{"id":3554,"date":"2023-08-23T18:38:53","date_gmt":"2023-08-23T16:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kunsthalle-bielefeld.de\/blog\/the-passions-of-philip-johnson\/"},"modified":"2024-10-22T18:38:02","modified_gmt":"2024-10-22T16:38:02","slug":"the-passions-of-philip-johnson","status":"publish","type":"journal","link":"https:\/\/kunsthalle-bielefeld.de\/en\/entdecken\/kb-journal\/the-passions-of-philip-johnson\/","title":{"rendered":"The passions of Philip Johnson"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A blog post by Prof. Dr. Jeffrey Lieber on his keynote lecture, &#8216;The Passions of Philip Johnson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":3539,"template":"","format":"standard","journal-categories":[74,75],"class_list":["post-3554","journal","type-journal","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","journal-categories-architecture-symposium","journal-categories-renovation"],"acf":{"blocks_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"text_serif_klein","text":"Professor of Art History at Texas State University.\n\nImpulse lecture within the framework of the symposium\nYesterday. Today! Tomorrow?\nFrom the museum of late modernism, its history and its future, monument protection, the \"third place\" or climate box versus climate crisis.\n<strong>Part I, April 21 + 22, 2023\n<\/strong><strong>Good Spirits, Bad Spirits: Facing the Stories of the Kunsthalle<\/strong>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"bild_single","bild":3539},{"acf_fc_layout":"text_serif_normal","text":"The Passions of Philip Johnson\n\nAre there new conclusions to be drawn from the life and work of a figure about whom so much has already been written? Since his death in 2005 at the age of 98, historians have parsed the myths Johnson cultivated for himself during his long life and gauged his impact on the development of modern and contemporary architecture. Analyses of Johnson\u2019s life and work sometimes devolve into stereotypes. He has been accused of stylistic promiscuity, labeled effete and narcissistic, and depicted as a high-strung nihilist and destructive cynic who disdained normative social and political values. The extent of Johnson\u2019s fascist activities in the 1930s is by now well-documented. Many historians argue that Johnson distanced himself from politics in the 1950s and 1960s to rehabilitate his reputation and have not found much in the way of political content in his work, although he seemingly embraced the dictates of corporate capitalism in his later postmodern projects. These issues raise several questions, which Lieber addresses in his talk: What happened to Johnson\u2019s political passions after 1940, when, at the age of 34, he abandoned political activism and enrolled at Harvard University\u2019s Graduate School of Design? Throughout the post-WWII decades, Johnson often spoke about his \u201cpassion for history.\u201d How did he deploy this passion in his writings and to what ends? How did Johnson dramatize his ideas about beauty and history in the pavilions he built on his New Canaan estate and in his museum designs of the 1950s and 1960s and were these projects part of an oppositional approach?"},{"acf_fc_layout":"bild_single","bild":3535},{"acf_fc_layout":"text_sans_gross","text":"You can watch the recording of the entire talk here."},{"acf_fc_layout":"text_serif_normal","text":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=clMiNWkMExY"},{"acf_fc_layout":"text_sans_klein","text":"[caption id=\"attachment_2017\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"157\"]<img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2017\" src=\"https:\/\/kunsthalle-bielefeld.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Lieber_Portraet-157x300.jpg\" alt=\"Portrait of a young white man. He has short, slightly curly hair, glasses and wears sporty clothes. Water can be seen in the background.\" width=\"157\" height=\"300\">  Prof. Dr. Jeffrey Lieber[\/caption]\n\nJeffrey Lieber is Associate Professor of Art History at Texas State University and the author of Flintstone Modernism or the Crisis in Postwar American Culture (MIT Press, 2018). His essays on Philip Johnson have appeared in international publications, including the Neue Z\u00fcrcher Zeitung. Lieber's 2018 opinion piece in The New York Times (\"What Will We Lose When the Union Carbide Building Falls?\") sparked a debate about the importance of mid-20th century architecture in the United States. His wide-ranging interests in the field have been sponsored by the Delmas Foundation Grant for Independent Research in Venice to cite one example, and are reflected in his curation of provocative film series for the Harvard Film Archive and The New School in New York. He received his AB from Vassar College and his PhD in art history from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor."},{"acf_fc_layout":"text_sans_gross","text":"Further blog posts related to the architecture symposium<a href=\"https:\/\/kunsthalle-bielefeld.de\/en\/entdecken\/blog\/\">   <\/a>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"text_serif_normal","text":"The symposium is sponsored and supported by:"},{"acf_fc_layout":"logos","logos":[1987,1989,1991],"subline":""}],"gallerie":[{"bild":3875,"laufweite":100}],"subtitle":"A contribution by Prof. Dr. Jeffrey Lieber"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kunsthalle-bielefeld.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/journal\/3554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kunsthalle-bielefeld.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/journal"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kunsthalle-bielefeld.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/journal"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kunsthalle-bielefeld.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kunsthalle-bielefeld.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"journal-categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kunsthalle-bielefeld.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/journal-categories?post=3554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}