What killer accessories did 1950s Los Angelinos put on their then new Paul McCobb coffee tables? Probably hip and cool matte glazed pottery by Jenev Design Studios. Then, they would cast an eyeball around their pad and notice that those bare walls were Nowheresville. What could be done to fill those empty walls? If unique art was too much bread and that portrait of grandma was way too Clyde, what about a wall hanging? Radioactive, Daddy-O!

If you are curious about potential decorating solutions for the middle-class hep cats of yester year, then you might go ape about the new Masters of Mid-Century California Modernism exhibition at the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park. This show is a sidebar exhibit devoted to the ‘50s accessories and tchotchkes designed and produced by Evelyn and Jerome Ackerman, who owned both Jenev Design Studio and ERA Industries, Inc. The exhibition curated by Jo Lauria and Dale Carolyn Gluckman focuses on the California modern design products that were mass-produced by the two Ackerman-owned Jenev and ERA companies to sate the public’s growing thirst for low cost modern design.

Jerome Ackerman designed ceramics and enamel works and was the business head of the Jenev and ERA labels. Trained at Alfred University, where he earned a Master’s degree in ceramics, his vessels are known for their spare, modern, elongated shapes and colorful glazes. Having the mottled matte surfaces of ash glazing, his vessels have a modern palette of colors such as white, black, deep turquoise, and deep brown, originally selling for between $4 and $20 at such design stores as Paul McCobb furniture showrooms. To make them affordable, his pottery was mass-produced using slip-casting. His pottery designs have become timeless, and his vessels are now frequently appearing in nostalgic museum shows across the country. Some of the ones from this exhibit were also included in the important Made in California exhibition of art and design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2000. Another of his modern designs was a sconce-like candleholder that protrudes from a zigzag bent plaque of yellow and orange porcelain on metal. He also designed a tabletop variation in yellow and white that is included in the show.

Mr. Ackerman’s business model of distributing inexpensive, friendly modernism to a public increasingly becoming interested in fashionable design essentially set the example for stores such as today’s Ikea. His Jenev and ERA labels produced the accessories sold in furniture stores alongside the modern couches and tables. Unfortunately, his concentration on the business took too much time away from his focus on design.

With her husband distracted by business, Evelyn Ackerman actually designed most of ERA Industries’ products. Her strength was creating decorative products to be hung on walls known as wall hangings, which borrow styles introduced by such famous avant-garde artists as Pablo Picasso or Fernand Leger. She then retooled their avant-garde style into pleasant, decorative design subject matter. Then these designs were mass-produced in Mexico to cut costs. During the mid-1950s, Mrs. Ackerman’s product designs mimic Picasso’s less abstracted figurative style that appears in his lithographs, paintings, and ceramics from mid-1940s through 1955. Evelyn Ackerman’s sand-cast aluminum relief wall hanging “Warrior King” made in 1955 for Jenev Studios looks like a bas-relief variation of one of Picasso’s paintings. She would also use a style of simple linearity and shapes of color, similar to Picasso’s, to describe figures in fashionable ‘50s mosaics. A good example of this strategy is Mrs. Ackerman’s mosaic prototype “Young Warrior” (1955), which is a simplified Picasso-esque figure rendered in a ‘50s palette of olive greens, pinks, and turquoise-blues.

Mrs. Ackerman also mirrored the 1950s penchant for pet themes when she designed her “‘Cats’ Table,” (1955) which is a simple rectilinear coffee table onto which she applied mosaic. The image on the tabletop is a central long horizontal line in the middle latitude of the table. On both sides stand geometric four-legged animals that with the assistance of the title can be read as cats. Oriented as it is, the design allows the viewer to see two right-side up and two upside-down animals from either couch view of the table. Other popular ‘50s motifs that appear repeatedly in her work are chickens, large-eyed women, and radiant suns.

Her latter works create abstracted designs for textile wall hangings. The textiles are indebted to the rectilinear geometric designs themes from Bauhaus alum Anni Albers as well as themes from Dada artist and Swiss School of Applied Arts alum Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Other works borrow elements from Op art. In “Striped Candy Tree” (1968), Evelyn Ackerman utilizes a contrasting blue and white offset stripe similar to an Albers artwork that was cropped into an Ellsworth Kelly-like compound shape made from two circles and a rectangle. She then set it off on a yellow background with a blue border. This woolen textile’s color is bold akin to Op art, although its form reads more like a Michelin Man than a tree.

In retooling high modernism for commercial ends, Evelyn Ackerman’s designs are a perfect demonstration of what Clement Greenberg described in his classic essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Designers from the 1950s and ‘60s perpetually harvested ideas from fine artists and retooled them into consumer products without any hesitation or second thought because designing for the home furnishing market is about timing. When designing objects for the home, it takes about five to seven years from its original avant-garde introduction to become potentially viable for a company to invest capital for a potentially risky mass-production effort. After a significant time delay, a radical new style no longer poses an aesthetic threat and can be welcomed comfortably into the average person’s home. Generally, this method of designing is well received by consumers. Later, Andy Warhol would take consumer product ideas from the design world, such as Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo soap pad boxes, to retool them into real, groovy artworks and thus even the score.

Sending Evelyn’s designs for ERA Industries to be made in Mexico with reduced labor costs made this modern style affordable. The Ackermans’ company utilized new production techniques as well. Industrial silk screening was used to apply Evelyn’s designs on such varied materials as roller shade fabric and upholstery linen, which further reduced costs. In addition, they employed new techniques invented by the aerospace industry to etch Evelyn’s designs for inexpensive calendars into metal.

The Mingei International Museum’s mission is to present craft and design from all eras and cultures of the world. In presenting the wares sold by Jenev Design Studio and ERA Industries, the Mingei is presenting product designers who retooled vital art ideas and transformed them into home accessories for average consumers. The theme music in the background of this exhibition of designs for mass production serves well because the music softens the serious affront to the permanent collection objects on display elsewhere in the Mingei International Museum—a museum traditionally devoted to unique works of craft, folk art, and design. The curators, Jo Lauria and Dale Carolyn Gluckman, seem to have mistaken the elegant concept of the folk tradition in art and design that is defined as making up a distinctive cultural tradition and have misinterpreted it as the inelegant German industrial concept of the Volk—an army of consumers hungry for cheap homogenized products.

Listening to the accompanying music is fun, though. The 1950s popular cha-cha and jazz music playing in the background creates a light-hearted effect enveloping the viewer with a campy atmosphere that injects nostalgic fun into the works on display. Some of the toe-tapping music includes compositions by Art Tatum, Count Basie, and Oscar Peterson. This show can be better appreciated as a nostalgic romp through yesterday's questionable tastes. Thoughts of "my mother and/or grandmotherhad one of these" as well as "What were my ancestors thinking?" keep popping into one's head. Viewing these quaint and dated curiosities that were popular during the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and flower-power years can also serve as a jack-pot manual on what to look for when trying to restore your vintage ranch style home to its original gold-flecked Formica glory.

As a 1950s design exhibition, Masters of Mid-Century California Modernism is still off-putting. From the title, one expects timeless work from such luminary designers as Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, or Charles and Ray Eames. The experience of viewing this exhibition is comparable to wanting to see a Porsche exhibition expecting to see an exhibition of sleek sports cars designed by Ferry Porsche and then once inside finding only his father Ferdinand’s designs for the Volkswagen beetle.