philip johnson (1906–2005) and the importance of resilience

The Smithsonian Institution

Philip Johnson (1906–2005) and the Importance of ResilienceAuthor(s): Franz SchulzeSource: American Art, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Fall 2005), pp. 92-94Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art MuseumStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/500234 .

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Appreciations

Philip Johnson (1906–2005) and the Importance of Resilience

Franz Schulze Critical commentary following Philip Johnson’s death in January 2005 has been so volu-minous that another evaluation of his contributions to architecture, architectural history, and museum curatorship runs the risk of reading like secondhand goods. But as his biographer, I learned to know him well enough to offer a few words in praise of a special Johnson trait that has lately been little noted but was, I believe, vital to a remarkably suc-cessful career.

Call it resilience. Although his wealth and inherited social position enabled Johnson to reach many of his objectives, he went through more than a few experiences that threat-ened their attainment. And while his professional record would seem to have assured solid self-confidence, he faced a number of situations during his long life that suggested otherwise.

Johnson’s undergraduate years at Harvard University, for example, were troubled by several bouts of depression punctuated by a serious case of mastoiditis (an infection of the skull). Moreover, his love of philosophy, which he made his major concentration, turned out to be unrequited. He earned the personal affection of his professor, the renowned Alfred North Whitehead, but not the respect demanded by this challenging discipline. “Whitehead never flunked his students,” Johnson recalled, “but if he gave you a B, it meant the same thing—that you didn’t have what it takes. In 1927 he gave me a B. If I was good in some species of philosophy, I was hopeless in metaphysics. He knew it.”

Ironically, Johnson sought and found surcease from his difficulties by poring over the writings of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who steered him to a field, the arts as a whole, that spoke more eloquently to his condition. Within a few years Johnson had found architecture and his life’s mission.

He discovered it, that is, only after a circuitous route that led him almost ruinously astray. Following a 1929 meeting and a rapidly growing friendship with Alfred H. Barr Jr., the brilliant young director of New York’s newly formed Museum of Modern Art, Johnson, aged twenty-three, became an unsalaried member of the museum staff. Between 1932 and 1934 he was largely responsible for two exhibitions that are still regarded as among the most important museum events of the twentieth century: Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, which brought such figures as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, J. J. P. Oud, and Mies van der Rohe to the attention of the American public; and Machine Art, a design show virtually without equal in its innovative survey of simple but elegantly fashioned, mass-produced mechanical objects.

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Johnson then proceeded on a course that proved to be temporarily self-destructive. He left the arts and went into politics—a politics of a right-wing order that by the mid-1930s had led him to adopt the principles of Nazi Germany and to publish writings supporting them. In 1941, when it was clear that the vast majority of American citizens had no use for the Nazis, he was identified as an “American fascist” in a best-selling book by William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent.

Johnson had reached a low point in his life, and salvation rested with himself alone. Wisely, he gave up politics for good and returned to architecture, now taking on a challenge distinctly unlike his curato-rial work of the early 1930s. He enrolled as a student in the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Johnson was older than most of his classmates, but he relied re-sourcefully on what he had learned during his tenure at the Museum of Modern Art—especially his devotion to the work of Mies van der Rohe. As an equivalent in built form to a senior thesis, Johnson de-signed a house for himself in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Competently derived from the Miesian model, it certified his poten-tial as a practicing professional architect.

That ambition was put on hold—in another frustration—when he was drafted into the U.S. army in 1943. After his

discharge from the military in 1945 he returned to New York, where he opened his own office but soon found that commissions in the postwar period were wanting. Fortunately, Barr, recollecting the curatorial record his friend had made earlier, offered him another place in the museum. Johnson accepted. His career now ran on the twin tracks of archi-tect and curator. And so it remained until he gave up his relationship with the museum in 1954 and turned all of his attentions to his practice. By his sixtieth birthday, in 1966, he had established himself as a designer of major international consequence.

But this circumstance too was not to last. International Style modernism, which he had followed from the outset of his career, came under attack in the later 1960s by a number of members of the younger generation, chiefly architect Robert Venturi, whose book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture encouraged the development of post-modernism, a movement that looked favorably on the forms of tradition and history that modernism had opposed. Johnson found himself off the pace, his confidence more compromised than at any time since the late 1930s.

Johnson chose, however, not to resist the postmodernists but to learn from them. One of his personal assets was the ability to recognize talent and respond to it generously

Hans Namuth, Philip Cortelyou Johnson, 1987. Cibachrome print, 21 ₇⁄₈ x 16 ₇⁄₈ in. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Acquired with a contribution from the James Smithson Society © Hans Namuth Ltd.

