A recent rain-streaked afternoon seemed the perfect time to connect with photographer Robert Landau, an LA native who’s been documenting our streets and structures for four decades.
His new book, “Art Deco | Los Angeles” (ISBN 13 978-1-62640-139-6, Angel City Press at Los Angeles Public Library), drenches its more than 200 oversized, glossy pages with iconic architectural photos that not only celebrate a design movement, but also define our city in motion, a unique cosmopolis.
Inclement weather, so rare in these parts, brings out the Lotus-Land, noir vibe so indelibly seared into the novelist’s page and on the movie screen, from “The Day of the Locust” to “The Long Goodbye.” Perfect weather for brooding over an industrial-strength cocktail at The Frolic Room, then sullenly holing up in a louche studio flat at the Alto Nido apartments until further notice, both classic Deco locations included in Landau’s new book.
Need for shelter is the keystone of the Maslovian hierarchy, a fact brought into excruciatingly sharp focus for our region in recent months. As the rain came down, we talked about the duality of architecture, a form that’s meant to last forever (think pyramids, Parthenon, Notre Dame) but in the end proves touchingly fragile.
But buildings do more than merely keep us out of the rain: they communicate ideas. Here, says Landau, “Signs become architecture and buildings become signs,” citing all exterior architecture, including neon, as an “urban vernacular.”
New York has the Chrysler Building, but it is Los Angeles that is truly the city built by Art Deco. Architect, author and historian Alan Hess states in the book’s introduction that Los Angeles is “…arguably the most modern city in the world.” Unlike the older burgs of the east, Los Angeles didn’t have enough time to truly develop as pedestrian-centric, a fact that Angelenos continue to bemoan. “Los Angeles was built to be read through the windshield of a car,” says Landau.
Hess identifies at least five loosely defined, overlapping eras of Art Deco, which not coincidentally is enjoying something of a centennial: the term was coined at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, 1925.
Hess describes Art Deco as “malleable, adaptable,” reflecting societal mood-swings through early Zig Zag Moderne, to Streamline Moderne, to WP Moderne, to Hollywood Regency style, to Late Moderne. The periods blend considerably, and Landau is mostly unconcerned with the fiddly bits of classification.
By the 1920s, the world was literally on the move, and Art Deco drew the roadmap. Transportation technology being the context, Art Deco is literally a rush.
The message sent by the various periods of Art Deco was one of forward thrust, driven by the voluptuous curves of the 1937 Chrysler Airflow, which was inspired by the sleek lines of the Burlington Zephyr streamline train, or the silhouette of the Douglas DC-3 that popularized domestic air-travel, or the contours of the new generation of transatlantic steamships. Then-new fabrication materials including steel and plastic signaled progress and prestigious modernity.
But Art Deco isn’t always sharp angles, hard edges, and Machine Age nuts-and-bolts. Organic, natural, and flowy folkloric elements are also present, thus allowing the shapes, bas reliefs and textures to tell the story of a rapidly changing world as the 20th century literally picked up steam.
For example, Jess Stanton’s sublime, teal-glazed grill of the Warner Building located at 477 East Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena is a riotous tumble of both botanical and mechanical forms, with gears, cogs, chevrons, fins, tetrahedrons, spokes and wheels spinning feverishly among fern-fiddlehead Fibonacci spirals and blooming rosettes. The 1927 building designed by the Pasadena firm of Marston, Van Pelt and Maybury, is now home to Linden Optometry.
Unsurprisingly, the streets of Los Angeles often resemble an abandoned movie set, likely a low-budget sword-and-sandals epic.
Freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness historical references to bygone dynasties litter the Art Deco genre. For instance, the graceful 1940 Victorville granite Muses perched around the entrance to the Hollywood Bowl, designed and carved by George Stanley, summon the neo-Grecian ideal, as does Stanley’s best-known work, the “Oscar” statuette.
Monrovia’s much-maligned Aztec Hotel, restored and placed in the National Historic Register in 2003, is festooned with glyphs and flamboyant Mesoamerican flourishes which place the 1924 structure designed by Robert Stacy Judd into the fanciful category known as Mayan Revival.
The 1922 opening of King Tut’s tomb triggered national waves of Egypt-o-mania, and decked-out Pharaohs along with the animal-headed pantheon of the Nile stiffly strut their stuff on period friezes and cornices stretching from Hollywood Boulevard to the Sid Grauman-built Million Dollar Theatre on Broadway in DTLA.
