California’s prosperity facilitated an energized art scene. Bay Area Bohemians loosely joined by Big Sur writers gave birth to a literary revival, the San Francisco Renaissance, which anticipated a countercultural movement soon to sweep much of America. In Los Angeles, on the other hand, non-Bohemian, socially elite arts patrons busily invested their resources in creating cultural venues commensurate with the city’s wealth, size, and aspirations to become a world super city.
The Bay Area headquarters of the poetry renaissance was San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore, co-founded by poet, painter, and publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. A galaxy of the leading Beats, so called because their work supposedly embodied the beatitudes of Jesus as well as a sense of being beaten down, gathered there to read each other’s output. City Lights literati included Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, William Everson, Jack Kerouac, Alan Watts, and other notables.
In addition to poetry, some of the Beats also wrote prose that oftentimes evinced Pacific images. In his acclaimed novel titled On the Road (1959), which narrates his car trip across America to California through fictional characters, Kerouac rhapsodized about catching his first glimpse of the City by the Bay and the vast ocean outside its Golden Gate: “It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.”
The poems and prose emanating from the San Francisco Renaissance often satirized corporate America’s consumerism, nationalism, and militarism. Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” addressed to his close friend, Carl Solomon, aimed its controlled fury at these targets. The bard gave his poem its first public reading in 1955 at San Francisco’s famed Six Gallery arts venue. Some authorities hold that by then Ginsberg had accepted his own homosexuality. Certain passages contained explicit homoerotic imagery that led to a major court battle involving the charge that Ginsberg’s book, Howl and Other Poems, which appeared the following year, was obscene. Ferlinghetti, whose City Lights Bookstore had published the work, successfully waged the fight against the obscenity charge. His attorney was able to demonstrate that the book was written without lewd intent and had “redeeming social importance.” The legal victory, according to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, “set a landmark precedent enabling the publication of books by, among others, [William S.] Burroughs, Henry Miller and Vladimir Nabokov.”
Asian religions, particularly Buddhism, informed the works of many of the Bay Area and Big Sur writers. A Buddhist and Taoist reverence for nature infused many of their writings. Some - Gary Snyder, Alan Watts, Kenneth Rexroth, and Allen Ginsberg - studied in Asia. Others, like Everson and Kerouac, imbibed Asian religions from their San Francisco associations and readings.
Prominent novelist Henry Miller lived and wrote in Big Sur, a picturesque village situated above towering cliffs overlooking the Pacific and located about 120 miles south of San Francisco. His novel Tropic of Cancer (1934), a semi-autobiographical work focusing on his life in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, was banned in the United States until 1961 for its explicit sexuality. Nevertheless, it won critical acclaim, with renowned British poet T. S. Eliot calling it a “magnificent piece of work.”
Ken Kesey was another major Beat-influenced Bay Area author. After studying writing at Stanford, he worked in a Menlo Park hospital. His novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) depicts the struggles of institutionalized people to gain a modicum of agency in a society that punished nonconformity. With a group known as the Merry Pranksters, Kesey toured America in a kaleidoscopically painted bus in the 1960s.
UC Berkeley-educated author Joan Didion did not fit the bohemian mode. She published her first novel in 1963, Run River, which dissected the troubles of a California rancher’s daughter going insane. Before moving to New York City, Didion lived in Los Angeles for 20 years, during which she gathered material for her collection of essays on California in the 1960s, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). Though Didion saw a glowing side to California, bright warm days “when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms,” on balance she presented a state in decline. The “center. . . was
Not holding,” meaning that California’s children “grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally. . . enforced society’s values.” To her the state’s youth were not so much in rebellion against traditional values as ignorant of those values in the first place.
While San Francisco boasted one of the nation’s best opera companies, complemented by art venues such as the de Young Museum, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles patrons decided to enter their city into the ranks of those known internationally for art. Dorothy Buffum Chandler, wife of the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, headed a fundraising drive resulting in the building of the Music Center, dedicated in 1964. The Hollywood Bowl provided summer concertgoers an outdoor amphitheater where they could hear the world-renowned Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Zubin Mehta. Oil magnate J. Paul Getty’s Malibu mansion served as an art museum, exhibiting ancient sculptures and other works he had collected in Italy. After completion of his seaside villa, these works went on display to the public beginning in 1974.
San Diego, too, tended to its arts sites. By 1965 the San Diego Civic Theater had been built, providing a concert hall for the city’s symphony. A year later, the city’s Museum of Art expanded by adding a west wing, doubling exhibit space for its modern European collection of paintings.
Like the state’s big-city art centers, smaller ones also were located mainly along the coast, which provided ideal settings for plein air (outdoor-painted) seascapes. Mendocino, Carmel, and Laguna Beach continued to draw painters, bolstering those cities’ national reputations as art colonies and travel destinations.
Architecturally, three styles prevailed: modernism, Tiki, and ranch. Austrian-born Richard Neutra, who settled and worked in Los Angeles, was known worldwide as an innovator in modernist designs. He employed machine patterns in the design of homes and commercial buildings. Sea Ranch, a modernist resort area on the Sonoma coast, was planned by architect Al Boeke, who conceived of building clusters of unpainted wooden houses and a lodge that fit with the natural environment. There, landscape architect Lawrence Halperin let the Pacific Coast inspire his design, which fused public and private space into a seamless outdoor setting. Internationally renowned Hideo Sasaki, whose modernist landscape designs can be seen at Los Altos Hills’ Foothill College and San Francisco’s Embarcadero, similarly insisted that the environment must guide his projects. Bay Area architect Joseph Eichler designed modern, steel-and-glass-encased, atrium-centered, singlefamily residences. Thousands were built, selling in 1957 for between $18,000 and $25,000. Throughout the Bay Area, Asian motifs were particularly evident in interior decor, furniture, and landscaping. Garrett Eckbo, a leading state architect, exalted the Japanese Zen garden as the aesthetic ideal for use of outdoor space.
Tiki (represented as a Polynesian warrior) architecture was most popular in the Bay Area but could also be found in the Southland. Many San Francisco shipping magnates, such as Roger Lapham, president of the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company and former city mayor, had traveled extensively throughout Polynesia and were enamored of the island lifestyle, which they incorporated into their homes. This often meant having rattan furniture, tropical plants, and artwork reflecting Pacific island cultures. These prominent residents and others held backyard luaus, or Hawaiian feasts, lit by Tiki torches. Businesses also adopted Hawaiian motifs. Trader Vic’s restaurant, for example, popularized Aloha
Shirts and other attire, and many hotels featured Tiki bars, where exotic rum drinks were served. The national chain of Trader Joe’s markets, beginning with the first in Pasadena in 1967, has utilized the South Seas theme in interior decor and branding products from then to now, according to founder Joe Coulombe.
Ranch-type residences evoked California’s connections to the American Southwest. Such houses, whose low, sprawling, horizontal lines were accented, bespoke California’s Spanish-Mexican past when rancheros dotted the hillsides. Like other aspects of California life, ranch-style architecture, inspired mainly by the designs of Cliff May, had spread to many parts of America by the mid-1960s.
World History
