HELLO, COOL WORLD
SoCal painter reconnects his hard-edge modern
art with classic artifacts of mid-century California

From the pages of CA-Modern magazine
By Dave Weinstein

Can 'cool' be codified? Beatniks with their bongos and bikers in leather would have said no. Wasn't cool akin to Zen -- something indefinable, like smoke, a you-know-it-when-you've-got-it sort of thing?

But when curators put together an ambitious, innovative exhibit such as 'Birth of the Cool' -- one that aims to show a connection, indeed, a shared zeitgeist, between certain architects, designers, jazz musicians, avant-garde moviemakers, and painters of mid-century California -- definitions are forthcoming.

'Cool' meant art that, unlike the earth-shaking solos of bebop or the splatters of paint that seemed to burst from Jackson Pollock's very soul, was rational and restrained, but deeply emotional nonetheless. In "the ethos of cool," the show's curator Elizabeth Armstrong says, can be found "a cerebral mix of seeming detachment and effortlessness."

"There are the rationality and purity that are hallmarks of modernist design -- a cool, some would say cold, aesthetic with hard edges, minimal forms, and an industrial sensibility," she writes in the stunning book-sized catalogue 'Birth of the Cool,' which accompanies the show of the same name. "And there is the cool of the hipster...an attitude that eludes those who try too hard to achieve it."

"Detached but smart," Lorraine Wild writes in her essay in the book, "imaginative but not overworked -- can 'cool' be described in any other way?"

"To be cool," wrote LeRoi Jones, quoted in 'Birth,' "was, at its most accessible meaning, to be calm, even unimpressed by what horror the world might daily propose."

By any of these definitions, the painter Karl Benjamin, who never pounded drums nor rode a Harley, was cool -- despite living in Claremont, a sedate college town 50 miles from the epicenter of Southern California cool, Venice Beach. Filled with artists and intellectuals associated with the town's colleges, Claremont had its own form of quiet cool.

Self-taught as a painter, Benjamin developed a rigorously abstract style, with single-color shapes colliding, caressing or jumping about the canvas. His paintings can resemble mountains or Indian blankets, or appear systematic -- though they are never about systems. Sometimes they suggest space, and other times the colors buzz like those in Op Art. But optical phenomenon is something else the paintings are not about. "Color," he has said, "is the subject matter of painting."

"Cool doesn't mean unemotional," Benjamin says. "It's understated. It's kind of an emotional expression where you're not burping all over yourself."

The curator Jules Langsner, who included Benjamin's work in the movement-defining 1959 show 'Four Abstract Classicists,' called one of his paintings "a series of percussive notes that would bring joy to the heart of a Gene Krupa." Benjamin is very much a jazz fan. "I think I wore out two copies of the 'Birth of the Cool,'" he says of the Miles Davis LP that gave the show its name.

Despite early acclaim, however, Benjamin never made a living from his paintings. Asked who bought them, he says: "Nobody." He then suffered the further indignity of being forgotten. When Southern California abstract painters began attracting national attention in the mid-1960s, that attention focused on the abstractions of Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston, and Larry Bell, and not on the earlier generation of abstractionists, including Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley, and Helen Lundeberg, whose works are highlighted in 'Birth of the Cool.' "What was to become the history," Benjamin says, "didn't include us."

Now, however, thanks in part to 'Birth of the Cool,' Benjamin and his generation are being rediscovered -- just as the work of mid-century modern architects was rediscovered a decade ago.

For Benjamin, a soft-spoken man of 82, the attention is sweet. He's got a prominent gallery carrying his art, he's been profiled in the New York Times, and when the Claremont Museum of Art debuted, its inaugural show focused on Benjamin. And Benjamin's work is prominently featured in 'Birth' -- including on the book's cover.

His paintings, moreover, go far to prove the curator's point that mid-century art and mid-century architecture are brothers under the skin. Benjamin was close friends with Claremont's leading modern architect, Fred McDowell, and had McDowell design the home where he has lived for more than half a century.

Benjamin's house is a classic mid-century modern California ranch, long and low, with a gabled roof over clerestoried glass, open beams and generous overhangs, an open floor plan, and a wall of glass facing the rear courtyard and the painter's studio. It looks in many ways like a Joe Eichler home, beautiful in its simplicity, with quiet lines, open spaces, and restrained decoration. What can be cooler than that? The structure is clearly apparent -- much as the structure is apparent in Benjamin's paintings.

McDowell, who studied architecture at the University of Southern California, spent his career in the Claremont area, designing many custom homes, several small modern subdivisions, and college buildings.

"I really think this house was a great influence on me," says Benjamin, who knew little about modern architecture when he commissioned McDowell to design the house. "I got to become immediately a friend of Fred's. We went over the plans. I didn't understand what I was looking at it, so he explained why he did this and why he did that.

The resemblance between his paintings and McDowell's architecture became apparent to Benjamin only after the fact. The series of paintings most influenced by the house he named his 'post-and-beam' paintings, after the house's structural system.

