The Triumph of Modernism by Hilton Kramer

Author:Hilton Kramer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781442223226
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

For Johnson, as Schulze shrewdly observes, “Hitler and the Nazis had color. . . . There was dash to these Nazis: the way they dressed and sang and marched and fought; their impudence, their bravado, the sexuality Philip could not help but project on them.” And the Nazis also met the requisite Nietzschean standard. “He concentrated his attention on the Nietzschean text in Der Wille zur Macht and its thesis that ‘the will to power’ constitutes man’s fundamental motivating force”—a doctrine, as Schulze also points out, that “must have appealed to the elitist view in which Philip had been nurtured since birth.”

In the face of these attractions, which were as much aesthetic and erotic as they were political, the arts were no longer a priority for Johnson. “If in the arts [Germany] sets the clock back now, it will run all the faster in the future,” he wrote at the time. Even the Bauhaus, which Johnson had acclaimed four years earlier as a new architectural ideal, he now condemned for bearing “irretrievably the stamp of Communism and Marxism.” As for Hitler’s racial doctrines, Johnson never allowed them to interfere with his sex life. In that respect, at least, he remained a follower of the Weimar ethos rather than the Nazi. Thus, writes Schulze, “he took his first serious lover [in New York] in 1934”—at the very moment when he was committing himself to the fascist cause, to which racial theories were central. “Jimmy Daniels was a black café singer whom Philip later called the first Mrs. Johnson.”

Still, as a consequence of Johnson’s political conversion, when he returned to New York from Germany he resigned his post at the Museum of Modern Art to devote himself to politics. Then he did something really bizarre for a white homosexual with a black male lover. With a school friend who was working at the museum, Johnson attempted to join up with the Southern political machine led by the demagogic governor of Louisiana, Huey Long.

It was a move widely reported in the New York press at the time. The headline of a story written by Joseph Alsop in the Herald Tribune read: “Two Quit Modern Art Museum for Sur-Realist Political Venture.” The New York Times reported of Johnson and his colleague that “Recently they became convinced that, after all, abstract art left some major political and economic problems unsolved. Consequently both have turned in their resignations [from the Museum of Modern Art] and will leave as soon as practicable for Louisiana to study the methods of Huey Long.” Once again Alfred Barr was horrified, tried to change Johnson’s mind, and failed.

Needless to say, Huey Long was not interested in Johnson’s services. But Johnson’s next attempt to attach himself to a homegrown version of a Nazi-type movement met with a more enthusiastic response. He discovered the Reverend Charles E. Coughlin, the Roman Catholic priest whose Sunday afternoon radio broadcasts from the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, commanded an audience of thirty million listeners.

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