A SHULMAN FEAST
By Sandy McLendon
It’s as if Jupiter aligned with Mars, as the cast of the musical Hair sang back in the days of Flower Power. Just in time for Modernism’s tenth anniversary, three new books have been released that give readers the ultimate modernist eye candy: photographs by Julius Shulman – born in 1910 and still snapping the shutter. Every lover of modernist architecture has a “dream house,” a coveted architectural masterpiece they know only from photographs. The pictures are usually Shulman’s.
Julius Shulman, perhaps more than any other photographer, brings architecture alive. One of his main means of doing so breaks a long-standing rule of architectural photography: people should never be seen in the shot. By populating his photographs, Shulman has given readers of countless magazines and books the sense that modernism is warm and livable, less a “machine for living” than a reflection of life in a new age.
Though Brooklyn-born, Shulman has spent much of his 80-year career documenting the architecture of Southern California. His iconic photographs of houses by architects such as Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, Rudolph Schindler and Albert Frey can fairly be said to have “sold” modernism to Middle America; the irresistible images convey a sense of an unfettered, carefree, rational life.
In Julius Shulman: Palm Springs (Rizzoli, hardcover, $55, 208 pages, 244 illustrations in color and black-and-white), artist and curator Michael Stern and architecture critic Alan Hess document Shulman’s work in a modernist paradise. Grouped by architect, the photographs show Palm Springs in its glamorous, celebrity-laden heyday. A sweeping Paul R. Williams ranch house for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz juxtaposes concrete block and stone with board-and-batten siding, and expanses of window wall look out on a golf course — a far cry from the couple’s fictional East 68th Street walkup in I Love Lucy. Richard Neutra’s famed Kaufmann House is revealed to be a structure designed to not impose itself on either the landscape or its owners. Palm Springs’ modernism went far beyond the preferences of its homeowners: Shulman’s camera also captured its modernist commercial and civic buildings, like its swooping, circle-themed Ocotillo Lodge, by Dan Palmer and William Krisel. An appreciative, informative text only adds to the fun of exploring this book, and it contains nuggets that will delight the reader: Who knew that Bob Hope’s house was by John Lautner?
While many of the houses in Cliff May and the Modern Ranch House (Rizzoli, hardcover, $60, 256 pages, 250 illustrations in color and black-and-white) are illustrated by recent photography by Joe Fletcher, Julius Shulman’s period images give a first-day impression of what self-taught designer Cliff May (1908-89) was all about: California modernism. Exceptionally light, bright and rambling, as well as extremely famous in their time, May’s houses were often only one room deep; the outdoors was always mere steps away. Architect and Sunset magazine editor Daniel P. Gregory and photographer Fletcher bring May back to the attention of architectural mavens with a well-written, highly informative text and photographs of May’s houses as they exist today. May’s designs often updated Spanish Colonial’s post-and-beam construction and stucco exteriors with enormous windows and pinwheeling floor plans, as in his third house for himself, now owned by actor Robert Wagner. May’s exceptional ability to get magazine coverage is well-detailed here, with archival pages from Sunset showing how his house designs took America by storm.
Surely the finest book featuring Shulman’s photography is Julius Shulman: Modernism Rediscovered (Taschen, hardcover, $300, 1008 pages, approximately 900 illustrations in color and black-and-white, 11.4 by 14.5 inches). Taschen has raided Shulman’s archives of more than a quarter of a million photographs to create three volumes of eye-popping splendor. Luxuriously bound, slipcased and printed on the extra-heavy paper it seems only Taschen will spend the money for, this magnum opus gives Shulman his full due. Four contributors (writer Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, photography critic Owen Edwards, history professor Philip J. Ethington and Los Angeles Modern Auctions director Peter Loughrey) lend their respective fields of expertise, helping the reader understand not only how much Shulman gave to modernism, but how he did it. Seemingly every important architect of the 20th century is represented in the dazzlingly reproduced photographs, from Corbu and Mies, to Bruce Goff, Craig Ellwood and Oscar Niemeyer. While this is an expensive set, it’s a must-have for anyone who loves modernist architecture, even if they have to subsist on macaroni and cheese for a while to swing the purchase price.
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