met Harris a couple months after the seminal January, 1935 modernism issue was published. He must have felt a sense of pride to see his Harris-designed house featured in both 1937 and 1938. It was thus probable that he had subscribed to the magazine and knew quite well the direction it had been taking from 1935 onward.

Building upon his predecessor’s foundation Entenza immediately began imposing his modernist sensibilities and taste to take the magazine to the next level. CA&A provided the outlet his creative talents needed to blossom. He had clearly found his calling and made the most of the opportunity Jere Johnson, through Harris, had provided him. No matter the circumstances surrounding the change of ownership, with the ends undoubtedly justifying the means in his mind, CA&A was clearly headed on a path to immortality. The above covers are a sampling of Entenza’s strong first year’s editorial output. One of his earliest covers, September, 1940 (top left) featured an Arthur Luckhaus photo of Richard Neutra’s 1938 Lewin Beach House in Santa Monica which shares similar design elements with his Harris-designed personal residence less than a mile away.

Recognizing early on that the powerful visual language resulting from the combination of Neutra’s architecture and Shulman’s photography would facilitate marketing his notions of modernism and help increase circulation, Entenza started to feature their work on a regular basis. The August, 1941 issue (top right) features an Anikeef cover photo of Neutra’s Davey Residence on the Monterey Peninsula.  The back cover Klearflax Duluth carpet ad in the February, 1941 issue (middle left) with a Shulman photo of Neutra’s Ward Residence at Lake Hollywood illustrates how Entenza began parlaying their work to generate much-needed advertising revenue. The November, 1941 issue (middle right) features a Shulman cover photo of Neutra’s Emerson Junior High School in West Los Angeles. The December, 1941 issue (bottom left) features a Shulman cover photo of a Paul Laszlo-designed interior.

I have included the November, 1942 cover of the Architectural Record to illustrate how Entenza, like his predecessors, kept California Arts & Architecture in the forefront of graphic design by influencing respected national publications to finally start including photos on their covers. Shulman, like Harris, found that appearing first in CA&A opened doors to the east coast establishment journals as this cover photo of Raphael Sorianos’ Glen Lukens House had previously appeared in CA&A‘s August, 1940 issue. Apparently the Architectural Record editorial staff concluded that it was still too risky in 1942 to start with more than a thumbnail image.

Reminiscing to his biographer Lisa Germany, Harris, generally liked what Entenza had done with the magazine and admired the Case Study program but thought dropping “California” from the masthead was a mistake. “Jean and Harris believed the magazine’s strength had been its regional bias – the way it showcased the distinctive aspects of California design.” (Germany, p. 128).

California Arts & Architecture, February, 1942. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/searchimages/images/image_8654_22633.htm

Ray Eames’ whimsical, abstract artistic cover designs also began to appear in 1942 through 1944. Note in the above page from “Eames Design” an example of how ubiquitous the attribution of Entenza’s ownership of the magazine as 1938 has become.

Another fortunate circumstance of Herbert and Mercedes Matter moving to Los Angeles in late 1943 for wartime employment with the Eamses was like manna from heaven for Entenza. Herbert was also immediately put to work at CA&A on article layouts and cover designs. My related post “Herbert and Mercedes Matter: The California Years” http://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2010/03/mercedes-and-herbert-matter-california.html goes into great depth about the happenings at Arts & Architecture from the early 1940s through 1946 and the beginnings of the Case Study House Program, the advent of which would cement Entenza’s place in history as the visionary that he was. Entenza’s greatest strength as an editor was his keen ability to recognize talent and charmingly cajole that talent to further his particular modernist vision at a very economical cost. His recruits such as Shulman, McCoy, Ray and Charles Eames, Alvin Lustig, Herbert Matter and the Case Study House architects were rewarded with listings on the masthead,  the prestige of  being published in one of the most cutting-edge publications in the country and future commissions for work by others. In my opinion, John Entenza and George Nelson were the two most influential editorial tastemakers of the twentieth century.

Readers steeped in the lore of modernist literature might be left then with the question, “Why does virtually every article on the Case Study House Program and/or Entenza and Arts & Architecture magazine published to date cite Entenza’s era at A&A beginning in 1938?” I theorize that Entenza was probably guilty of implying to McCoy over their close 52-year friendship that his magazine ownership coincided with the publication of his Harris-designed house in 1938 and she likely took him at his word when penning her 1962 “Modern California Houses: Case Study Houses 1945-1962.”  This is puzzling since McCoy was normally a stickler for accuracy on dates in her work. As an example, she was extremely frustrated and almost had a major falling out with Neutra while working on her 1960 Braziller Neutramonograph.

