Collector's Focus: Planes, Trains & Automobiles

When Claude Monet (1840-1926) painted La Gare Saint-Lazare in 1877,

- John O' Hern

Paris had only recently been rebuilt from medieval chaos to broad, apartment-lined boulevards. One of the new buildings can be seen through the smoke and steam in the station. Monet painted the station on a sunny day with the light animating the atmosphere, lighting the distant buildings and casting shadows throughout the station, an Impressionistic view of modern Paris.

Also in 1877, the Southern Pacific Railroad completed its line through the desert to the ocean. Part of the land it passed through had been occupied by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians for thousands of years. An oasis the Cahuilla called Se-Khi (boiling water), later became Palm Springs, California. Beginning in the 1920s, visionary architects began building sleek, modern homes and other buildings in Palm Springs. The area became a mecca for midcentury modern design.

Today, Danny Heller combines architecture and automobiles in his paintings that celebrate midcentury Palm Springs and the area. He says, “Working in a photorealistic fashion, I highlight various elements of midcentury modernism—walls of intricate breeze block patterns, dynamic rooflines of tract homes, fins of a 1958 Cadillac, kidneyshaped swimming pools—and how they combine with the surrounding environment to create an idealized setting. What’s important for me is not just a respectful reproduction of these touchstones of design, but communicating their optimism and continued relevance in our daily lives. In doing so, I’m helping people value the past, aid in its preservation and learn from it in order to build the future.”

Joseph Eichler was a real estate devel oper who brought modern design to the masses, building 11,000 homes across California—but not in Palm Springs. A company is now rectifying that by working with designs by the architects who worked for Eichler to create homes for the 21st century called Desert Eichlers.