Photo Credit93, © 2005 Smithsonian Institution, Courtesy National Portrait Gallery



enough to impress whoever possessed it. He grew closer to those younger architects whose ability seemed to him undeniable, and he profited sufficiently from their example that the work he did in the last quarter century of his life, notably the AT&T Corporate Headquarters (1984, New York City) and the Transco Tower (1985, Houston), secured him a place of lasting significance in the history of twentieth-century architecture. In 1987 photographer Hans Namuth captured the image of a confident-looking Johnson straddling a Robert Venturi chair in his office in the oval skyscraper on Third Avenue, popularly named the “Lipstick Building,” which he had designed two years earlier with partner John Burgee. A model of the building is seen at left in the photo.

Despite his reputation as an emissary of the avant-garde, Philip Johnson was nothing if not a practical man, a trait he often demonstrated when he identified the architect’s first and foremost obligation: “Get the job.” The unusual resiliency that characterized Johnson’s long life allowed him to keep on doing so.

Charles Sawyer (1906–2005)

A Star in the Museum Firmament

When I first met Charles Sawyer in 1966, as a new student in the graduate museum program he had created at the University of Michigan, he seemed a distinguished old man. Distinguished he certainly was, but I now see—having reached the age he was then—not by any measure old. Nearly forty years later, I also realize that the Charles Sawyer I knew seemed hardly to change over time, embodying a quality of constancy, the comfortable confidence of one who knew precisely who he was and what he was meant to do in the world. Charlie, as he liked to be called, was, personally and profes-sionally, one of the most consistent souls I have ever known—unfailingly attentive, thoughtful, kind, tactful, principled. His standards were exacting, his commitments—to the arts, to museums and his profession, to his students, colleagues, and friends—unswerving. A New Englander, he was a gentleman to the core, embodying a particular code of living that embraced guiding moral imperatives and everyday social graces, that informed everything from his rock-solid work ethic to respect for the commandment forbidding cocktails before the dot of five.

Charles Sawyer was born in Andover, Massachusetts, on October 20, 1906, and was ninety-eight years old when he died this February. His life and career thus spanned a period of extraordinary development for museums, which included the intensified com-mitment to education and increasing passion for authenticity and American history that followed World War I; the devastating displacement of works of art during World War II, which raised philosophical and legal questions still current today; and the revived ethical consciousness and demand for public accountability provoked by Watergate. He witnessed the proliferation of museum training programs; the glory years of federal arts funding (of which Michigan’s program was a beneficiary); the commercial success of museums with its attendant benefits, dilemmas, and redefinition of the role of director; the challenge posed by theory-centered art history to traditional notions of connoisseur-ship; and the phenomenon of the museum building as civic landmark. It is remarkable how many of these (and other) watersheds Charles not only observed but engaged.

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Marjorie L. Harth

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While always abreast of the latest developments, he retained a steadfast attachment to what he considered the essential focus and responsibilities of museums: works of art, education, and public service.

Sawyer was educated at Andover Academy, Yale University, and Harvard, where he intended to study for a legal career but was diverted by the influence of art historian Paul Sachs, who offered one of the country’s first connoisseurship-oriented museum seminars. Many of the country’s next generation of museum directors were products of that class, and Sawyer moved quickly into the field, becoming the first curator of the Addison Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Academy, Andover. At this time he also met and married Katharine (Kitty) Clay, an ever-gracious, wittily engaging (and occasion-ally irreverent) hostess.

In 1940 Sawyer became director of the Worcester Museum of Art in Massachusetts. Three years later, he entered government service, spending a year in England as part of the Military Government for Germany and, later, in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where he worked to document and return works of art confiscated by the Nazis. The final years of the war found him in Washington as assistant secretary for the Commission for the Preservation of Monuments and Works of Art in War Areas. In 1947 he returned to Yale, where he was awarded an honorary master’s degree along with the directorship of the Division of the Arts, overseeing the colleges of Architecture, Art, and Drama, the Department of the History of Art, and the Art Gallery. During his tenure architect Louis Kahn was commissioned to design an addition to the gallery; the two worked closely together and became friends. In 1957 Sawyer departed for Ann Arbor, becoming the second director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art and a member of the art history faculty. He remained there until his retirement in 1972.