The architect also noticed the resemblance, says his widow, Shirley McDowell, who remains friends with Benjamin and his wife, Beverly. When Fred McDowell chose a Benjamin painting to hang in their home, she says, "I said, 'I know why you chose that painting. It looks just like your architecture.' "

Armstrong sees other formal parallels between mid-century painting and mid-century architecture. "Just as the light-filled modernist house is open to the elements, with walls and ceilings seeming more like planes floating in space than enclosures," she writes, "hard-edge paintings of the period are characterized by a play between opaque and transparent forms, an instability of spatial division, and ambiguity between flatness and depth."

Among the artists and designers whose work makes up the 'Birth of the Cool' show are Charles and Ray Eames, furniture designers and architects; Julius Shulman, whose photos of elegant people in stark interiors made modernism appealing. The 'Birth of the Cool' catalogue also features classic and cool-as-glass Ernie Braun photos of Eichler homes.

One section of the catalogue focuses on William Claxton, the photographer and designer of record album covers, whose photos of Sonny Rollins, Chet Baker, and Gerry Mulligan defined the Los Angeles Cool Jazz scene. "The look of his photos was the way you wanted things to look," David Hickey writes in one essay, on Claxton and Cool Jazz. But it is the hard-edge mid-century painters whose work makes up the centerpiece of the show. Benjamin never thought of his art as 'cool,' and his approach to painting seems far from rational. Despite the work's hard-edge look, Benjamin works intuitively, not mathematically. And even though his brushstrokes are invisible, the act of painting is a sensuous one for Benjamin.

"An Abstract Classicist painting," Langsner wrote in the introduction to the 1959 show, "represents a rational crystallization of intuitive experience." Benjamin's work also suggests how Cool -- both the general aesthetic and his particular paintings -- had a social component. The Cool aesthetic, in many ways, was a quiet protest against the materialism of the 1950s, and to the increasingly paranoid Cold War world, complete with its McCarthy-ish witch-hunts and its missile races. Cool was a distancing technique, a stepping back from a world that was increasingly insane.

Benjamin, whose politics veers left, never saw his art as political, though he says that devoting ones life to abstract art is itself something of a political statement. He did produce a 'Viet Cong series,' he says, "after my students were kidding me about doing abstract paintings, not socially important things."

Benjamin showed his work at the Pasadena Museum in 1954 -- only a few years after creating his first painting. The Four Abstract Classicists show, which put him on the map, opened in San Francisco, showed in Los Angeles, and traveled to the East Coast and Europe.

Though Benjamin painted every day, he and Beverly spent their careers teaching and raising three children. Benjamin taught art, first in public schools, then at Pomona College and Claremont Graduate School, both in Claremont. He retired from painting in 1995, slowed by a bad back and "a bunch of stuff."

"I used to fantasize that one thing about being a painter or a poet is, you never have to quit," he says. "But I quit without a problem, and I was an everyday painter."

Since retiring, Benjamin has been enjoying his home ("It's very beautiful and I feel very close to it, he says") and his garden; he planted every tree. He reads, and he and Beverly entertain friends and family. For the past five years, Benjamin's been busy with galleries and shows. His paintings, which sell in the mid-five figures, have been in group shows, art fairs, and museum exhibits across the country and in Europe.

Benjamin never intended to become an artist. He moved to the nearby town of Redlands after World War II at 19, after a brief stint in the Navy. Hired to teach sixth grade in a local public school, he was told he'd have to teach art -- a subject he knew nothing about. His career goal at the time involved literature. "I didn't even pick up a brush until I was 22," he says.

"I knew the names of Michelangelo and Picasso. The principal said you have to put in 45 minutes on art. So I passed out some paper I found, and some crayons, and hoped they'd do something they'd call art," Benjamin says of his students, working class kids who had never seen a museum. "I'm not exaggerating. It was the blind leading the blind."

His lifelong methodology of teaching was developed through instinct. "I had a knack with kids, anyhow," Benjamin says. "I said, 'Pretend like you're doing long division. You have to really concentrate on your paper. They did that. They had to fill the paper with color, was the second thing. They couldn't have another paper until they'd filled up the first one with color. The third rule was: ask a kid to make a drawing and most kids draw a mountain, tree, and the sun. The rule was: you couldn't do that. It's a cliché."

"I took a group of kids from no background and had them doing really terrific stuff. I don't mean a few art stars. I mean 90 percent of the class. Everybody had an individual color sense, everybody had a sense for textures. These were all natural things, just like voices are natural."

Benjamin's success at teaching art to children suggested he could learn it himself. "I thought: if these kids with no background could do this, let's see what's in this art for me. It was a weird way for a painter to get started."

Photos: John Eng, Ernie Braun; and courtesy Karl Benjamin

Paintings by Karl Benjamin: courtesy Louis Stern Fine Arts

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