2012 Armory Show

Once again the pickin's were slim at the Armory Show where I could count on almost just one hand, the artists I admired. But I'm in the minority, judging from the masses of super serious, blinged-out people there lapping it all up. On the whole, it was a case of bad ideas, badly executed. A number of big name galleries were absent and favorites of mine, Lisson and White Cube from London, had nothing really to write home about—though I liked the Andreas Gurskey of Niagara’s Maid of the Mist. The reliable Sikkema Jenkins didn’t come out to play, but stayed put at their space in Chelsea. I high-tailed it over to the Paul Kasmin booth hoping for a Walton Ford fix and was rewarded by a rare dud of his. Even Pierogi 2000 failed to impress this time around.

There’s a lot meant to shock, but it just ends up being boring. I’m thinking of the 30 plaster heads of Osama bin Laden by Wang Du at $15,000 a pop or $320,000 for the lot. Then there’s Jota Castro who uses handcuffs (actual ones and photographs) in various prurient ways. For real shock and awe, I suggest he take a look at Catherine Opie’s truly enthralling photographs of Ron Asthy, which (one can hope) might encourage him to hang up both his camera and handcuffs. Andreas Serrano’s contrived photographs of toy figures in silhouette reminded me of the equally dull James Casebere’s toy houses that he photographs in real landscapes. I swear the exact doppelganger of Ai Wei Wei’s polyhedron is in the window of my local Urban Outfitter. I don’t care if it’s hand carved, Ai’s got studio assistants up the wazoo to do the carving for him.

Special kudos go to the revolving group of women dressed in lab coats taking turns lying on a slab with a jagged hunk of quartz suspended millimeters above their foreheads. I actually saw a man cross some kind of line and touch one of these intrepid women, which reminded me of the groper at the Marina Abramovic show who was ejected and permanently barred from MoMA after pulling a similar stunt with one of the nude participants in her piece, Imponderabilia. People were delighted by the piece at the Armory Show, madly snapping pictures of them the whole time. But really what was the point?

I’m tired of seeing one-trick ponies that pop up in more than one booth and in show after show: the aforementioned Casebere and Kehinde Wiley—whose heroic super-realist portraits of black men on highly-patterned backgrounds I liked the first time I saw, but now they’re sameoldsameold.

Without a doubt, the most startling artist at the fair would have to be Mary Reid Kelley. There was something a little too slick about her drawings, but her video, The Syphilis of Sisyphus was jaw dropping. Reid Kelley plays Sisyphus a “grisette,” (French working class woman). The action begins with Sysyphus pondering the fate of woman as she sits at her dressing table and ends with her being dragged off by the "Morals Police," to the infamous Salpêtrière Hospital where women were “treated” for hysteria. Joining her in the performance are four Pierrots (played by Reid Kelley’s family members) who also assume other roles along the way. Reid Kelley employs antique costumes and painted set designs that look like they come from the dawn of cinematography, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligheri or Nosferatu. Her highly articulated make-up and weird black eye covers are downright creepy, evoking simultaneously a death’s head and also somehow not. It’s a wonderfully odd mix of serious, stylish and screwball. Retro and yet contemporary.

Watching the video, I felt strangely out of control, hijacked into some weird netherworld. It was like a bad acid trip in a good way. My one complaint is that I found her flat, girlish voice a little jarring and at odds with the dark intensity of her video. Reid Kelley is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Yale. She is one to watch.

Yang Jiechang’s series of paintings, Tale of the 11th Day, resemble traditional Chinese screens. On closer inspection you realize there’s a whole lot of monkey business going on between different species and between humans and animals. But the bestiality is presented in the same restrained manner as the landscape and adds a dash of spice and outlandishness to these otherwise austere works.

London-based Israeli artist, Gideon Rubin uses a subdued palette of olives, beiges and mauves with wonderful painterly brush strokes to produce curious and compelling paintings. His work has a 1940s aesthetic, recalling old sepia snap shots. What is most distinctive about his work is that he leaves the faces blank. Particularly effective was the girl on skis sitting in the snow and a whole group of small portraits hung in grid fashion, next to each other. Despite their featureless faces, Rubin successfully conveys each subject's individual character.