“Well, he wanted–now, for another thing, he wanted me to put the date of the Lovell house in 1927, and I said, “That isn’t true.” I told him I’d had a check through the records at City Hall and got the date of when the drawings were filed and when the building permit was issued, and this was 1929. And then, finally, he said, “Yes, but I like 1927, that was the year that the Barcelona pavilion…” And then a couple of other things, too. He wanted it to be that.” (McCoy Oral History, Archives of American Art).

This, coupled with McCoy’s original close friendship and working relationship with Entenza and later magazine and book collaborations with friends and colleagues Barbara Goldstein and David Travers was likely how the 1938 myth was generated and perpetuated. (For more discussion on this see my Selected Publications of Esther McCoy, Patron Saint of Southern California Architectural Historians).

Elizabeth A. T. Smith’s “Arts & Architecture and the Los Angeles Vanguard” essay in “Blueprints for Modern Living” is even more troubling since a more thorough analysis of CA&A‘s evolution, I believe, would have altered her impression of the years leading up to Entenza’s involvement, despite the seemingly purposeful inaccuracies in the dates of her Entenza editorship and ownership attribution. Her disingenuousness appears intended to enhance the aura surrounding the extent of Entenza’s makeover of the magazine. The Entenza story is quite compelling enough, in my opinion, without her revisionist spin, which results in the total dismissal of the courageous editorial work Oyer, Daniels and Johnson had performed between 1935 and early 1940, well ahead of the national editorial curve, chronicling the evolution and growth of our modernist regional architects and their designs for affordable contemporary single family residences.

David Travers’ statements in his Taschen “Arts & Architecture: The Complete Reprint” introduction are equally mysterious. His misinformation could only have come directly from the mouth of Entenza. Why else would his successor disavow the rich heritage and forward looking modern legacy which California Arts & Architecture epitomized from January, 1935 until the May, 1940 change of ownership? It is unfortunate that Travers had evidently not seen any issues from the mid to late 1930s for virtually every month delivered something of interest for modernistas. In any event, we are all the richer for this wonderful publication having the glorious run that it had.

It is my intent with this article to increase awareness of the important role California Arts & Architecture played in our state’s rich architectural legacy, to begin to set the record straight regarding the circumstances surrounding the magazine’s 1940 editorial and publishing regime change and to elicit further discourse on the subject. Personally I have become increasingly dismayed with the fact that massive new treatises are still unwittingly being published with much erroneous information surrounding Entenza’s 1940 CA&A palace coup. Recent publication of major magnum opuses perpetuating the above-mentioned inaccuracies indicates that this will be an extremely difficult task indeed.

CA&A between the early 1930s and the actual beginning of the Entenza Years in early 1940 is a treasure trove of material, chronicling the evolution of California’s Modern Movement in both the arts and architecture, ready to be explored and written about. These early issues truly show that California was indeed leading the nation in the production and publication of modern, affordable residential architecture. Recognizing the notable accomplishments of Entenza’s predecessors in no way detracts from his legendary, iconic achievements from early 1940 onward, on the contrary it enhances them. I also hope that authors who have previously published work unwittingly using 1938 as their nexus for Entenza’s canonization help try to correct the record in future work.

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Neutra inquired about Shulman’s background and his work and purchased the Kun House photos from him on the spot. He asked Shulman if he would be interested in other assignments and the rest as they say is history. Neutra obviously recognized the young photographer’s potential and likely relished the opportunity to influence his evolution in the field, and probably at a rate that was initially much less than he was currently paying for Arthur Luckhaus’s services.

Neutra gave Shulman a list of other projects to take a look at which included recent Neutra apprentice Raphael Soriano’s nearby Lipetz House which Shulman visited the same day meeting Soriano at the site. (Wolgang Wagener, Raphael Soriano, Phaidon, 2002, p. 79). From Shulman’s Oral History, “Neutra said, pointing up at the hill above the lake, at the south end of the lake, “Why don’t you drive up there and meet Soriano, who is there every day supervising the construction of the house?” I drove up that afternoon, met Soriano for the first time. We became good friends. And strange, we started our respective careers that same year. And I did pictures of the house when it was completed.”

