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MUSIC, architecture and art melded in a picture-perfect Modernist moment in 1957 every time abstract painter Karl Benjamin went to work. In the studio of his custom-built post-and-beam ranch that hewed closely to the airy Case Study model mastered by Pierre Koenig and Richard Neutra, Benjamin would huddle over his canvases to create vivid geometric compositions while playing and replaying Miles Davis' records on the hi-fi.
"I think I wore out two copies of 'Birth of the Cool,' " Benjamin recalls. "Miles' music spoke to me, spoke to my attitude, my outlook. In visual arts, negative area -- the space between things -- is very important, and with Miles, the space between the notes took on new meaning. This restrained lyricism moved me deeply. Of course you're not thinking about it at the time, but the music and the painting coincided." At 81, Benjamin could be seen as the venerable poster boy for the Orange County Museum of Art's new show "Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury." His sensibility is writ large in the exhibition, opening today, which celebrates the Modernist aesthetic as filtered through paintings (Benjamin's included), architecture, music, graphic design, decorative arts, furniture, film and animation produced by Southern California's creative community during the '50s.
Gathering more than 150 objects, "Cool" includes work from midcentury design polymaths Ray and Charles Eames as well as photographs by Julius Shulman, whose meticulous portraits of Case Study homes (built between 1945 and 1966 under the auspices of Arts & Architecture magazine) established Southern California as a breezy outpost of International Style.