Among his many accomplishments at Michigan, Sawyer created one of the country’s early museum training programs—the Museum Practice Program—many of whose graduates have gone on to leadership positions: among these, Jacquelynn Baas (Hood

Charles Sawyer at the University of Michigan Museum

of Art, Ann Arbor

Photo Credit95, Photo by Stephen G. Maggio



Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive), Roger Berkowitz (Toledo Museum of Art), Kevin Consey (Berkeley), Steven Hamp (the Henry Ford), and Millard Rogers (Cincinnati Art Museum). Catholic in approach, the program accepted students of history and archaeology as well as art history, and worked closely with the Toledo art museum, the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, and Michigan’s Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. Responding to a per-ceived need for broadly trained professionals interested in smaller, community museums, Sawyer also instituted regional internships—at Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills and in Flint, Grand Rapids, and Kalamazoo—that were, for years, supported by National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities grants.

Sawyer was first associated with the Smithsonian Institution in 1953, when he joined the institution’s Art Commission; he was chair of the commission in 1968 when President Lyndon B. Johnson dedicated the Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C., as the new home of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Until the end of his long life, he remained a respected advisor to museum directors there and throughout the country. He served on advisory boards for Harvard, Amherst, and Smith colleges and the University of Notre Dame, and was a trustee of the Corning Glass Museum. Other associations included the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of which he was a fellow; the American Antiquarian Society; and the Century Association, of which he was the oldest living member. In addition to the MA from Yale, Sawyer was awarded honorary doctorates by Amherst College and Clark University in Massachusetts and the University of New Hampshire. Last September the University of Michigan Museum of Art announced that its projected Center for Museum Studies would be named for him—a fitting tribute and one in which he delighted.

Some years ago, in the wake of a celebratory event at which several of his former students offered brief reminiscences, Charles wrote to me, as I’m sure he did to others. “You are,” he said with characteristic grace, “one of the stars in my firmament.”

And you, Charlie, in ours.

Walter Hopps (1932–2005)

In the Company of Artists

Walter Hopps was truly an artists’ curator. He was a man of exceptional insight and sensitivity, and he had an empathy with artists unlike any other museum administrator or curator I’ve ever met. I felt comfortable sharing with him anything and everything I tried to do in my art. But above and beyond all, I don’t think I’ve ever had a better friend or one that I respected more.

We first met in the late 1960s at the Corcoran Museum in Washington, where I was teaching. He had recently become director there after leaving the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum of Art) in California. Hopps had an unbelievable memory, and he actually remembered sending me a Marcel Duchamp exhibition catalogue I had requested many years earlier when I was teaching at Memphis State University. “My goodness,” he told me, “I remember my secretary coming into my office in Pasadena and saying, ‘Look, Walter, we’ve got a request for a Duchamp

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William Christenberry

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catalogue from Memphis, Tennessee!’” He told her to send it to me right away along with a special poster that Duchamp had designed for the show. When I shyly introduced myself to him in Washington, he also seemed genuinely interested in my art; in time he asked to see the work. That’s how our friendship began.

He was a genius, someone who didn’t necessarily follow everyone else’s rules. His work hours were erratic, and because he showed up late so often, some people at the Corcoran made up a button “Walter Hopps will be here in 20 minutes” as a joke. I have one that I’ve kept as a memento. When it was time for an exhibition to go up, the installers might be there all day, but he would arrive in the late afternoon and expect everyone to work with him all night.

When he organized the Robert Rauschenberg show in 1976 at what is now the Smithsonian American Art Museum—that was the first large Rauschenberg show at a major museum—he called me up one night and said, “I really need your help. Can you come down and help us make a reproduction of Rauschenberg’s Minutiae?” He explained that Merce Cunningham’s dance troupe wanted to do another performance piece around this 1954 combine (which was largely made of fabric), but at this point the original was too valuable and fragile. “And, by the way,” he added—“this is going to take some time.”

Hopps also said I was the only artist he knew who could imitate Rauschenberg’s brushstroke for this project (I still don’t know if that was a compliment or not). So I went down to the museum, little understanding that I’d be there for seventy-two hours straight. We worked around the clock, and so did the museum carpenters, who were building a huge crate for the piece. When we finished our reproduction in the wee hours, they loaded it into the crate and shipped it off by air freight to a sound studio for the Cunningham troupe. Sometime later I asked Walter what happened to it, and he replied, “Oh, Merce has it somewhere.”

Many people have recalled that Walter Hopps would occasionally disappear and not appear at work for days. Sometimes when that happened he was at our house. He stayed up in the attic bedroom. We’d leave him alone and not see him for days, or he would

William Christenberry, Walter Hopps, Washington, D.C., 1978. Photograph. Collection of William Christenberry



come down and we would end up in a three-hour conversation about all sorts of things. We valued those times. While writing didn’t come easily for him, there wasn’t anything Walter couldn’t talk about. I’ve never met a mind that worked that way, that was just so open and flexible.

