The Duke of Xanadu at Home

By ROBERT HUGHES

IT is 7:30 of a fall Sunday evening and only a few artists remain, straggling under spotlighted trees across the shaven lawns of Philip Johnson's 32-acre New Canaan precinct. All the millionaires and collectors have gone home. Andy Warhol, in black jacket and silver wig, looking like the Angel of Death quitting Jerusalem, left ten minutes ago. Robert Rauschenberg lingers on, and though a lady art critic is locked in Johnson's subterranean painting gallery with a young artist who is slapping her around for undetermined reasons, the place is quiet. Above the Morrises, Judds and Oldenbergs, lights still burn in the new sculpture gallery, the completion of which was the occasion for the party. Through the glass wall of his house, a few hundred feet away, the host watches the Connecticut sky display its sense of occasion by turning a fulgid, Turneresque pink. Philip Johnson, architect and art collector, scans his horizon with pleasure as if the sunset, too, were a commissioned work. The inauguration of his own special Xanadu is nearly over.

Up from the Top. Johnson's sculpture gallery, with its complex flows of space and rafter-striped light, is a far cry from his 1949 Glass House, but it may, in time, become as famous. Between them lies a career of almost indecent success, starting near the top: wealthy by inheritance, Johnson is now, at 64, one of the three or four best-known architects alive in America.

There is no "school" of Johnson, as there was of his own great mentor, Mies van der Rohe, with whom he worked on the design of New York's Seagram Building. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a young architect setting out to imitate Johnson. He is an architect of sensibility, not polemics, and his work has no discernible core of aesthetic theory. It is all taste, exemplary in its detailing and finesse of decision. Though he was trained in the strict, functionalist idiom of Mies and Gropius, Johnson believes such purism "is winding up its days." "Structural honesty," he declared in 1961, "seems to me one of the great bugaboos that we should free ourselves from very quickly."

Dolphin in History. Johnson does not see buildings simply as machines for living. For him, the need for fantasy, play, memory and spectacle is just as real as the need for efficiency. Most of all, in Johnson's view, people need a sense of history. Architecture cannot give it to them by making ebullient panty raids on the sleeping past, grabbing a cornice here, a vault or pilaster there. It is a matter of integration. Not many architects now living have Johnson's integrative powers. He is a highly educated architect, able to slip like a dolphin through the currents of style: history is his natural element, and from the last 20 years of Johnson's output it is clear that he took to a manner of freewheeling historical allusion as his proposed alternative to the International Style--which by 1950 had frozen from a mainstream into a glacier, trapping its architects in ice like mastodons.

Perhaps Johnson's most revealing work is what he put up for Johnson --his enclave in New Canaan, built over a span of 21 years and now completed by the sculpture gallery. Johnson dislikes calling it an estate, preferring the word compound--but an estate it is, with all the seigneurial overtones. There has, in fact, been nothing like it since the ducal properties of 18th century England.

Theatrics of Neatness. Who else has a switch on his terrace that, at the flick of a whim, causes a fountain to spurt 120 feet into the air from the center of a private lake? Johnson's house is a monument to the theatrics of neatness: only a bachelor could sustain such stark elegance at this pitch of obsession--one three-year-old child could reduce it all to chaos in ten minutes. It is perhaps the expression of a dilettante--in the classic sense of the word, a lover of the fine arts. It does need money, but it also demands concern. Johnson noted that the trunks of oaks turn dark after rain while maples stay light; he has judiciously pruned the forest surrounding his house to produce the most satisfactory chiaroscuro possible after every passing storm.

But if Johnson indulges himself in the dilettante pleasures, he scorns the corresponding idleness. He has designed ten art galleries, and his work in Manhattan includes the New York State Theater, the extensions to the Museum of Modern Art, Asia House and the library for New York University. An unceasing flow of projects issues from his office in the Seagram Building, and currently he shares with Paul Rudolph and Kevin Roche an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art called "Work in Progress." It includes models of Johnson's glass arcades for N.Y.U. modeled on the Milan Galleria but as high as Beauvais Cathedral; a tumbling water garden for Fort Worth; slanted prismatic skyscrapers for Minneapolis.

Dwarfs and the Duke. An art historian can read Johnson's development simply by studying the buildings on the estate--Johnson himself admits that here he tries out his ideas. "I have never felt free working for a client," he acknowledges. "But working for oneself is a different matter. You have to discover your own needs. That is not easy, but it leaves you free."

The first building was Johnson's own house, the idea for which--a house built entirely of glass--Mies van der Rohe proposed to him in 1946. A transparent box with one opaque brick cylinder that contains the bathroom, the house has since become a classic of American architecture, and even after 21 years it is a startlingly expressive building--not least for the intelligence and openness with which it states its prototypes. The "absolute" cubic form was taken from one of the 18th century fathers of modern architecture, Claude Ledoux. Le Corbusier provided the angling paths between the transparent, almost invisible house and the solid brick guesthouse (each building becomes the positive-negative image of the other). And so on. Johnson took his idea for the lake pavilion--a caprice of scale, with concrete colonnades only six feet high and three feet wide--from the miniaturized dwarfs' quarters in the Renaissance ducal palace in Mantua. "Obviously the duke didn't build them that way to make the dwarfs happier. It made him feel happier." In 1965, Johnson added the subterranean gallery for his paintings. It was modeled--perhaps appropriately, considering the value of the Stellas, Rauschenbergs and Warhols that hang there--on the ancient Treasury of Atreus in Mycenae. The paintings are hung on huge leaflike screens, which swing like the pages of a book, a means of display Johnson adapted from the Soane Museum in London.

Shifting Light. Johnson's new sculpture gallery is a brilliant attack on the problem of how to avoid a long, boring, enfiladed room of sculpture without chopping the space up into unrelated cubicles. Johnson's deceptively complex plan ("I wanted to see what could be done with 45-degree angles; we all know about right angles") places the sculpture in related groups on different levels around a central, five-sided well; the inflections of this space, its arrest and flow, are masterly,. The gallery is flooded with shifting light from the roof, which consists of tubular steel rafters supporting narrow panes of mirror glass that both reflect the sculptures and transmit the dazzling blue of the sky. The ambiguity of space, and its constant surprises, allows each sculpture to make its own zone of authority. It may be that in this building Philip Johnson has done for the pseudo religion of art what Corbusier, in his chapel at Ronchamp, did for the modern church.

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