Soriano recalled the March 5, 1936 meeting with Shulman in his oral history  “Substance and Function in Architecture Oral History Transcript” “You know, Shulman started out photography when I started my first house. He came in with a Brownie one day, said, “Oh Soriano, look! I’m Julius Shulman, a photographer, and I’m just starting out, too; can I photograph your house?” I said, “Sure.” He had a Brownie.”

Julius Shulman’s 1933 birthday gift, a Kodak “vest pocket” camera. From “Julius Shulman in 36 Exposures” by Mary Melton, Los Angeles Magazine, January, 2009. Dan Winters photo. http://www.lamag.com/article.aspx?id=12432

Shulman writes in his autobiography, “At the location I met Soriano, sitting on the newly carpeted living room floor eating lunch. I shared a sandwich with him, and described my meeting with Neutra, which surprised him. Neutra, he stated, was a tyrant with photographers. That utterance was followed by him asking, “Would you photograph this house when it is completed?” Not only did I photograph the house several months later, but subsequently its publication in this country and abroad served to showcase Soriano’s design and my talents.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lipetz House, Silverlake, Raphael Soriano, 1936. Julius Shulman photos, 1936 (From “Raphael Soriano” by Wolfgang Wagener, Phaidon, 2002

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Left, National Steel Housing Corp. Exhibition House, 1934, Richard Neutra from Pencil Points, July Special Neutra Issue. Right, John Entenza House, 1937, Harwell Hamilton Harris from “Harwell Hamilton Harris” by Lisa Germany, University of Texas Press, 1991.

Soriano’s Lipetz House (link to current owner interview after recent restoration) above exhibits the same semi-circular design elements as Neutra’s above left 1934 National Steel Housing Corp. Exhibition House (unbuilt) and recently completed Sten-Frenke and Von Sternberg Houses in Santa Monica and Northridge. Harwell Hamilton Harris, another former Neutra apprentice, would echo this same semi-circular pattern in his above right 1937 John Entenza House near Neutra’s 1934 Sten-Frenke and and 1938 Lewin Houses in Santa Monica. (See my related post http://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2010/05/california-arts-architecture.html).

Neutra’s unbuilt “Skyline Apartments” seen below in a 1934 Westways article was the most obvious influence of all on Soriano’s design for the Lipetz House, down to the grand piano in the semi-circular living room.See my related post at http://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2010/06/neutras-skyline-apartments-penthouse.html.

 

Westways, 1934. Courtesy Los Angeles Public Library.

Most likely through his association with Neutra, Soriano’s Lipetz House was chosen as one of the buildings to be presented as representative of American modern architecture in the American Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition which ran from May 4 through November 25th. (Wagener, p. 41). Neutra did not pay his apprentices much but he did help them get published and exhibited early in their careers as he did for Harwell Hamilton Harris in the seminal January 1935 Modern Architecture issue of California Arts & Architecture and Soriano in the Paris Exposition and later group articles. (http://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2010/05/california-arts-architecture.html).

Neutra was quoted in the July 1937 Special Neutra Issue of  Pencil Points article with the byline of one of his then assistants, Henry Robert Harrison, “You know yourself that I am proud of whatever a young man gets out of an association with me as: Peter Pfisterer from Switzerland, Gregory Ain and Harwell Hamilton Harris from Los Angeles, Stanley Vallet from St. Louis, Raphael Soriano from Greece, Elbert Brown from Texas, Carl Conrad from Pennsylvania, Marshall Shaffer, and yourself.” (Henry Robert Harrison, “Richard Neutra: A Center of Architectural Stimulation”, Pencil Points Special Neutra Issue, July, 1937, pp. 410-438).

Note that the same semi-circular design element is present in the U.S. Pavilion postcard below. Neutra’s Scholts Advertising Agency, Bell Avenue School, Beard and Kun Houses were also on display as was work by erstwhile partner R. M. Schindler whom he had recently introduced to Shulman. Neutra was awarded Bronze Medals by the French Government for the latter three projects.“California Architects Receive High Honors from France”, Los Angeles Times, Sep 18,1938, p. V-2.

Not only did Soriano thus have the distinction of his first project being exhibited in the same venue with his mentor Neutra but also alongside Alvar Aalto’s Finnish Pavilion, Albert Speer’s German Pavilion and Pablo Picasso’s iconic “Guernica” to a paid audience of over 35 million people, heady stuff indeed for the fledgling architect. (See postcards below). There is a good chance that selected Shulman’s photos of the Soriano’s Lipetz House and Neutra’s Kun House were also on display in the exhibition although I have yet to verify this. If they were, it was probably unbeknownst to Shulman as he does not mention this in his autobiography or oral history.

