MoMa Urged To Drop Philip Johnson's Name Over Architect's Fascist, White Supremacist Past
Last edited Sun Dec 13, 2020, 07:24 PM - Edit history (1)
'MoMa urged to drop Philip Johnson's name over architect's fascist past.' The Guardian, Dec. 13, 2020. After Harvard University said his racism and white supremacy had no place in design, the New York museum in under pressure to act.
New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is under growing pressure to remove Philip Johnson’s name from its galleries and titles after Harvard addressed the late architect’s legacy at the university, saying his history of racism, fascism and white supremacy had “absolutely no place in design”.
- Johnson, by Carl Van Vechten, 1963.
The dean of Harvard’s prestigious Graduate School of Design (GSD), Sarah Whiting, denounced its former student, who was the founding director of the department of architecture and design at MoMA, and said they would not use his name to refer to a house he designed that is owned by the university. Harvard’s condemnation comes after the Johnson Study Group, a collective of architects and designers, wrote an open letter to MoMA and GSD calling for his name to be struck from “every leadership title, public space, and honorific of any form”.
Writing in response, Whiting said in a public letter: “His racism, his fascism, and his strenuous support of white supremacy have absolutely no place in design.”
She said the house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which Johnson designed and built for his thesis project in the 1940s, is usually referred to as “the Thesis House, or the Philip Johnson Thesis House, or some variation”, though that is not its official name. ..Johnson’s works as an architect include the Glass House in Connecticut, where he lived until his death in 2005, what is now known as the David H Koch Theater in Manhattan – home of the New York City Ballet – and MoMA’s sculpture garden.
- The Glass House, 1949.
- Gate of Europe towers in Madrid, 1989- 1996.
His history with fascism, antisemitism and the Nazis is well documented. He tried to start a fascist political party in the United States, attended the Nuremberg rally of 1938 and described Hitler as “a spellbinder”. Mark Lamster, author of the 2018 Johnson biography, The Man in the Glass House, said Johnson’s Nazi and fascist past had long been public knowledge and was published at the time in major US magazines. He was, he said, “effectively an agent of the Nazi state operating in the United States”.
Johnson, who later renounced fascism, was investigated by the FBI but not put on trial or arrested.
Whether or not his name is removed, Lamster said the histories of MoMA and Johnson, who donated many major works to the museum, are “inextricably intertwined”...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/dec/13/philip-johnson-architect-moma-harvard-fascism
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- Wiki. Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 – January 25, 2005) was an American architect best known for his works of modern and postmodern architecture. Among his best known designs are his modernist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, and postmodern 550 Madison Avenue in New York, designed for AT&T, and 190 South La Salle Street in Chicago..
Controversy over Nazi sympathies: Between 1932 and 1940, Johnson was an "antisemite, fascist sympathizer, and active propagandist for the Nazi government". He attempted to start a fascist party in the United States. As a correspondent for the newspaper Social Justice, which was edited by the antisemitic cleric Father Charles Coughlin, he made several trips to Germany, sympathetically covering the huge Nazi rally at Nuremberg and the German invasion of Poland in 1939.
The American correspondent William Shirer who also covered the German invasion of Poland, noted his enthusiasm for the Germans and called him "The American fascist".
A September 1940 article in Harper's listed Johnson as among leading American Nazis. An FBI investigation found that "Johnson had developed extensive contacts with the German Propaganda and Foreign Ministries while in Germany and then returned to propagandize on the Nazis' behalf in the United States." He was not prosecuted. However, when he was considered for a possible government position, an FBI agent sent a memo to J. Edgar Hoover saying, "I can think of no more dangerous man to have working in an agency which possesses so many military secrets."..
A 2018 article in The New Yorker notes that "in 1964, well after he had been forced to abjure his Nazi past, he insisted in letters that Hitler was 'better than Roosevelt.'"...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Johnson
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