A haven for truly avant-garde art
Three outdoor installations adorn Connecticut’s iconic Glass House
NEW CANAAN, CONN. Philip Johnson’s Glass House, built in this leafy corner of Connecticut in 1949, was always about more than architecture. While Johnson and his partner David Whitney lived in the house, they turned it and the grounds into a haven for avantgarde art.
Artists such as Andy Warhol, Donald Judd and Frank Stella were encouraged to experiment and take creative risks on the 49acre estate — which along with the house includes a pond, neoclassical-style pavilion in concrete and other small structures.
In keeping with that tradition, the Glass House has commissioned three outdoor installations by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, whose works Johnson collected.
The works surround the house, which is a national historic landmark, and highlight its art-world legacy in celebration of its 10th tourist season and the 110th anniversary of Johnson’s birth.
“Kusama is an artist Johnson both collected and admired,” said Irene Shum, curator and collections manager at the Glass House. The new works are meant to “playfully engage the entire site, creating a celebratory mood.”
Johnson and Whitney, both of whom died in 2005, “were great patrons of the arts, and art interventions like this are in complete alignment with our history,” she said.
NARCISSUS GARDEN
The highlight is a landscape installation, Narcissus Garden, which Kusama first created for the 1966 Venice Biennale. It is comprised of 1,300 stainless-steel spheres, each about a foot in diameter, drifting and bobbing on the newly restored 1957 pond, built by Johnson in a little valley just below the Glass House. The mirrored surfaces of the paper-thin spheres reflect viewers and the scenery around them, including the Pond Pavilion (1962), also by Johnson.
The spheres skitter across the surface with the passing breeze and make a slight pinging sound when they bump against one another. You can see them glinting in the sunlight from much of the estate. Versions of the installation have appeared in Australia, France, Britain, Brazil and, in 2004, New York’s Central Park. In this version, the spheres are larger, more numerous and unrestrained.
Before its restoration, the pond “had never been dredged and was in danger of becoming a wetland and disappearing as a pond,” Shum said.
When Narcissus Garden was first installed, “the frogs were croaking and jumping and singing,” said Christa Carr, a spokeswoman for the Glass House. “It was a truly joyful moment.”
PUMPKIN
Tucked on a hillside of native grasses just above the Glass House is one of the 87-year-old Kusama’s most recent works, Pumpkin (2015). Made of red, glittering steel, the pumpkin is over 4 feet (1.2 metres), tall.
“In Japanese, a ‘pumpkin head’ is an ignorant man or a pudgy woman, but for me, I am charmed by its shape, form and lack of pretension,” says Kusama, who grew up on a farm.
Both installations are to remain on view through Nov. 30.
DOTS OBSESSION
An additional Kusama installation, Dots Obsession — Alive, Seeking for Eternal Hope, will open Sept. 1 and run through Sept. 26. It will cover the outside of the Glass House with red vinyl dots of various sizes — the first work ever to be installed on the house itself.
“It will be installed in the fall when the leaves are all turning, so that it can really play on the surrounding colours,” said Carr.
All three Kusama works can be viewed from inside and outside the house, and Dots Obsession is meant to temporarily transform it into what Kusama has dubbed an “infinity room,” featuring both the dots and the shadows they create.
“My desire is to measure and to make order of the infinite, unbounded universe from my own position within it, with polka dots,” Kusama says. “In exploring this, the single dot is my own life, and I am a single particle among billions.”