Indepth Arts News:
"Personal Edens: The Gardens and Film Sets of Florence Yoch"
2002-01-16 until 2002-03-10
Charles Allis Art Museum
Milwaukee, ,
USA United States of America
Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum presents
the touring exhibition Personal Edens: The Gardens and Film Sets of
Florence Yoch, and complementary exhibition David O. Selznick's Gone with
the Wind: Film Memorabilia from the Collection of Dale E. Kuntz. Among
America‚s foremost landscape architects, Florence Yoch designed for
residences, courtyards, social clubs and film sets from Mexico to
California, including Gone with the Wind.
From 1918 to 1971 she adapted
traditional landscape designs to American needs, creating some of the West‚s
most beloved gardens. Modern California gardens have fully incorporated her
fundamental design principles of comfort, efficiency, and economy, which
continuously molds contemporary American trends. Celebrating Scandinavian
Heritage as part of the International Arts Festival, the exhibitions open
with a public reception on Wednesday, January 16, 2002, 5:30 - 8:00 p.m. and
continue through March 10th.
Three talks will be presented in conjunction with the exhibitions. Explore
the legendary classic film Gone with the Wind through the Gallery Talk &
Tour with Dale E. Kuntz on Wednesday, January 30 at 7 p.m. and Sunday,
February 24 at 2 p.m. Kuntz will lead an insightful tour of his exhibition
David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind: Film Memorabilia from the
Collection of Dale E. Kuntz, as well as highlight the partner exhibit of
Florence Yoch‚s design legacy. Admission is $5 Adults, $3 Students and
Friends of Villa Terrace Members. Eric McDonald will follow with 20th c.
American Landscape Design on Wednesday, March 6 at 7 p.m., the first lecture
in the series A World of Gardens 2002. Admission is $8 General or $25 for A
World of Gardens series.
Florence Yoch (1890 - 1972) was one of the most original and versatile 20th
century American landscape architects with a 53-year career accomplishing
over 250 projects. Yoch designed gardens for private residences, public
courtyards, and social clubs from Coyoacan, Mexico, to Carmel, California,
as well as for five Hollywood film sets. Her highly recognized landscape
designs, Tara in Gone With the Wind and the Capulet Garden in Romeo and
Juliet, are among her projects for Hollywood clientele including producers
Jack Warner and David O. Selznick and director George Cukor. Her designs
suited the literary-based films she worked on, which rejected flamboyant
individualism and emphasized the redemptive power of a well-organized
domestic world. A passionate traveler, she journeyed to Africa to research
The Garden of Allah (1936), visited Georgia for Gone with the Wind (1939),
reshaped San Fernando Valley slopes into rice fields for The Good Earth
(1937), and made 10,000 daffodils bloom for the hero‚s recovery in How Green
Was My Valley (1941).
Yoch primarily executed her designs between 1925 and 1940 under her
flourishing firm, Yoch and Council, a partnership with her lifetime
companion, Lucile Council. They worked with the period‚s finest architects,
including Roland Coate, Myron Hunt, Reginald Johnson, Wallace Neff, and
Gordon Kaufman. Successful Los Angeles women sought Yoch for key
commissions, from the Women's Athletic Club rooftop gardens to the Greek
temple garden for Dorothy Arzner, who introduced Yoch to the movie industry.
Yoch annually visited and studied great European gardens, skillfully
adapting formal gardens to the Southern California climate, vegetation, and
lifestyle, saying, Let traffic carry the bonework. Countering numerous
California myths, she gravitated toward allegorical temperance, juxtaposing
the natural and wild against artificial and disciplined, stating, Genuinely
informal planting is not natural in our climate. Her distinctive and
inclusive work united friends and clients from varying geographical and
social backgrounds, even integrating patios and peasant‚s kitchen gardens
into plans for wealthy clients, and by the 1920s and 1930s was among the few
landscape architects working in Pasadena and West Los Angeles. Yoch
simplified her designs for unskilled workers after the 1929 stock market
crash and World War II. In 1961 she said, do not work against local
conditions and spoil the genuine desert-country-ranch look. Focusing on
the subtler pleasures of gardening, her enduring designs replaced elementary
lawns with fields of barley, alfalfa, and African grass. „The complex
harmonies of her personal Edens bridge divisions in city and state and join
their owners to larger communities, new cultures, and venerable times. In
each landscape, she told many stories to enlarge American dreams,‰ said the
Personal Edens exhibition curators.
Personal Edens: The Gardens and Film Sets of Florence Yoch will include 77
watercolors, photographs, drawings, and ephemera, including Florence Yoch's
watering can. This is the first traveling exhibition organized by the
Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino,
California, and was curated by Eric T. Haskell of Scripps College, and James
J. Yoch of the University of Oklahoma, Florence Yoch's grandnephew and
author of Landscaping the American Dream: The Gardens and Film Sets of
Florence Yoch: 1890-1972.
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