chapter II
 
Utopia Limited
 
SO IT WAS THAT ONE OF THE MOST DOTTY AND INFLUENTIAL documents in the entire history of the colonial complex came to be written. This was a piece called “The International Style,” by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, the twenty-six-year-old son of a wealthy Cleveland lawyer. The boy had given the Museum of Modern Art the money to found an architecture division, which he then headed. Hitchcock and Johnson wrote “The International Style” for the catalogue of the museum’s 1932 show of photographs and models aimed at introducing the work of Gropius et alii to New York. The term “International Style” was taken from the title of a book Gropius had published seven years before, International Architecture.
Museum catalogue copy, which is a species of forced labor or gun-at-the-temple scholarship, is notorious for its sophistry, when it isn’t patent nonsense. But “The International Style” was literature of a higher order. It shone … with the hallucinatory clarity of a Church of the Galilee Walker handbill. The two men were baying at a silvery, princely moon.
In utter seriousness they set up a distinction between architecture and building, after the manner of Vitruvius some two thousand years before. The italics, presumably, were meant to indicate that these were objective, scientific categories. In Europe, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Oud—the four great “European functionalists,” as Hitchcock and Johnson called them—were creating architecture. In America, even the architects who thought they were being modern and functional were only engaged in building. Oh, there was always Frank Lloyd Wright, of course … and with a certain weariness Hitchcock and Johnson paid him homage for his work … in the distant past … and then concluded that he was merely “half-modern.” Which was to say, he was finished and could be forgotten.
As for the pride of twentieth-century American architecture, the skyscraper, it was all they could do to contain their amusement. The skyscrapers were empty compositions tarted up with “zigzag trimmings” and God knew what else. American architects, and skyscraper architects most especially, were always willing to “deface” their buildings with bad design, if the client demanded it. The Europeans, they implied, would walk away from a commission before submitting to any such stupidity.
In his preface to the book version of The International Style, the Museum of Modern Art’s director, Alfred Barr, took a look at the finials, the crowns, of New York’s most famous skyscrapers. He was appalled. “The stainless-steel gargoyles of the Chrysler Building,” “the fantastic mooring mast atop the Empire State”—how could such vulgarities come into being? Simple: American architects stood still and listened to the client. He had even heard architects argue, albeit cynically, that their hideous little ornaments and hollow grandiosities were “functional,” since one function of a building was to please the client. “We are asked,” said Barr, “to take seriously the architectural taste of real-estate speculators, renting agents, and mortgage brokers!”
Hitchcock and Johnson spent many pages analyzing the designs of the great “functionalists”—and none analyzing such inconvenient matters as the workers, worker housing, and socialism, much less the slightly mad battles of the compounds. There was only the occasional cryptic remark about how American architects could not “claim for their skyscrapers and apartment houses the broad sociological justification that exists for the workers’ housing, the schools and hospitals of Europe.”
In fact, they gave no indication that the International Style—and their label caught on immediately—had originated in any social setting, any terra firma, whatsoever. They presented it as an inexorable trend, meteorological in nature, like a change in the weather or a tidal wave. The International Style was nothing less than the first great universal style since the Medieval and Classical revivals, and the first truly modern style since the Renaissance. And if American architects wanted to ride the wave, rather than be wiped out by it, they had first to comprehend one thing: the client no longer counted for anything except the funding. If he were cooperative, not too much of a boor, it was acceptable to let him benefit from your new vision. How this was to work out in practice, they didn’t say. How much explaining did a tidal wave have to do?
The Empire State Building (left) and the Chrysler Building. Oh, how they sniggered at the little Christmas-tree ornaments on top!
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The show and the catalogue created a terrific stir in the American architectural community, chiefly because of the status of the museum itself. The Museum of Modern Art was the colonial complex inflated to prodigious dimensions. In Europe, avant-garde movements, whether the Fauvists, the Cubists, the Neoplasticists, or the Bauhaus, were initiated and developed by artists and architects. In Europe, that went without saying. At a later stage, as in Vienna after the turn of the century and in Paris and London in the early 1920s, the more adventurous businessmen and other members of the bourgeoisie might give them their support, for reasons of politics or cultural piety or simply to appear chic, “modern,” and not bourgeois at all. Only in America did it happen exactly the other way around. Only in America did businessmen and their wives introduce avant-garde art and architecture and carry the brave banner forward and urge the practitioners to follow, if they could possibly find the wit to catch on.
The Museum of Modern Art, after all, was not exactly the brainchild of socialists or visionary bohemians. It was founded in John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s living room, to be exact, with A. Conger Goodyear, Mrs. Cornelius Newton Bliss, and Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan in attendance. They had seen their counterparts in London enjoying the chic and excitement of Picasso, Matisse, Dérain, and the rest of Le Moderne and were determined to import it to New York for themselves. In 1929 the museum opened, and European modernism in painting and sculpture was established, institutionalized, overnight, in the most overwhelming way, as the new standard for the arts in America. The International Style exhibition was designed to do the same thing for European modernism in architecture.
Our visionary avant-gardists! Rockefellers, Goodyears, Sullivans, and Blisses! O oil men, lumber men, dry-goods jobbers, and wives!
It was marvelous. It was like the plot of Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera Utopia Limited. King Paramount, ruler of a tropical paradise, having heard that the English were the last word in all matters of dress, speech, manners, and cultivation, converts his court to the English style. He and his retainers step straight out of their muumuus, palm fronds, and orchid blossoms into britches, frock coats, wigs, corsets, hollyhock skirts, and pointed shoes. He orders his subjects to follow suit. Baffled but impressed, they do so.
In the opera, as one might well predict, the king and his countrymen discover, by and by, that the native ways were best after all; and the last laugh is on the Europeans. There Gilbert and Sullivan and the New York art world part company. Not for a moment did the oil men and the lumber men or their subjects—the artists—have the slightest doubt that the European way was best. Throughout the 1930s, the local artists, notably Arshile Gorky, groused and grumbled and protested that the museum devoted all its resources to European work and never gave them a chance. But they didn’t have their hearts in it. The colonial complex had become so intense that the standard response to the reputation of the Europeans was not to compete with them but to imitate them, often with total frankness.
Gorky’s model was Picasso, and he didn’t care who knew it. A friend told Gorky that, in his opinion, Picasso’s recent work was lazy and sloppy. In many canvases his edges were blurred. There were even drips of paint.
“If Picasso blurs,” said Gorky, “then I blur. If he drips, I drip.”
In the next moment, however, his whole stance would seem hopeless. He would fall into depressions. One day he called a meeting of all the artists he knew in his studio.
“Let’s face it,” he told them. “We’re bankrupt.”
Such was the mental atmosphere into which Hitchcock and Johnson introduced the International Style. Little did they know that they were but the messenger Elijahs, the Mahaviras, the Baptist heralds for an event more miraculous than any they would have dared pray for: the coming.