I think my favorite artist at the show was Mike Bayne, a photographer (Nope he's a painter see comment below.) This makes me like him even more I had never heard of. He paint incredibly realist paintings of sad-sack neighborhoods and down-at-heel commercial strips. Bayne doesn’t go for big statements; he seeks out the ordinary, everyday things anyone anywhere could see: a tawdry motel sign or rundown ranch as opposed to attention grabbing glitz or nifty visual sights. But Bayne’s little gems do grab your attention. It’s all about composition and scale. Bayne frames his work really, really well and they’re diminutive (5” x 8”?), which for me works as well as large format as far as photography’s concerned.

This is the third year of the Armory Focus, which devotes a section of the Armory Show to an important arts community. This time, the attention turned to Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland. Included in the line-up was a conversation between visual artist Ragnar Kjartansson and Bjork, which I am sad to say I missed.

Two Nordic pieces confront you straight off the bat: Kjartansson’s divine 40-foot-long pink neon sign that reads “Scandinavian Pain." Funny and poignant at the same time, it’s suspended above the bar where you can purchase an $18 flute of champagne. Scandinavian Pain was acquired from the show by Sweden’s Moderna Museet where it's rumored it will be placed on the top of the museum building. On entering the Armory Focus area you soon become aware of a whooshing sound, almost like the surf, but one having an extra long pause between waves. It’s Helsinki-based artists Tommi Grönlund and Petteri Nisunen’s Wave of Matter. The piece consists of a table-like platform that holds hundreds of tiny ball bearings on its surface; as the piece tilts slowly back and forth the balls roll across the surface creating the sound. It’s mesmerizing to watch and listen to.

Just based on his materials—light glass, water—you’d know Olafur Eliassion came from Scandinavia. His slices of colored glass, two in each arrangement, are set atop pieces of driftwood. The glass is different colored, forming a solid hue. At the edges,where it doesn't quite overlap you see the separate colors. They’re luscious to look at, unsettling because they appear to be so casually placed on their narrow "shelves," and texturally interesting: the shiny, sleek glass contrasting nicely with the dull, rough wood.

One entire wall in this booth was taken up by the work of the late Icelandic artist, Birgir Andrésson. Like over-scale paint chips, his paintings of pure color feature the name of the color printed across them. One series, different variations of grey, seemed to comment directly on Iceland’s potential for bleakness. But the work is much more than this, referencing a “blind reality” that Andrésson was only too familiar with having been born to blind parents.

Over on Pier 92 was the Modern section. There I saw a nifty blue slit canvas by Lucio Fontana whom I had only recently been introduced to at the Suprasensorial show at the Hirshhorn. Here, also was Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild, yours for a cool $13.5 million, and a not very good, but interesting because it was so uncharacteristic, abstract painting by Chuck Close.

I was lucky enough to meet up with a well-connected art dealer friend who had been invited to parties hosted by the consular generals of Finland, Norway and Belgium at their uniformly splendid apartments. (Not being a Nordic country, I surmise Belgium jumped on the Armory bandwagon purely because, unlike here, art is important in that country.) The work at the Finnish apartment was the most impressive with a number of interesting artists: Hanna Väisänen, Susanna Gotteberg, Margatta Palasto, Raili Tang and Robert Lucander whose triad of paintings Harmaa, Tummanvihreä, Musta (Grey, Dark Green, Black) 1993 (pictured) with their brooding, spare yet dense presence were the best thing I saw in New York.

On the Norwegian Consular’s terrace we were treated to one of the most spectacular moon rises I have ever seen: a great orange orb that matched exactly the lights on the warehouses of Queens, rising slowly above the East River. Framed by tall buildings, city lights and water, it was breathtaking.

