Palm Springs Art Museum, California

There’s a louche feeling to Palm Springs, even if it’s raining so hard the road is starting to flood and the water is threatening our parked car. It could be the architecture, or the glamour of the well-heeled, or an aura left over from the days of Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope, when anyone who was anyone headed out of smoggy Los Angeles for weekends in the dry bright air of Palm Springs.

The rain is a drag but it does enable us to shoehorn the kids to the Palm Springs Art Museum. It has been an institution in this city since 1938, though to begin with it was called the Palm Springs Desert Museum, and focused on the natural sciences.

Charging up the grand entrance stairs, we arrive damp and flushed and, wow, are instantly captivated, the kids by the wacky totem poles made from recycled backpacks and me by the quiet exuberance of the space. This is high Modernism, airy, sleek, textured, minimal in a friendly, tactile way. I feel suddenly nostalgic and realise I’m having flashbacks from my 1970s adolescence. I want to lie on the shiny wooden floor under the curve of frosted glazing that reaches to the ceiling, run my fingers along the gritty stone feature wall and trail my hands on the angular coppery hand rails.

This version of the Palm Springs Art Museum was designed by the architect E. Stewart Williams in 1976. With his father and younger brother, he established the firm Williams, Williams and Williams in Palm Springs in 1946. By then Desert Modernism was well underway.

It began with the Oasis Hotel in 1923 which was built by John Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank. He combined Art Deco forms with Modernist features in concrete. It had the first swimming pool, a lush garden and a 40-foot tower in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. But with just 24 rooms, the Oasis struggled to survive and only the tower can still be seen in downtown Palm Springs. The city is full of such treasures.

Trapped in the Art Museum by the pelting rain, we prowl the exhibits assiduously. The ground floor is devoted to a show called “Unsettled: Art on the new frontier” that features 75 artists from Alaska through the North American West down to Central America. Banjo is fascinated by the swarm of model submarines representing each craft in the US Navy. Iris likes the pyramids of vivid powder arranged in a triangle on the floor. I like everything, particularly the doctored photographs of Native Americans.

The second floor shows off some of the Museum’s 20,000 works and I’m drawn to the ceramics of Latin America. They are loveably anthropomorphic. Each work is given ample space and light, and though there is plenty to see here, it’s not the Louvre, which takes the pressure off.

A nook on the ground floor is dedicated to the days of Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope. There are postcards of lithe people lounging in classy chairs next to pools, large tumblers of whisky and ashtrays on their side tables. And photographs of Ol’ Blue Eyes partying with the in-crowd.

Frank Sinatra inadvertently boosted the desert Modernist movement when he drove down to Palm Springs in 1947 looking for a weekender. He’d just earned his first million with MGM and had a Georgian mansion in mind. The architect E. Stewart Williams must have been a smooth talker for he persuaded him out of that idea and in to a “more desert appropriate style”. Just over three months later, Sinatra held the first New Year’s Eve party at his new home of Twin Palms. (Picture courtesy of www.sinatrahouse.com)

It is a glorious hymn to Modernism, a 4,500 square-footer with plates of sheer glass, a covered walkway, 4 meticulously designed bedrooms, 7 bathrooms and a large pool in the shape of a grand piano. Today it is a luxury rental and wedding avenue, but can be visited during the Palm Springs Modernism Week held every year in February.

Sinatra brought Nancy and the kids to Twin Palms, in between trysts with Ava Gardner who was to succeed Nancy as the second wife. Visitors to the house today can inspect the crack in a bathroom basin from the bottle of champagne Sinatra threw at Ava, before he threw her and Lana Turner out on the street.

After the Museum, we drive slowly in the rain along streets called Palm Canyon, Vista Chino and Monte Vista, clutching a map of the famous modernist houses. It is hopeless. Mostly, we see artful bushes and cactus. It only rains for 15 days a year; for the other 350, you can hire a bike and cycle these streets, or take one of the many tours.

I know the 1970s is the era of Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room and Greer’s The Female Eunuch – of house wives with frustrated ambitions and minority status – but even so a small part of me yearns to have experienced those years in Palm Springs, when desert Modernism ruled and no one knew that smoking caused cancer.

EXTRA

Palm Springs Art Museum is open daily 10am to 5pm, except Wednesdays and Thursdays when it opens from noon to 8pm. 
See also the Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Centre and the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Desert. www.psmuseum.org. (Front entrance photograph from their website.)
The Palm Springs Historical Society offers reasonably-priced walking tours through 8 different districts of town www.pshistoricalsociety.org
2021 Modernism Week will be held on February 15-21.  www.modernismweek.com