COOL SCHOOL - Los Angeles Premiere

In Los Angeles on June 27th, the American Arts Documentary Foundation premiers its film, COOL SCHOOL.

New York City has long been regarded as the heart of the American art movement, but near the end of the 1940's, as the post-war rise of Abstract Expressionism became the new wave of painting in the United States, a small but determined band of painters, curators and collectors on the West Coast were determined to make themselves known. Filmmaker Morgan Neville examines the rise of the Los Angeles art scene and how it brought a new and vigorously American slant to contemporary painting in the documentary, "The Cool School." Neville profiles Walter Hopps and Irving Blum, owners of the Ferus Gallery, which championed the new school of Los Angeles art; sculptors Ed Kienholz and Larry Bell and painters Ed Ruscha, John Altoon and Billy Al Bengston, all of whom were championed by the Ferus Gallery; architect Frank Gehry, whose ideas dovetailed with those of the new L.A. artists; and Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, actors and Hollywood bohemians whose love of the new L.A. art (and willingness to buy pieces) provided crucial support for a struggling movement. Jeff Bridges serves as narrator. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide.

The film also includes ten of Malcolm Lubliner's photographs from his archive of the times and the artists who appear in the film; Ed Ruscha, Wallace Berman, John Altoon, Ed Kienholz, Billy Bengston, Ken Price and others. Lubliner was then the contract photographer for Gemini G.E.L. and for the Arts and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He was also active in covering much of the art and gallery scene then and was a prominent contributor to the 1996 Craig Krull Gallery exhibition "Photographing the LA Art Scene 1955 - 1975. Opening on September 27th and continuing through November 14th, 2007, Sonja Marck and The 8 Gallery in San Francisco, who represents Mr Lubliner, will exhibit more than thirty, mostly vintage photographs from that historic period.