Suprasensorial

Almost a decade before the Light and Space movement emerged in this country, in the late 1960s, Latin American artists were working with light and color in innovative ways. Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space, at the Hirshhorn in Washington presents a small gem of a show curated by Alma Ruiz, featuring the work of artists at the forefront of the movement: Carlos Cruz-Diez, Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Hélio Oiticica and Jesús Rafael Soto. Challenging the idea of art as a static experience to be looked at, these artists created work that bursts forth from the traditional confines of picture plane or 3-dimensional sculpture, and in some cases fully envelopes the viewer.

I am a sucker for light—have far too many luminaria of all kinds in my possession—so this show is a natural for me. Right off the bat, you’re greeted by Fontana’s grand squiggle of cool, white light, Neon Structure for the IX Triennial of Milan, 1951 that’s suspended over the escalators. A nice counterpoint to this expansive gesture is Le Parc’s 1962 intimate installation, Light in Movement, that uses mirrors, angled metal squares and spotlights to cast reflections around a darkened room, creating the effect of being underwater in some otherworldly, nocturnal pool.

I loved Soto's lawn-sized rectangle of blue plastic tubing, Penetrable BBL Bleu. It reminded me of a piece I saw when I was a child in New York, an entire room of ceiling-to-floor. clear plastic strips one had to make one’s way through. It really was a seminal piece for me, opening my mind up to the possibilities of what art could do: it could be visually arresting and it could also be fun! As a youngster, I was particularly taken with the notion of touching and moving through an artwork. This was a revelation. I remember it being at the location of the folk art museum on 53^rd, but think there was another museum there, possibly of contemporary art?

Much like that earlier piece, you must breaststroke your way through Soto’s plastic tubes, which slap against your face and body and resist gently your forward movement. I felt like I was in some weird plastic jungle or savanna. Looking at people making their way through it produced an almost stroboscopic effect and the piece remained animated for some time after one exited, the moving tubes producing a wonderful striated pattern. It’s a fairly recent work, dating from 1999, but Soto has been exploring the idea for 30 years.

The showstopper is Cruz-Diez’s 1965 large-scale box, Chromosaturation. Walking around the front, one sees rectangles of intense colored light: red, blue, green that turn out to be windows. Around the other side, is the entrance to the box, which is divided into three zones with rows of colored fluorescent tubes in each space suspended from the ceiling. The color is not as intense as it appears looking through the windows, which must have some kind of film on them. Still, it’s plenty intense, surrounding one in a haze of color that is almost tangible, yet curiously, looking at another person, he appears normal in terms of form and colors. Standing in the corner and looking across the entire box, seeing the colors meet and bleed into one another was simply ravishing.

I gather that at the exhibition’s installation at MOCA in Los Angeles where it originated, there was an installation by Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida that featured a swimming pool ringed with blue neon and illuminated by green spotlights. On the opposing walls, slides of John Cage's 1969 book of musical notations, as well as drug imagery were projected. Visitors were allowed to swim laps in the pool—what a sensory experience that would have been, and talk about engaging with the work!

Too bad for me I was at the Hirshhorn during the day and couldn’t see the new commission by Doug Aitken Song 1, a 360° projection that at night, illuminates the museum’s entire façade.

A Bit of Fun

These beauties are a natural target after my last post and given the fact I'm a shoe hound. They delight me with their Cadillac taillights and hot rod-detailing wings. A fine balance between humor and style, they’re elegant and fierce and just darn sexy unlike those goofy, faux mary jane booties from Prada’s last season. They're a breath of fresh air next to all the clunky out of scale platforms so in vogue these days.

Car Culture

Cars are getting uglier and uglier. Whether they’re American, Japanese or high-end German, it doesn’t matter. The worst offender may be Nissan, which a couple of years ago came up with what was the ugliest car ever: the Cube. Just because you have the technology to make a wrap around window, doesn’t mean you should. Nissan may have outdone itself this year with the perkily named Juke whose headlights extend up onto the hood. It’s an unfortunate precedent because you just know that other car companies have taken notice and this hither-to-fore expanse of plain metal will now become bedazzled and bedecked with all sorts of lighting bling.