Leaping gazelles, griffins from medieval heraldry, and even echoes of ancient Mesopotamia—witness the stately Assyrian Lamassu now guarding the Citadel Outlets mall in Commerce—further up the polyglot motif-ante, producing a hybrid, baroque result which teeters on the psychedelic and occasionally simply bizarre.
Landau, the son of an art dealer, first became intrigued with making images while studying the prints of French masters who photographed Paris. His uncle owned a camera-store in New York City and supplied the young Landau with his first Nikkormat, an affordable camera body that took superior images thanks to use of excellent Nikon F series lenses.
“I started out with black and white, because of the cost of processing,” recalls Landau. “Then I became a major Kodachrome user, and in the last few years, I’ve finally switched to digital.”
In the book’s Afterword, he writes “Once I’ve identified a subject that captures my interest, I like to return at different times of day to view it with different lighting. I have developed a sense about the light here in Southern California which, with all its brightness, can be quite brutal.”
The photographs in “Art Deco | Los Angeles” represent a 40-year span of regular shooting, with Landau usually behind the eyepiece just after sunrise or just before sunset. Landau says that he often returns to the same location again and again – the turquoise terra-cotta tiled tower of the Eastern Columbia building in DTLA is a favorite of his – to shoot the same façade yet another time.
Inevitably, he observes that buildings change. Some are, as we all know, leveled by natural disasters. Others are razed when tastes turn fickle and when land values rise. Other simply morph, like the former body shop that’s now a cool Argentinean restaurant, or the once-upon-a-time-in-Hollywood gas station that now serves lobster.
The Darkroom, located at 5370 Wilshire Boulevard and built as a camera-shop in the mid-1930s, now El Toro Cantina, is an example of programmatic architecture, where a structure is made to resemble the featured product itself. The shop’s front window was originally designed to suggest a nine-foot Argus 35mm camera, and the notion proved so popular that both Disney and Universal theme-parks have replicated the concept in the USA and abroad.
The Brown Derby, also replicated by Universal and Disney, The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures with its repurposed golden lipstick tube,Randy’s Donuts and Tail o’ the Pup also come to mind as programmatic examples.
Landau says “I suppose part of being a photographer is wanting to keep things forever, wanting something to be permanent. But that’s impossible. Great cities like ours are great because they grow and change while still holding on to a sense of memory, of times past.”
An earlier exercise for Landau as a photographer were the billboards of the Sunset Strip, where oversized visages of rock stars gazed down the boulevard of broken dreams not far from where he lived just above the long-gone Tower Records store.
Perhaps as an unwitting nod to the fleeting brevity of fame, the glitzy portraits were repainted or papered over almost as quickly as Landau could photograph them.
Hess describes Art Deco as “transgressive,” liberating architects from classical Western precedents, and perhaps this underlying subversive quality links Landau’s latest venture to those pre-MTV cultural artifacts. Landau recounts that The Boss himself scrambled atop the shoulders of The Big Man, saxophonist Clarence Clemmons, to modify his own billboard with spray paint. Landau further recalls that Beatles fans decapitated Paul’s cut-out figure in the Abbey Road billboard, perhaps to validate the recurring rumor that the dreamiest of the Fab Four was indeed deceased.
While defacing public monuments is discouraged, these actions do speak to the interactive nature of human beings and what they build.
For all of their seeming constancy, ediifices are no more invincible than are we ourselves. Landau’s work is a visual Valentine not only to his eccentric hometown, but also to the quest for beauty even moreso than elusive permanence, and a knowing embrace of the ephemeral nature of all things. The author will speak later this month at The Los Angeles Breakfast Club, and images from this book may also be viewed at Denenberg Fine Arts through June.
DEETS
- Robert Landau speaks about his new book “Art Deco | Los Angeles”
- The Los Angeles Breakfast Club
- Friendship Auditorium
- 3201 Riverside Drive
- Los Angeles 90027
- Wednesday, May 14
- 7:00 AM
- 323-662-1191
- www.labreakfastclub.com
- Buy tickets here
- Robert Landau’s “Art Deco | Los Angeles” | A City Etched in Geometry and Glamour
- Denenberg Fine Arts
- 417 North San Vicente Boulevard
- West Hollywood 90048
- Free admission
- 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM, Wednesdays through Saturdays
- 310-360-9360
- denenbergfinearts.com
- By appointment, email [email protected]
