The Glass House meets the Stonewall
PHOTO EXHIBIT PRESENTS THE TIME PHILIP JOHNSON’S NEW CANAAN RETREAT WAS AN ELITE GAY GATHERING PLACE
Two settings captured in David McCabe’s photographs could hardly be more different.
In the early 1960s, Andy Warhol’s first “Factory,” in Midtown Manhattan, was a bustling bohemia set amid a soundtrack of blaring horns and a vertical landscape of high rises. A young Mick Jagger, drink in hand, Warhol adorned in an Incan headdress beside Salvador Dali and a lindyhopping Tennessee Williams are the subjects of some McCabe photos, taken between 1964 and 1965.
Less than 50 miles away, the New Canaan of Philip Johnson’s Glass
House was verdant and quaint, with a small downtown, large plots of land and a population with a comparatively more conservative bent. Another of McCabe’s photos show Warhol staring pensively through the glass at the landscape, or in conference with Johnson and a collection of his colleagues.
Yet there was an important interchange of ideas underway, facilitated, in part, by Johnson and his longtime partner, the curator and tastemaker David Whitney, which allowed momentous figures of the moment — including the composer John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, the ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein and the artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Warhol — to leave their imprint on Johnson’s bucolic
masterpiece.
“They either visited, performed there, were collected or shown there, or were honored there in some way,” says Donald Albrecht, a co-curator on the upcoming “Gay Gatherings: Philip Johnson, David Whitney and the Modern Arts,” at the Glass House May 1 through Aug. 15, which celebrates each artist’s impact on the site.
The exhibition is coincident with the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, a landmark moment in the gay rights movement, the 70th anniversary of the completion of the Glass House and the centennial of the Bauhaus, the German art school whose teachings Johnson helped to bring to the United States.
The relationships between the eight men are shown at two locations on the Glass House grounds — Da Monsta and the Painting Gallery — and will include artworks, visual presentations and photographs by McCabe, Christopher Makos and others.
“From the moment the house opened, Johnson used it as kind of a salon. That intensified in the 1960s. Whether they come because of David Whitney, we’re not sure. But Johnson acknowledges that Whitney is very influential,” Albrecht says.
Aside from Kirstein, with whom Johnson attended Harvard University and for whom Johnson ultimately built a memorial on the New Canaan property, the other figures in the exhibition were contemporaries of Whitney, who was 33 years Johnson’s junior.
Whitney was an assistant to Johns, and a close friend to Rauschenberg and Warhol, the latter of whom once reportedly said of Johnson, “Oh, he’s so fabulous, wait ‘til you see his house.”
“The house and the landscape are instantly famous and very widely documented,” says co-curator Thomas Mellins, an architectural historian and curator. “What’s interesting is what a broad range of people the
“FROM THE MOMENT THE HOUSE OPENED, JOHNSON USED IT AS KIND OF A SALON. THAT INTENSIFIED IN THE 1960S.”
Glass House attracted. People commented on socalled high society rubbing shoulders with the avant garde. There’s a very highlow contrast.”
That juxtaposition was perhaps best embodied by 1967’s “Country Happening,” in which Cunningham’s dance company performed on the property to music composed by Cage, followed by the discordant rock music of the Velvet Underground.
The men featured in the show were also working within the broader context of America before the gay liberation movement. And while the Glass House would have been a safe place for them to interact, Albrecht and Mellins hesitate to label it as a kind of refuge.
“I think at that time, gay men lived compartmentalized lives. Amongst this group of people, their gayness was an open secret and no one really talked about it that much. As long as you didn’t announce it from the rooftops it was thought to be acceptable,” Albrecht says.
“But these are also wellknown figures,” adds Mellins. “This is not an examination of a kind of underground. There may be ways in which their lives are compartmentalized, but these are not hidden figures. These are major players.”
More than an exploration of the social context of the time, Albrecht and Mellins say the exhibition is a celebration of the outsized contributions each made to their respective fields and the relationships that formed around Johnson, Whitney and the Glass House.
“The notion that movements in art rest on personal relationships is an interesting thought that seems to be capturing everyone’s attention at the moment,” Mellins said.
“It’s not that it’s a cohesive group, but the fact that these people knew each other and that larger movements in art rest on personal interactions between them, is interesting.”