Bling and collagen seem to be the theme here, the Juke looks plumped up like the bee-stung lips on a Bravo Housewife as does the is-it-a-sedan-or-an-SUV BMW X6 whose upwardly tilting rear end (and I’m sorry to be coarse here) reminds me of a baboon in heat presenting her ass to a courting male. I think perhaps Infiniti can be blamed for the introduction of the fubsy look to automobiles; they're no slouch in the hideous department this year with their JX and QX models.

And does anyone else see a goofy toothless grin when they pass by the front of a 2011 Mazda? It’s not an attractive look that’s only accentuated when the car is a light shade. I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t want to look imbecilic driving down the road.

Don’t get me started on the SUV-pickup truck hybrids (and I’m not talking gas-electric hybrids here). The industry refers to this class of car as a crossover. I think Cadillac makes the worst version, though they’re all loathsome. These seem to be popular with pro-ball players, rap stars and recent lottery winners.

I could probably devote an entire blog to American car names, which in the past included Mirage, Charade and Caprice. Among the current line up in these macho post 9/11 times, Avalanche and Armada might be the best (i.e. worst) with special irony kudos going to GMC for co-opting the Indian name for Mt. McKinley, Denali, to bestow on its gas guzzling behemoth.

Speaking of irony have you ever noticed the disproportionately high number of SUVs out there that have the "9/11 Fight Terrorism" license plates? A friend says this is just because the drivers of such para-military vehicles are militaristic. But I believe it's more than that. On some level there’s an awareness of the ultimate toll vehicles like this have extracted from this country and it’s the owners' attempt to shift blame for the Iraq War from oil to terrorism.

La Bella Principessa

Last night I watched the PBS special La Bella Princepessa on a drawing some experts believe to be a Leonardo da Vinci. A beautifully executed portrait, the pen-and-chalk drawing on vellum, features lovely rosy and golden tones. One of the highlight’s of the TV program was watching a contemporary artist recreate it using authentic materials. She began with a vellum calf-hide, which she cut to size before sketching in the figure. It was trial and error to get the colored chalk to adhere to the vellum and she eventually resorted to using her fingertips to rub it on. Interestingly, there is a partial fingerprint on the drawing, Leonardo left prints on other works, which not only supports the likelihood of finding one here, but also provides an example of the real McCoy for comparison. In the end, the print from the drawing wasn’t extensive enough and the results were inconclusive.

The drawing’s story is the kind that galvanizes the art world. Purchased for a relative pittance ($21,850) in 1998 by New York dealer, Kate Ganz (who held on to the painting for ten years) it was eventually bought by Canadian collector, Peter Silverman who suspected it might be a Leonardo and sent an image of it to eminent Leonardo scholar, Martin Kemp.

Kemp noted "uncanny vitality" in the work and says, "I experienced a kind of frisson, a feeling that this is not normal." The vellum had been carbon-dated c. 1440-c. 1650, which was within the range of Leonardo’s dates. Intrigued, Kemp embarked on his own investigation using high-resolution multispectral scans. Studying the drawing in extraordinary detail, the evidence began to mount up. Kemp discovered many areas that seemed to confirm that it was a Leonardo, most notably that the artist of the drawing was (very unusually) left-handed like the master himself. Other aspects include: the precise lines and adept modulation of colors and the enigmatic expression that is reminiscent of Leonardo’s other muses: Mona, Anne, Genevra. Lastly, the sitter’s headdress belongs to the Milanese court of the 1490s where Leonardo was.

Because there are stitch marks on the edge of the portrait and vellum was used for books, Kemp theorized that the portrait came from a book that may have commemorated a royal marriage. (This might also explain why hidden within the pages of a book it remained unknown for so long.) Armed with this clue, further research led him to theorize the sitter was Bianca Sforza (Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis (c. 1455–c. 1508) painted a strikingly similar portrait, right down to the hair net, that's positively identified as Bianca), the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Milan, who married Galeazzo Sanseverino in 1496. Her husband was not only commander of the Milanese troops, but most tantalizing, a patron of Leonardo's. Sadly Bianca, who was probably only 14, died just a few months after her wedding.

