Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California & Graphic Design, 1936-1986
By Louise Sandhaus
Metropolis Books, $55
“There is science, logic, reason, there is thought verified by experience, and then there is California.”
Louise Sandhaus quotes anarchist, environmentalist, and author Edward Abbey to introduce the first section of her new book, Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California & Graphic Design, 1936-1986. His words encapsulate the inexplicable otherness, the raw intuition, and the optimism borne of dissent that Sandhaus credits with defining the ethos of California graphic design at midcentury.
The book’s title suggests its argument: California graphic design has been shaped by a perennially uncertain environment—physically, culturally, ideologically—where tradition can gain little traction. As the East Coast absorbed an influx of European émigrés fleeing fascism in the 1930s and bringing a prescribed European modernism with them, the West Coast was left largely to its own intuitive devices. California, at the time, was still very much an outpost, and its local designers questioned the foreign strictures of an imported modernism: rigid grids, a reductive color palette, the pretense of universality. The influences that did make it across the country were filtered through the characteristics of a distinctly Californian mise-en-scène—its cultural diversity, its unique landscape, its burgeoning film industry, and its emerging counterculture. Sandhaus divides Earthquakes’ 400-plus pages and over 250 images into four sections. Each section consists of a short preamble by the author, a commissioned essay offering a more focused point-of-view, a sampling of related primary source texts, and a robust selection of visual work. The reproductions are accompanied by detailed descriptions, essentially footnotes-writ-large, that offer significant anecdotal and historical background. These visual examples and their accompanying narratives are the book’s most satisfying offering, helping to draw out the somewhat elusive arguments of the introductory essays.
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Deborah Sussman’s supergraphic for Zody’s in Los Angeles (left) The Eames’ Kaleidoscopes (right).
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The book’s structure echoes the organization of another classic study of California design, Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Sandhaus credits Banham’s influence as she offers her own “ecologies” of California graphic design. The first section, “Sunbaked Modernism,” attempts to define a distinctive California-Modern style, concluding that it is, ultimately, style-free. The next section, “Industry and the Indies,” examines the development of motion graphics as a tension between the market—driven Hollywood “Industry” and the experimental, technically innovative artists, “The Indies.” “Sixties Alt Sixties” demonstrates the true eclecticism of visual production in the 1960s by looking beyond the familiar counterculture psychedelia. The final section, “California Girls,” reviews the conceptual evolution of the significant number of women design leaders that came to prominence during this period.
Sandhaus’s curation emphasizes the view that California graphic design came about through a multiplicity of perspectives, styles, reactions, and transformations. She makes clear the pervasiveness of certain Cal-Modern themes: the fascination with folk art and vernacular visual languages; improvisation mixed with an ambivalent awareness of high modernism; technical invention especially in film, animation, and video games; and, through all of it, a friction between personal motivations and commercial concerns. The examples are plentiful and the usual suspects are well represented: Alvin Lustig, the Eames Office, Saul Bass, Oskar Fischinger, and April Greiman all make multiple appearances. Arguably, Earthquakes’ more significant contribution lies in its excavation of work by lesser known but equally deserving practitioners like John and Marilyn Neuhart, (Sister) Corita Kent, Gere Kavanaugh, and Boston and Boston, to name a few.
Reviewing this feast, one senses both the magnitude and the dilemma of Sandhaus’ project: How to organize an incredibly rich era of design that achieves its seductive energy by refusing the prevailing order—and, perhaps, any order. The upside is the eclecticism and breadth of the work. The downside is that the original concept— California graphic design as a product of myriad upheavals—never gets much critical momentum. But herein Sandhaus implicitly reinforces a different point: To be truly “Californian,” the prescribed order has to be subverted as a means to achieve creative autonomy. We certainly see this dissident spirit in both the work and the lives of several of the designers represented in this book—Oskar Fischinger buys back a film project from Paramount to continue the experiment on his own terms; Barbara Stauffacher Solomon rejects the entire profession as too hamstrung by capitalism; and, perhaps most dramatically, designer and Catholic nun Sister Corita Kent abandons her convent over its refusal to adopt the institutional updates of Vatican II.
Sandhaus does make plain the idiosyncratic curatorial filter that she used to select the included body of work. The book, she said, is “like a dinner party that serves only desserts.” The desserts are decidedly beautiful, their array stunning, and the dessert cart is noteworthy, if a bit baroque. But the sugar high risks leaving the reader both over-stimulated and under-nourished.
Still, the rich tour of California work and the diligently researched backstories far outweigh questions of structure and critical clarity. Earthquakes is a deeply informative and visually rewarding review of a place and time largely overlooked by more standardized histories. Its seismic effect will be two-fold: First, it firmly establishes the impact of California’s contribution to the development of an American modernism; and second, it reinforces the postmodern form of the “eccentric history”—a hybrid of personal experience and historical fact, à la Reyner Banham—as perhaps the only way to honor the multiplicities that we inadequately file under the title “modernism.”