New York City has long been regarded as the heart of the American art movement, but near the end of the 1940s, as the post-war rise of Abstract Expressionism became the new wave of painting in the United States, a small but determined band of painters, curators, and collectors on the West Coast were determined to make themselves known. Filmmaker Morgan Neville examines the rise of the Los Angeles art scene and how it brought a new and vigorously American slant to contemporary painting in the
documentary The Cool School. Neville profiles Walter Hopps and Irving Blum, owners of the Ferus Gallery, which championed the new school of Los Angeles art; sculptors Ed Kienholz and Larry Bell; and painters Ed Ruscha, John Altoon, and Billy Al Bengston, all of whom were championed by the Ferus Gallery; architect Frank Gehry, whose ideas dovetailed with those of the new L.A. artists; and Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, actors and Hollywood bohemians whose love of the new L.A. art (and willingness to buy pieces) provided crucial support for a struggling movement. Jeff Bridges serves as narrator. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
The Cool School, a breezy, lively documentary about a thin slice of the Los Angeles fine art scene in the 1950s, is easy on the eyes, and the ears too.
Documentarian Morgan Neville takes an appropriately lively, left-field approach to The Cool School's eye-opening history of the Beat-era Left Coast art scene -- a lesser-known chapter in the story of American modern art.
No one emerges very well defined from this historical shuffle, but those who know the artists' works, or names such as Hopps and Blum, but have never heard them speak, will find The Cool School absorbing and informative.
Morgan Neville's 'The Cool School' is a slickly packaged document of the burgeoning modern art scene in LA during the late '50s and early '60s which sadly submerges its fascinating subject matter in technical clutter and contrived set-ups.
An art scene flick which can be readily appreciated for its valuable lesson that one need not be dependent on the New York Establishment or any Ivory Tower critics for validation.
Veteran documentarist Morgan Neville's illustrated history of the painters and sculptors associated with Venice's Ferus Gallery (1957-1967) is at once lively and analytical.
Surf's up in Southern California as the modern art world invades Nixonville and Reagan City in the 1950s. A fascinating look at the start of something big: modern art in Los Angeles.
Smart, jazzy and unafraid to deflate egos, Morgan Neville's fast-paced, finely critical study makes for a pungent intro to a movement now esteemed as a key alternative to the New York AbEx stranglehold.
A lot of information, very well done, and made me wish I was not a sparkle in my mother's eye at that time. I think I would have gotten into it more if I was a part of that generation.
October 8, 2008
Lenore S
Besides being graced by the narration of Jeff Bridges...a must for anyone interested in the visual arts, particularly the artists who began to put CA art on the contemporary map...as well as for anyone interested in the times in which they live...not to mention good film-making...
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