All this is very compelling, but there are experts who are not convinced that the portrait is by Leonardo and it was excluded from the blockbuster show now on view at the National Gallery in London. I have to say that while I think it is a gorgeous drawing by a consummate artist, it doesn’t look like a Leonardo to me. Now, I am no Leonardo expert, but his women are distinctly odd looking (it would be interesting to have a forensic facial reconstruction artist translate their features into “living” people to get a sense of odd they really are) and tend to look alike, probably because he used the same model. There are a couple of exceptions: The Lady with an Ermine (who kind of resembles Bianca) and his Portrait of an Unknown Woman aka La Belle Ferroniere. But even these have a stylized, almost archaic quality to their features. Not so the drawing, which not only looks like a real person, but possesses an ideal of female beauty that seems distinctly different from Leonardo’s. While there were contemporary artists who did paint beauties that look like actual people—Botticelli springs to mind—Bianca looks too pretty for Leonardo and too fleshed out, if you will, for the period. She’s more like a pre-Raphaelite glammed-up take on the Renaissance (though I’m not suggesting the drawing is from that era). Or I'll put it this way, if you asked Gustav Klimt to paint a by-the-book Renaissance portrait of a young girl, I think you'd end up with something like this.

It’s possible she was done by some other Renaissance artist or else is the product of an incredibly skilled forger. The multi-pronged expertise required to pull this off would be incredible, but with a potential $100 million payout it’s not completely inconceivable. While the evidence that points to Leonardo is manifold, for me it’s how something looks, it’s the ultimate test and all the facts in the world can’t take away from this. Just sayin’.

53rd Street Gem

The eminent architect W. G. Clark has called the American Folk Art Museum building the most beautiful in New York. Designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects it was completed in 2001.

Sheathed in bronze, the eight-level sliver of a building more than holds its own against the black glass behemoth to its right. On this block of megaliths, the human scale of the AMFA building offers a welcome visual respite. Its clifflike surface, which is pockmarked and mottled and looks both ancient and modern, presents a dynamic pattern of intersecting planes. A clever use of recessing creates a strong line bisecting the façade that culminates in a dramatic slanted V at the top, which expresses upward and downward movement simultaneously. All this dynamism adds lightness to a material that has a pronounced brooding intensity. Strips of glass on either side provide interior light without compromising the sculptural integrity of the façade.

Built by an overly ambitious board at a reputed cost of $32 million, the 30,000-square-foot building, beautiful though it may be, spelled trouble for the museum from the beginning. After years of struggle the institution finally threw in the towel, recently unloading the building to its next-door neighbor, MoMA, and retreating to its former home at 2 Lincoln Square where it pays $1 a year in rent to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Talk about a comeuppance.

Rumors abound that the AMFA building will be razed. Adding fuel to the fire is its location: right smack in the middle of MoMA and an empty lot where a proposed Jean Nouvel high-rise, offering condos as well as galleries for MoMA, is slated to go. But MoMA claims that it intends to use the AMFA building as gallery space. One hopes in its Yoshio Taniguchi-induced fog that it does. Designed specifically to exhibit art and a seminal example of Contemporary architecture to boot, it would make a most fitting location for MoMA’s architecture and design collections and a delightful palate cleanser amid a sea of glass.

Philip Johnson's Glass House

(This article first appeared in the January/February 2012 issue of Artillery magazine.)

Philip Johnson’s Glass House, completed in 1949, is one of my all-time favorite buildings. Never mind that Johnson borrowed heavily from Mies van der Rohe, or that he also designed a number of notable eyesores in New York City: the false-fronted 1001 Fifth Avenue, the Chippendale-crowned, post modern AT&T headquarters (now Sony Plaza) and the pink marble “Lipstick” building—infamous these days as the onetime home to Bernie Madoff’s offices. On the plus side, Johnson also designed the sublime Rockefeller guesthouse and the almost perfect, original MoMA addition and sculpture garden; projects that are more in keeping with the aesthetics of his New Canaan, Connecticut masterpiece.

