Preview of new Museum of Art building, with model

Architect Philip Johnson’s vision of grandeur is explored in “Look for Beauty”: Philip Johnson and Art Museum Design, opening to the public October 17, 2010 in the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute Museum of Art. This exhibition celebrates the 50^th anniversary of the Museum of Art building dedication on October 15, 1960.

 

Look for Beauty examines three Johnson-designed museum buildings: Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, 1960; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, 1961; and the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery (now the Sheldon Museum of Art), University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1963. While Johnson (1906-2005) designed several museums and galleries during his long career, these three early projects form a coherent trio to study the arc of Johnson’s developing personal aesthetic that wed International Style modernism to historical architectural references.

 

Look for Beauty includes models, plans, furniture, photographic murals and archival materials such as correspondence, exhibition photographs and catalogs. Slide shows document the social history of each institution. The interpretive component of the exhibition features wall texts, object labels and audio guides that can be accessed by cell phone or Museum-provided MP3 players. Numerous programs are scheduled during the exhibition to introduce visitors to the fine art of architecture as practiced in mid-20^th-century America and lived in today.

 

Philip Johnson was born in 1906 to an affluent Cleveland, Ohio, family and graduated from Harvard University with a degree in philosophy in 1930. He worked at the Museum of Modern Art as its first Director of Architecture and Design before returning to Harvard for an architecture degree that was conferred in 1943. Initially Johnson’s aesthetic allegiance was with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), the leading architect of the International School, but by 1960 Johnson felt constrained by such formal strictures. Stylistically restless, he began to incorporate architectural motives from earlier eras; the most notorious of these was Johnson’s 1984 design for the AT&T Headquarters (now Sony) in New York City, the top for which was inspired by the broken pediment of an 18^th-century Chippendale-style highboy.

 

Johnson designed all types of structures, from private residences to houses of worship, skyscrapers, college buildings and public libraries. His extensive portfolio includes a wing at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., for the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art (1963); the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City (1964); the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif. (1980); and headquarter high rises such as the IDS Center in Minneapolis (1973) and Pennzoil Place in Houston (1976). Johnson received the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1978 and the first Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979. He died in 2005 in his home in New Canaan, Connecticut, and bequeathed his famous Glass House estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.