Review: Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Architecture and Design

Abstract

Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Architecture and Design MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles September 2011–January 2012 Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Architecture and Design presented a retrospective of the work of writer, architecture critic, and unabashed booster of Southern California modernism Esther McCoy (Figures 1, 2). The exhibition was housed in the building that inspired McCoy’s initial foray into architectural criticism: Rudolph M. Schindler’s 1922 King’s Road residence in Los Angeles. Drawing from the McCoy papers in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, curators Kimberli Meyer and Susan Morgan presented a wide range of her writings in order to affirm her “unassailable role as a key figure in American modernism,” as introductory wall copy explained. With its Los Angeles–centric focus, however, Sympathetic Seeing at best indirectly made the case for McCoy’s national profile. The exhibit was nonetheless a reminder of McCoy’s prodigious talent and range as a writer and of her tireless crusade to win for California architects the accolades she believed they deserved but had long been denied. Indeed, when she turned to architectural criticism in 1945, McCoy became one of the first to argue that California architecture warranted serious consideration and study. Figure 1 Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Architecture and Design Figure 2 Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Architecture and Design The McCoy exhibit was the MAK Center’s contribution to Pacific Standard Time, a multi-institutional, Getty-led initiative to showcase “Art in Los Angeles” from 1945 to 1980. With exhibits staged at over sixty participating institutions, the goal of Pacific Standard Time, according to the Getty brochure, was to “celebrate … how the Southland became a great center for art and culture.” While there is much to celebrate about this art and culture as well as McCoy’s contribution to an appreciation of it, boosterism is inevitable when a region …