A Crack In The Glass House
Mark Stevens writes in The New York Times of the late modernist architect Phillip Johnson's creepy past:

Philip Johnson did not just flirt with fascism. He spent several years in his late 20s and early 30s - years when an artist's imagination usually begins to jell - consumed by fascist ideology. He tried to start a fascist party in the United States. He traveled several times to Germany. He thrilled to the Nuremberg rally of 1938, and after the invasion of Poland, he visited the front at the invitation of the Nazis.

He approved of what he saw. "The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy," he wrote in a letter. "There were not many Jews to be seen." As late as 1940, Johnson was defending Hitler to the American public. It seems that only an inquiry by the FBI - and, presumably, the prospect of being labeled a traitor if America entered the war - led him to withdraw completely from politics.

Today, any debate over an important figure with a fascist or communist background easily becomes an occasion for blame games between right and left. Johnson is no exception. Morally serious people can have different views of his personal culpability.

But what's essential is to let the shadow fall - to acknowledge that fascism touched something important in his sensibility.

Johnson's emphasis on the aesthetic as the only important value in art was remarkably cold-blooded. His main regret seems to be that contemporary republics have failed to create monuments that ravish the senses.

He never became a fascist architect. But he was probably one of those artists - among them many communists - whose philosophical sensibilities were gutted by the experience of the '30s and World War II. Afterward, he lived more than ever for the stylish surface, appearing uncomfortable with large-minded ideas even when his buildings reached for the sky.

Philip Johnson now seems like an emblematic figure partly because he appears to have been happily, marvelously, provocatively, disturbingly hollow. Johnson's main flaws as an artist - his tastes for razzle-dazzle and overweening scale - are equally the weaknesses of American secular culture. His main strengths - his openness to change, playfulness and urbane rejection of the Miss Grundys of the world - are equally its strengths.

The beautiful Glass House will remain Johnson's signature work. It's a dream house, a stylish stage set. It floats upon the land, eliding boundaries between inside and outside. It seems full of emptiness. It's not really a place to live, but was still Johnson's essential home. That uneasy stylishness deserves emphasis. Philip Johnson lived in a glass house. He threw stones, too.