Music and Cats

Traditionally, Mr. Johnson is presented as the great champion of modern architecture - organizer of the landmark 1932 Museum of Modern Art show on the International Style, and architect of the Glass House on his Connecticut estate, which quickly came to symbolize American modernism. He is equally celebrated for abandoning classical modernism in the late 50's and adopting in the decades that followed a succession of styles that mirrored the changing taste of the time.

It hardly mattered that many of his skyscrapers were corporate schmaltz; he was an enlivening, generous figure, a man who charmingly described himself as a "whore" as he picked the corporate pocket. Always ready to challenge the earnest, Mr. Johnson, who understood Warhol as well as Mies, became both an icon and an iconoclast.

Only one aspect marred this picture: His embrace of fascism during the 1930's, which was mentioned only in passing in most obituaries. He later called his ideological infatuation "stupidity" and apologized whenever pressed on the matter; as a form of atonement, he designed a synagogue for no fee. With a few exceptions, critics typically had little interest in the details, granting Mr. Johnson a pass for a youthful indiscretion.

Then, in 1994, Franz Schulze's biography presented this period of Mr. Johnson's life in some depth. Mr. Schulze's account was as sympathetic as possible - and many reviews of the book still played down the importance of Mr. Johnson's politics - but it was clear that views of Mr. Johnson's import for American culture would change significantly.

Philip Johnson did not just flirt with fascism. He spent several years in his late 20's and early 30's - years when an artist's imagination usually begins to jell - consumed by fascist ideology. He tried to start a fascist party in the United States. He worked for Huey Long and Father Coughlin, writing essays on their behalf. He tried to buy the magazine American Mercury, then complained in a letter, "The Jews bought the magazine and are ruining it, naturally." He traveled several times to Germany. He thrilled to the Nuremberg rally of 1938 and, after the invasion of Poland, he visited the front at the invitation of the Nazis.

He approved of what he saw. "The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy," he wrote in a letter. "There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle." As late as 1940, Mr. Johnson was defending Hitler to the American public. It seems that only an inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation - and, presumably, the prospect of being labeled a traitor if America entered the war - led him to withdraw completely from politics.

Today, any debate over an important figure with a fascist or Communist background easily becomes an occasion for blame games between right and left. Mr. Johnson is no exception. Morally serious people can have different views of his personal culpability.

But what's essential is to let the shadow fall - to acknowledge that fascism touched something important in his sensibility. Throughout his life, he was an ardent admirer of Nietzsche. His understanding of the great philosopher was surely deeper than that of the Nazis, but he was overly enchanted by the idea of "a superior being," "the will to power" and Nietzsche's view of art. And he loved the monumental.

In an interview published in 1973, long after he renounced fascism, Mr. Johnson said: "The only thing I really regret about dictatorships isn't the dictatorship, because I recognize that in Julius's time and in Justinian's time and Caesar's time they had to have dictators. I mean I'm not interested in politics at all. I don't see any sense to it. About Hitler - if he'd only been a good architect!" In discussing Rome, he contrasted the poor artistic achievements of the democratically elected Republic with those of earlier regimes. "So let's not be so fancy-pants about who runs the country," he concluded. "Let's talk about whether it's good or not."

Mr. Johnson's observation was refreshingly hard-nosed about art's relation to politics: good politics is not now and never will be a prerequisite for good art. But his emphasis on the aesthetic as the only important value in art was remarkably cold-blooded. His main regret seems to be that contemporary republics have failed to create monuments that ravish the senses.

He never became a fascist architect. But he was probably one of those artists - among them many Communists - whose philosophical sensibilities were gutted by the experience of the 30's and World War II. Afterward, he lived more than ever for the stylish surface, appearing uncomfortable with large-minded ideas even when his buildings reached for the sky.

Perhaps as a consequence, his imagination developed no particular center. Nothing was intractable or non-negotiable. He was remarkably free. He could toy, sometimes beautifully, with history. He liked a splash. He was a playful cynic, cultivating success even as he winked at its vulgarity. If someone should complain, well, the problem lay not in the artist but in the fallen world.

Philip Johnson now seems like an emblematic figure partly because he appears to have been happily, marvelously, provocatively, disturbingly hollow. It is an underlying fear of Western culture, one that has lasted since World War II, that there is no larger or ennobling content to mine. Mr. Johnson's main flaws as an artist - his tastes for razzle-dazzle and overweening scale - are equally the weaknesses of American secular culture. His main strengths - his openness to change, playfulness and urbane rejection of the Miss Grundys of the world - are equally it strengths.

The beautiful Glass House will remain Mr. Johnson's signature work. It is the transparent heart of a collection of eclectic buildings in New Canaan, Conn. It's a dream house, a stylish stage set. It floats upon the land, eliding boundaries between inside and outside. It seems full of emptiness. It's not really a place to live, but was still Mr. Johnson's essential home. That uneasy stylishness deserves emphasis. Philip Johnson lived in a glass house. He threw stones, too.

Mark Stevens is the art critic of New York magazine and the co-author of "De Kooning: An American Master."
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Soon he was drifting away from the severe and rigorous steel-and-glass boxes of his mentor and experimenting with more plastic shapes. In the process, he pushed Modernism in a new direction. Like other architects, Johnson was responding to the American public's desire for pomp and circumstance, but the result was a clumsy sort of stripped-down neoclassicism, best represented by the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. Monumentality for the masses.

In the mid-1960s, Johnson veered again. Architects like Eero Saarinen worked for corporate clients, but Johnson took on the challenging task of working with commercial real-estate developers. Over the next two decades, working often for the developer Gerald Hines, Johnson popularized the signature office building. The idea was that striking architecture was good for business. Across the country, he built increasingly theatrical skyscrapers, culminating in the AT&T Building in New York City, a Chippendale-topped high-rise that got its architect on the cover of Time magazine.