A sublime structure in a sublime setting, the Glass House is both rich and modest. Built for one, it’s the chicest monastic cell you will ever come across. The design is simplicity itself, composed of a rectangle bisected by a central cylinder that encloses the bathroom and provides housing for the all-important hearth. Aside from glass, brick is the predominant material; used to form the cylinder and to compose the striking herringbone floor, it’s also visible through the windows at the Glass House’s pendant structure, the Brick House. There’s a freestanding galley kitchen that when not in use, is hidden under hinged, wooden panels. Concealed behind a built-in cabinet is the acetic bedroom with the bed, and off to one side, a desk, where Johnson wasn’t ever able to work because he found the view so distracting. (He would eventually build a separate more enclosed structure for his study.) His favorite perch was at the dining room table facing north, from which vantage point, he could admire what he called his “very expensive wallpaper.” The Barcelona chairs, ottomans and récamier, elegant, restrained, sculptural, suit the setting perfectly.

A sizeable Elie Nadelman sculpture, Two Circus Women anchors the south end of the house, helping to define the space. The only other piece of art in the house is a large painting attributed to Poussin that’s mounted on a handsome Johnson-designed stand, a necessity given the glazed walls, but a design solution that turns the painting into an object as opposed to flat, wall decoration. Johnson bought the 17^th century work at the urging of his mentor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founding director of MoMA. It’s an unexpected choice, but it works well in the space, its earthy palette echoes the dark bricks and landscape just outside the glass walls. At certain times of the year when nature’s colors synch with it, the flow between the two must be seamless. The painting depicts the burial of Athenian statesman, Phocian, sentenced to death for treachery and buried in disgrace outside the city walls. As my guide pointed out, the subject may have had particular resonance for Johnson, whose youthful flirtation with Nazism left him feeling ostracized. I kept thinking of its elegiac theme as I wandered through the grounds of what is in essence a memorial park, with 14 (mostly Johnson-designed) folly-like structures that call to mind 19^th century mausoleums dotting the 47-acre estate.

Johnson viewed the Glass House as one wing of a larger edifice that included the Brick House as its opposing wing diagonally across the “courtyard” of open lawn. The “doorway” was where the paths from the parking area begin; the gravel lining them, which crunches when you step on it, the “doorbell.” Near the entrance, a large, rather blah Donald Judd circle is balanced by the swimming pool on the far side of the courtyard. The pool, round with a rectangular plinth for sunning/diving cutting across it at one end, is a Suprematist painting made three-dimensional.

Though it mirrors the Glass House in length and shape, the Brick House is its polar opposite. Complete exposure is replaced by almost total concealment. The Brick House contained amenities impossible in the Glass House, including the mechanical components of both buildings, storage and privacy. Johnson referred to the Brick House bedroom as the “sex room” (he enjoyed being titillating) and it certainly has the aura of a seraglio. The familiar arch and column motif seen repeated in many of Johnson’s designs, lends a middle-eastern flavor to the room. Fabric panels ensure that the outside world is sealed off. Despite the fact that they’re Fortuny and the room itself is appointed simply, there’s something undeniably Liberace about it. Originally, the Glass House was Johnson’s weekend retreat with the Brick House at the ready when he desired more privacy or if the weather was too hot or cold, eventually Johnson lived there full-time, and fittingly would die there in 2005.

Behind the Glass House the land falls away to a pond, which boasts a “floating” pavilion that Johnson designed in 1962. It’s primarily an ornamental feature adding interest to the view, but Johnson also used it as a picnic venue. Inspired by the Mezquita in Cordoba, Spain, the pavilion references its famous arches and columns that seem to go on and on, using Johnson’s attenuating spin. A Mannerist folly, the structure is much smaller than it appears and is placed slightly away from the shore, so that you must step across a couple of feet of water to get to it. Johnson enjoyed the concept of “safe danger” and orchestrated encounters with it in other areas of the property, most notably the rail-less footbridge that crosses a creek. Above the pond is the Cubist tower Johnson constructed in honor of his best friend, Lincoln Kirstein, who founded the New York City Ballet.