U.S. Pavilion at 1937 Paris International Exposition, Paul Lester Wiener, Charles H. Higgins and Julian Clarence Levi, Associated Architects. http://lartnouveau.com/art_deco/expo_1937/pavillons_pays2/pav_usa.htm

Entrance to the 1937 Paris International Exposition.

Basque shepherd and Raphael Soriano resting durina a walk with Shulman. Julius Shulman photo, 1936. From “Architecture and Its Photography”, p. 295.

Thus, Shulman’s assignment log book was quickly becoming a virtual listing of the eventual pantheon of modernist Southern California architects. Neutra and his circle were clearly the vanguard for the wave of modernism beginning to break in Southern California in the mid to late 1930s. Shulman was about to become a prime member of the group as they doggedly proselytized their gospel of modern architecture through the editorial pages of California Arts & Architecture, Architectural Forum, Architectural Record, Pencil Points, and through their messiah Neutra’s hard-earned contacts with the European and global architectural press, to the rest of the world. (See my related post http://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2010/05/california-arts-architecture.html).

 

Architectural Forum, July 1936. Plywood Demonstration House, 1936, Richard Neutra. Photo by Julius Shulman, circa April 1936. (From my collection).

Shulman’s first published photograph was of Neutra’s Plywood Demonstration House designed for the California House & Garden Exhibition located at 5900 Wilshire Blvd. which I documented at the following link. (http://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2009/12/julius-shulmans-first-published.html). The house design won the $1,250 second prize in the 1935 General Electric Competition. This top image above right by Shulman appeared with the bottom Mott Studio photo and 2 Arthur Luckhaus photos above left in the July 1936 issue of Architectural Forum and this photo and/or others also appeared later the same year in the September issue of American Architect & Engineer and the October issue of the Japanese architectural journal Kokusai Kenchiku.

My 5,000 item Neutra Annotated Bibliography indicates that he had already published at least 500 articles all over the world by the time he met Shulman, mostly with photographs by Willard D. Morgan until circa 1932 when Morgan moved to the east coast, and then by Arthur Luckhaus. Shulman’s first year ended with the 3 known assignments and 3 documented publications mentioned above. He may have photographed some of the work that was published in 1937 in 1936 which I will speculate upon in future posts.

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The cover photo epitomizes the essence of the publication and just happens to be from a painting by the much under-appreciated architect Elmer Grey of his unbuilt personal “cottage” just above the Bel-Air Bay Club which he also designed at 16801 Pacific Coast Hwy. in Pacific Palisades. http://www.belairbayclub.com/ Three more renderings and a floor plan are included in the articles “The Hill-side House on the Mountain” and “An Architect’s House Set Into the Hillside.”

The painting appears to have been commissioned by Alphonzo Bell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonzo_Bell, the developer of  Bel-Air and the Bel-Air Bay Club for a marketing book (see Bel-Air Bay Book referenced in lower right caption) for the club and his nearby exclusive housing development which the cover article states Grey will design many of the houses for. Grey’s paintings are held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and come up at auction from time to time. The original cover art work above can be viewed at the following link http://circacalifornia.com/elmer-grey-painting.html.

At a precocious 26 year’s of age, Grey’s work (10 illustrations) appeared in the “First Annual Architectural Exhibition” at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Art Gallery which opened in 1898. http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_921.html. The exhibition was sponsored by the Pittsburgh Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. (See exhibition poster below).

On the basis of the design of his personal residence in Fox Point on the shores of Lake Michigan, Grey was named a Fellow in the AIA the same year, a rare occurrence for someone that young. See David Gebhard’s excellent chapter on Grey in “Toward a Simpler Way of Life” edited by Robert Winter illustrated below. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_Grey for another brief introduction to Grey and his oeuvre. The included bibliography just scratches the surface of this architect’s prolific writings and body of built work.

This particular issue of California Southland contains many more interesting items including announcements on the openings of the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs designed by Walker & Eisen and the Biltmore Hotel in Santa Barbara designed by Reginald D. Johnson. (See below).

 

 

Additional articles on the new La Quinta Resort Hotel, new commercial developments in Santa Barbara, and architecture by Roland Coate, Curlett & Beelman, Palmer Sabin and Gable & Wyant are included. Issues of “California Southland” rarely become available on the open market and are highly prized by collectors. They provide a fascinating window into the lifestyles of wealthy Californians as the state was undergoing it’s initial large-scale development in the 1920s.

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