Johnson ushered in, although he did not invent, what became known as architectural Postmodernism. Always generous, he promoted the careers of such notable practitioners of the genre as Michael Graves and Robert Venturi. But in less capable hands, Postmodernism quickly degenerated into a facile and repetitive pastiche of old and new.

Johnson's work became increasingly historicist, often slapdash, definitely interesting rather than good. He seemed to sense that Postmodernism might be a dead end and switched gears again. This time it was Deconstructivism that caught his eye. He took architects such as Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry under his wing, and hoping to repeat his earlier success, promoted a 1972 exhibit at MoMA. While lacking the impact of his earlier show, his imprimatur helped to propel Eisenman and Gehry, as well as Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas, into the limelight. Johnson himself, who had continued his practice, also embraced the new style. The ungainly Canadian Broadcasting Corp. headquarters in Toronto, was one result.

The celebrity culture of contemporary architecture is a Johnson legacy, as is a somewhat cynical aestheticism that seeks to divorce architectural design from the real world. On the other hand, Johnson's enthusiastic involvement in architecture certainly served as a stimulus to several generations of what he called "my kids." Yet, in turning away from the principle of Modernism and embracing the shaky terrain of the eclectic, Johnson ultimately lost his way. Perhaps that's why the elegant and evocative Glass House, which he built in 1949, remains his most enduring achievement.
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In architectural terms, Mr. Johnson's output was uneven. His most memorable works are almost without exception his most intimately scaled, and they evoke a remarkable range of references that with hindsight, imbues them with unexpected subtlety. The Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., for example, was famously inspired by Mies's earlier design for the Farnsworth House in Plano, Ill., but its sleek Modernist appearance and slender brick base also suggested a traditional home with its skin stripped off.

That catholic sensibility was also evident in his 1950 design for Dominique and John de Menil's residence in Houston, whose blank brick facade masked a more transparent interior that opened onto flowing gardens, echoing, in its small way, the Janus-like vision of precedents like the 17th-century French estate Vaux le Vicomte.

But what most separates his work from more austere influences like Mies is its thinly veiled hedonism. The beauty of the Glass House, for example, arises from the quality of the glass, which is less about transparency than about the creation of a subtle interplay of visual images, from reflections of the surrounding trees to the movement of bodies inside. Similarly, the polished interiors he designed for the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, with beaded steel curtains that conjure up a woman's slip, make it one of the sexiest rooms in the city 45 years after its completion.

That bias toward aesthetics over social issues had been clear since his 1932 "International Style" show at the Modern, which he organized at the age of 26 with Henry-Russell Hitchcock. The show, which celebrated the work of such pillars of early Modernism as Mies, Le Corbusier and J. J. P. Oud, electrified an audience that was unfamiliar with Modernist achievements in Europe. But its relentless focus on form tended to overlook the deeper social goals that inspired such architecture. While Mr. Johnson may have made such work palatable to the American cultural elite, he also emptied it of some of its meaning.

Nonetheless, that narrow devotion to aesthetics may also have been what allowed Mr. Johnson, in his later career, to slip so easily from one architectural style to the next. When the glow of late Modernism began to fade sometime in the early 1970's, Mr. Johnson was one of the first to abandon that vision in favor of postmodernism, a movement that he helped spawn and that eventually landed him on the cover of Time, clutching a model of his AT&T tower with its granite Chippendale top.

A decade later, Johnson was exploring the more fragmented forms of architects like Frank Gehry, which led to a short-lived collaboration on an unbuilt guest house for the insurance magnate Peter B. Lewis. His forays into so-called deconstructivism yielded the canted walls and curved shapes of a visitors center at his estate in New Canaan.

Mr. Johnson's fickleness often led to accusations that he was more an arbiter of architectural tastes than a creative groundbreaker. And in truth, few of his buildings from the 1970's and 80's could be considered distinguished. Most - banal corporate towers done on the cheap - seemed a winking testament to his famous quip that all architects are whores.

Yet there were exceptions. The angular glass surfaces of his 1976 Pennzoil Place, for example, frame a thin sliver of sky that gives a palpable tension to what are otherwise a pair of conventional corporate towers. His Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., completed in 1980, is a mesmerizing composition of faceted glass planes.

And in many ways, Mr. Johnson's restlessness may have been his greatest asset: not so much as an architect as in his effect on the culture of architecture. During his long reign, no one was a more eloquent advocate for architecture, and few were more open to new ideas. Nor has any American architect been more indefatigable in promoting new talents, many benefiting from his patronage.

Mr. Johnson accomplished much of this through his position at the Modern, where he continued to curate shows until he was into his 80's. The 1988 show on deconstructivism, which he organized with Mark Wigley, may not have had the impact of his earlier successes, but it underlined Mr. Johnson's zest for exploring contemporary architectural ideas at an age when most would be content to play the role of dignified figurehead.

His connection to the Modern was only the most visible aspect of his stature as architectural tastemaker, a position enhanced by his aristocratic charm and social connections. It was Mr. Johnson, for instance, who famously introduced Mies to the Seagram heiress Phyllis Lambert in the early 1950's; soon afterward she commissioned Mies and Mr. Johnson to design the landmark Seagram Building. Later, he was an ardent supporter of emerging talents then like Peter Eisenman and Mr. Gehry. His dinners at the Century club, meanwhile, were coveted as a means of entree into the tight-knit world of New York high culture, the kind of circles that guaranteed large-scale, high-profile commissions.

Conversely, the architects he ignored sometimes felt as though the power he wielded could be devastating. But Mr. Johnson felt free to follow talent and ideas wherever they led him. That blazing openness to the new - that ease in gliding from style to style, from one milieu to another - seems virtually impossible to replace.
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