The National Art Center, Tokyo presents California Design, 1930 - 1965: "Living in a Modern Way". The exhibition - the first majorstudy of modern California design - examines the state's key role in shaping the material culture of the country at mid-century.California Design features more than 250 objects in wide-ranging media, including furniture, textiles, fashion, graphic and industrial design, ceramics, jewelry, metalwork, and architectural drawings, as well as film.

"California is America, only more so", the author Wallace Stegner famously declared in 1959. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the state symbolized the good life in America. After 1945 a burgeoning, newly prosperous population - intoxicated by the power to purchase after the deprivation years of the Great Depression and the war time rationing of goods - turned the state into America's most important center for progressive architecture and furnishings. This exhibition explores how the California of our collective imagination - a democratic utopia where a benign climate permitted life to be led informally and largely outdoors - was translated into a material culture that defined an era. To tell the story of how California provided the ideal environment for modernism to flourish in a way particular to the state, the exhibition is divided into four sections: "Shaping", "Making", "Living", and "Selling". As émigré Greta Magnusson Grossman declared in 1951, California design "is not a superimposed style, but an answer to present conditions.... It has developed out of our own preference for living in a modern way".

*image (left)
Woman’s swimsuit, 1961
Spandex, Lycra 
Mary Ann DeWeese (1913-1993, active Los Angeles) 
LACMA, Gift of Mary Ann DeWeese, DeWeese Designs
© 2011 The Warnaco Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
For Authentic Fitness Corp., Cole of California.
Photo © 2011 Museum Associates/LACMA.