Both architects had a lifelong connection to the Harvard Graduate School of Design and must have had quite a number of encounters. Yet think of it:
1.) Jerzy fought with the Polish army against the Nazis and barely survived the battle; then he barely survived six years of prisoner of war camp.
2.) Philip was a fucking NAZI! A real live Nazi who tried to start an American fascist party and loved him some Hitler! He celebrated the destruction of Warsaw! He attended Nuremberg rallies and it’s clear from his descriptions of his response to them that they made him come! Come, reader. Like have an orgasm.
****************
UD actually kind of finds it hard to imagine a universe in which these two men exist together; she totally can’t create a clear picture in her head of Cambridge only fifteen or twenty years after the war and ANYTHING civilized being exchanged between these two. Did Jerzy know about Philip’s profound commitment to and delight in the violent destruction of everything Jerzy not only held dear but for which he practically gave his life? “We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed,” [Johnson wrote in a letter during the war]. “It was a stirring spectacle.”
*************
I mean, Jerzy already disliked Johnson because of Johnson’s commitment to postmodernism, to be sure; but can he also have known he was talking to a degenerate, seemingly unregenerate, Hitlerian?? If so, how can he have agreed to be in the same room with him? I’m thinking he must not have known.
************
But, well, fascinating fascism and all that. Most people who know about architecture have long known that Johnson was a brownshirted jackbooted antisemite… which is like SOOOO fascinating… SOOOO offbeat and edgy and out there… Oh, Philip, stop it!! (Giggle.)
[L]et us not forget his playbook (or his witticisms), so that we can recognize future versions when they arise: the nihilism and casual dismissal of the human that inspired his dark grids and glass-clad castles. I see traces of those qualities in certain architects who claim to be humanists, but whose work instead celebrates their own grandeur. Philip Johnson wasn’t just a racist and fascist: He was a cultured, rich cad who made us forget our own failings as a country and as a profession.
And it is fascinating to old UD, the way we extend a weird sort of – what’s the phrase everyone’s using these days? – preemptive pardon to people like Gore Vidal (UD loves Vidal and even made a pilgrimage to his DC gravesite, but there’s no denying his Johnsonian ugliness in old age) and Kingsley Amis. And maybe we should extend a pardon. But Philip Johnson was no garden variety bigot; he was a brilliant and principled Hitlerian. He laughed it all away years later and people let him. Look how long it’s taken for the civilized world to start erasing monuments to the fucker.
December 12th, 2020 at 12:28PM
It’s very conflicting when bad people have some real artistic chops. Is there a trade-off equation, in the application of which, Hitler and Pol Pot closely approach negative infinity, but Philip Johnson slides by, in the middle of some curve trough. I like a lot of Johnson – though the Glass House essentially is the Barcelona Pavilion – Morandi, some Nolde, Italian Fascist architecture. (The Conformist is visually splendid) But I’d give them up in a minute if, in exchange, the regimes in question would, as a result, never have existed. Still, I look with pleasure. What if Hitler, and not Matisse, painted what we know as Matisse or Vermeer? Trump? (Hah.) I’d like to think that there is some natural mechanism that makes extreme cases like the last two impossible, not just improbable. Dunno. But it reminds me a little – though only just a little – of the Lon Fuller, H.L.A Hart debate on whether evil law could in fact be law, based on conflicting views of law’s essential characteristics. Here the issue is how much context external to the artwork itself figures in the assessment. Specifically; on how the the beauty or other artistic merit of a product depends on moral and humane attributes of its maker. Analogously, in viscerally assessing the beauty of those around me, I find that who they turn out to be, in a deeper sense, very often radically transforms how they look to me.
Just a footnote. I’ve never understood the artificial
pressure not to use Hitler as an example when modern, central-case he is. A law review once asked me to change an AH reference that was exactly apposite. After arguing with a stone wall, I, tired and with many even worse editorial comments to reject, substituted Pol Pot. Sadly many of their readers will just have to look it up. Let them eat Wkipedia!
December 12th, 2020 at 7:49PM
Greg: It’s a subject that has long fascinated me. You could argue that especially in order to be a great boundary-breaking artist (Picasso and James Joyce and Ezra Pound and George Bernard Shaw were nasty pieces of work, and plenty of impressive but lesser lights – consider that absolute shit, Evelyn Waugh – were just as intolerable) you have to be insolent, cold, brave, full of an unbreakable sense of your own brilliance, impatient with the moral conventions of your time (see also DH Lawrence)… Great artists draw us into their world even if part of us is appalled (Nabokov, Lolita) – and this is all good, far as I’m concerned. Art is the realm of free play, of liberation from inherited moral constraint, and bravo.
I don’t care much about the artist; I care about the art. And this is true of Philip Johnson too — I’ll take what I can from his buildings and I won’t worry much about his absurd biography. On the other hand, if people want to remove some of his honors because it’s kind of gross to honor a Nazi, I’m fine with that too.