The Man in the Glass House by Mark Lamster

Author:Mark Lamster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

The 1953 Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, an urban oasis. (© The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY)

Johnson’s “outdoor room” was defined by a grid of slate-gray paving plates of Vermont marble, with a dining terrace at its western end. The sunken central area was divided by a pair of rectangular pools crossed by bridges, and studded with birch and cryptomeria trees. An 18-foot-high brick wall separated the garden from the street. Barr, who was intimately involved in the project, devised the sculptural program.

There were other collaborators, too, none more critical than James Fanning, a New Canaan landscape architect who worked closely with Johnson on the plantings. Johnson, however, assiduously declined to credit him in public. “People would think he designed the garden,” he later admitted. Finding trees that wouldn’t fail in that environment proved a challenge. Johnson also caught flak—from Aline Louchheim, in the New York Times—for cutting down extant trees that he considered inconvenient, a practice that would also cause problems with his Glass House neighbors. The pools leaked, a perennial problem.

If Fanning’s contributions were appreciated if not credited, the same was not necessarily the case with Philip Goodwin, the museum’s original architect and now a trustee. He contributed $25,000 to the commission to replace the garden that graced his most famous work. With that, he felt free to offer advice—the stone paving would make the place too hot; there was not enough room for sitting—that Johnson duly ignored, even though Goodwin used Nelson Rockefeller as his messenger.

He was wise to do so. From its first days the garden became a favorite midtown oasis, answering the call from the Herald Tribune that had helped to inspire it. The Rockefeller family, which shouldered $100,000 of the $164,000 budget, was especially pleased. “You have achieved something mother would have loved,” Nelson wrote. “Even father, whose interest in the field of modern art has not been primary, was simply thrilled.” Johnson, moreover, had given the world something unique, “the basis for a new concept in the development of a garden as a setting for sculpture” and a “focal point for the cultural life of the city.”

By all rights, it was a fitting memorial to the woman who had seen potential in him when others had not, and occasionally taken a white glove to his dusty display cases.

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