In 1965 Johnson completed the underground painting gallery modeled on the Treasury of Atreus in Mycenae. His partner, David Whitney, was a curator and serious collector and given the constraints of the Glass House it became necessary to build a structure that could contain their growing collection of large, statement paintings, Warhol, Salle, Schnabel, Rauschenberg and Stella. Johnson devised a nifty series of three circular tracks with movable panels, allowing 42 paintings to be moved around easily for display. While the building worked for two-dimensional artwork, it functioned less well for three-dimensional pieces and so in 1970 Johnson built the Greek village-inspired, sculpture gallery. He devised a mechanical glass roof intended to open up like a gull-winged car to create the illusion of being outside. The roof proved problematic not only because the mechanics failed, but on sunny days its tubular supports cast prominent shadows that are distracting and compromise one’s experience of the sculptures.

Johnson referred to the small building built in 1980 that houses his library and study as an “event” on the landscape. Like something in a Precisionist painting, its vernacular is vaguely industrial, vaguely agricultural. In either case, the design connotes work. And it was here that Johnson could sequester himself to read, think and produce, surrounded by his books and the tools of his trade. The building was originally white stucco, but after Johnson built his final structure, Da Monsta, nearby, which he painted a dramatic red and black, he decided (using the advice of color consultants) to change the Library/Study to a more simpatico and, to my eye, safer bronze that Johnson referred to as an “emotion,” not color.

Four years later, Johnson built the Ghost House behind the Library/Study on the foundation of an old barn. Constructed of chain-link fencing and featuring a broken façade, the structure was influenced by Robert Venturi and Frank Gehry. Though the “house” is but a folly, Johnson has succeeded in finally uniting inside and outside. Vines are allowed to grow up within the Ghost House before they are periodically cleared out, creating dramatically different effects depending on the season.

Johnson’s final structure built in 1995 was his most experimental. Based on a Frank Stella design for a Dresden museum, it’s both sculpture and structure, a tour de force made of modified gunnite shot onto a pliable wire mesh superstructure creating dramatic angled walls and graceful curves. For Johnson, it was almost a living thing and he coyly christened it: “Da Monsta.” He considered it his apogee, though in fact he’d reached that 46 years earlier. While I like aspects of Da Monsta, most notably its shape, I’m not wild about its fun house apertures. I kept wondering what Da Monsta would have been like if Johnson had taken Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-de-Haut as a reference point and painted it white to conform to the then white library/study rather than introducing a new color and painting the earlier building to conform to it

Johnson loved nature and the Glass House allowed him to live in it sheltered within a transparent box. He liked to refer to himself as a landscape architect and his treatment of the land is masterful. Composed of gently sloping meadows and woods, it looks natural but has been planted and pruned to Johnson’s exacting standards, creating handsome woodland vistas and interesting juxtapositions of plants. Like a director tinkering with a stage set, Johnson was hands-on, sometimes supervising distant landscaping projects using a bullhorn.

Insecure, prone to depression and sometimes difficult, Johnson was also wealthy in his own right, bien élevé and could “talk the talk.” Though the money may have trammeled his creativity, his polish guaranteed his position as society darling despite the fact he produced a number of mediocre, even ugly buildings. In this respect, he’s always reminded me of Ayn Rand’s Peter Keating. But at least Johnson admitted he was an emulator and gave credit to the architects he referenced.

Johnson’s work didn’t so much evolve as vacillate from one extreme to another. Above all, he seemed to be a pushover for whimsy, which did his work no favors, dating it rather quickly. Yet, when he was able to reign in that inclination, his work soared. The retrained elegance of the Glass House is so timeless it could have been built just yesterday. It must have bedeviled Johnson to have attained such perfection so early in his career never to reach such heights again. But he remained passionate about architecture, freely indulging it at his New Canaan “hameau du roi.” In the process, he created an iconic monument to his vision. One must admire his willingness to experiment and his incredible zeal for what was both avocation and vocation.