He told me that when he was twelve or thirteen, growing up in California, he had a serious case of rheumatic fever. His father was a doctor—and maybe his

mother too, I’m not sure—and his parents insisted that he spend a lot of time recovering at home before they would allow him to return to

school. He was in part self-taught, and he used that time to learn a lot of things. For example, that is when he taught himself to process black-and-white film. He was really interested in photography as a serious means of expression, and one of my most treasured gifts is a Walter Hopps photograph, showing a medical skull and a micro-

scope, that he did at age thirteen. I don’t usually photograph people, but one time when he was visiting our Washington home I snapped

some photos of him sitting in our backyard. Looking back on it, I’m glad to have these mementoes of Walter.

He was one of the first people to champion the work of William Eggleston, a great photographer and wonderful friend of mine from Memphis. This was the early 1970s, and Eggleston was on his way to New York to show some work to the director of the Museum of Modern Art. He came through here first to spend a few days with my wife, Sandy, and me, and I introduced him to Walter. Well, don’t you know Walter locked the three of us in the auditorium at the Corcoran and we spent hours looking at Bill’s slides. Eggleston had a major exhibition at the Modern in 1976, but Hopps was one of the first people to recognize the importance of his work. He had a great eye.

Another time we went together to visit Walker Evans, and there was an immediate rapport there as well. Walter really liked being around artists, from Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg to Duchamp and Joseph Cornell. He was a very personable, charismatic man. As far as the types of artwork he supported, he always said, “I’ll look at anything.” Since the days of his Duchamp show, he had been interested in dada and surrealist influences on artists, but I never heard him be critical of any other school or movement. I do think he tended to gravitate toward sort of oddball things—and I say that as a compliment; that was a great strength.

To work with him on an exhibition was exhausting, though, because he was so thor-ough and not casual about facts at all. He wanted to see everything. He was avaricious about his looking. He didn’t leave any stone unturned. He wanted to know everything: “When did you make that?” “Why did you make this?”

As for my own career, Walter Hopps was the first person who understood the relationship of things in my work. That is, I was trained as a painter, always was inter-ested in three-dimensionality, and I made snapshots. All of this is a totality. My little, three-by-five-inch Brownie snapshots got a lot of attention in the mid- to late 1960s, because they were almost always in color, and color was frowned on in the world of fine art photography. And my primary subjects were vernacular architecture and early country graveyards in my native Alabama. Hopps saw the range of the work and how everything is an attempt toward a totality of expression about where I’m from and what I care about.

One time in 1974 I started thinking about making a small version of a country church I had photographed three years earlier. I said, “Walter, I can’t possess the real church. I can’t bring it back to Washington. I have this desire to make a small version, a sculptural, three-dimensional version, but I’ve never done anything like that and it

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might be a waste of time.” I’ll never forget his reply. He said, “You’ll never know until you try, will you?” It was my first building construction, set on a field of real red earth that measures five by six feet, but there have been many more since. And later when Walter was director and then curator at the Menil Museum in Houston, the museum purchased it.

And there’s the dark side—a large-scale tableau I made, with over four hundred objects, on the subject of the Ku Klux Klan. It is made mostly of GI Joe dolls dressed as Klansmen, combined with many drawings based on my experience with the Klan in the South. In 1979 some of the Klan material was stolen from my studio, and Walter was very helpful in advising us how to handle this very scary situation. Later he was sup-portive of showing the Klan tableau when some other institutions appeared to be fearful of exhibiting it. It was shown for the first time in an exhibition he did of my work at the Institute for the Arts at Rice University in 1982 after he left Washington. This was shortly before the Menil Collection was founded. Dominique de Menil badly wanted Walter Hopps to be director of her new museum, then later he became curator and a consulting curator there. This show traveled to the Corcoran in the spring of 1983. It was a very important exhibition for me—a major survey of my sculpture, drawings, and photographs, and included the Klan room.

Walter also included a family calendar my grandfather had kept for decades in a show called Poetic Objects at the Washington Project for the Arts. It is a wonderful chronicle of my family’s history from 1866 to 1951 when my grandfather died and my father entered his name in the calendar. I conceived of showing it as a piece, and Walter loved it and decided to include it in the exhibit. To me, that says a lot about his open approach to art.

When Walter Hopps died, Sandy and I went out to the funeral in California. I didn’t know at the time whether it was his request or not, but the lid of his coffin was made from one of the doors of his house, with the doorknob still attached. When the coffin was being lowered into the earth, I noticed that some people went over and touched the doorknob. Walter’s wife, Caroline, told me later that the artist Richard Jackson had built the coffin and incorporated the door at her suggestion. Walter would have liked that. It was a very Hopps-like final gesture.



philip johnson (1906–2005) and the importance of resilience

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