Postmodernism

By the next decade, references to classical traditions show that further dissociation from the tradition of modernism was well underway. There emerged in art and architecture a new historicism that looked back at the classical artistic and architectural tradition, often in an ironic way, in order to subvert convention. Thus, even when parodied, forgotten classical themes became visible once again in the new art. What was being subverted was the long-dominant austerity and inherent elitism of high modernism, where sacrosanct images were usually abstract and ‘‘quality’’ in the visual arts was defined exclusively by the white male creator. Among the innovators, women artists and artists of color appropriated classical themes and forms, carving out their new territories in what came to be called ‘‘postmodernism.’’ For them, Greek and Latin classics proved easily recognizable and therefore adaptable in different ways, according to the individual needs of the artist.

Postmodern art was often playful, ironic, eclectic, and parodic. Already in 1962, the French Nouveau Realiste Yves Klein (1928-62) covered a reproduction of the Victory of Samothrace with a coat of his signature deep blue paint, making a contemporary work of art out of the classic enshrined in the Louvre, presented in the guise of a reproduction. The American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97) produced playful appropriations of images from comic books and other aspects of popular culture. Looking to subvert the dominant modernist style of abstract expressionism, Lichtenstein recounted that he had pondered what would be most unacceptable as a subject to paint, choosing comics and advertisements. But he also mined classical tradition, turning to the cliche of Greek architecture in his painting Temple of Apollo (1964) and other related images. The image pleased him enough that he reproduced it again as a color lithograph, Temple.

Perhaps Lichtenstein never would have turned to the Greek temple if he had known of its appreciation by the leading modernist architect and city planner, the

Figure25.4 Temp1eo/ApoWo,1964,byRoyLichtenstein, magnaandoiloncanvas,94’’ x 128’’. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Brown. © The Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS

Swiss-born Le Corbusier (Charles-lldouard Jeanneret 1887-1965). In his 1923 book, Towards a New Architecture, Le Corbusier had warned, ‘‘To send architectural students to Rome is to cripple them for life’’ (Le Corbusier 1986: 173). His book reproduced photographs and sketches of the Pantheon, the forum in Pompeii, the Parthenon, and a Greek temple at Paestum, noting, ‘‘The Parthenon is a product of selection applied to an established standard. Already for a century the Greek Temple had been standardized in all its parts’’ (Le Corbusier 1986: 133). And he exclaimed, ‘‘The plastic system of Doric work is so pure that it gives almost the feeling of a natural growth’’ (Le Corbusier 1986: 209). Appreciating other classical architecture, he recommended Hadrian’s Villa, for ‘‘One can meditate there on the greatness of Rome. There, they really planned’’ (Le Corbusier 1986: 157).

A more widespread revival ofinterest in classical styles and themes in the visual arts and in architecture emerged during the 1970s and 1980s as postmodern art and architecture became the vogue. Postmodernism also successfully challenged traditional cultural values and began to blur distinctions between high and low art. The term ‘‘postmodernism’’ gained currency in a book on architecture by Charles Jencks, who attacked the International style - the style of the European Bauhaus and the dominant tradition of modernism - by arguing for a more eclectic approach. Eclecticism arrived with postmodernism.

By the early 1960s, the architect Philip Johnson had declared that he was bored with the work of the Bauhaus veteran Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, although he still considered the modernist architect ‘‘a genius.’’ For his own direction, Johnson rejected ‘‘academic revivalism. There are no classic orders or Gothic finials. I try to pick what I like throughout history’’ (Johnson, quoted in Jencks 1984: 82). Johnson’s building for the AT&T Corporate Headquarters (1978-83) in New York earned him unprecedented international attention. It features a Roman-style arch at the entrance, but a broken pediment that tops the building draws more upon the eighteenth-century English furniture-maker Chippendale than on classical Greek or Roman styles.

Perhaps ‘‘classic orders’’ had heretofore seemed too tainted for Johnson because of their association with both Mussolini’s Fascist Rome and Nazi architecture, as in the work of Albert Speer, or with Hitler’s admiration for classical forms (Jaskot 1996: 622). The Nazi admiration for forms of Greek classicism was a part of a deep German admiration for Greek antiquity and a preference for the classical over the contemporary (Silk and Stern 1981: 4). It has been pointed out that Hitler’s views on Greek art and architecture were similar and perhaps indebted to those of the great German scholar and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68), whose dictum he was known to repeat: ‘‘the only way for us to become great... lies in the imitation of the Greeks’’ (Spotts 2002: 20). During the 1930s, Johnson himself had sympathized publicly with, and promoted, fascist ideology and the Third Reich, but by the mid-1950s, he had publicly atoned and had designed a synagogue in suburban New York. Also encouraged by the antimodernist polemics of Robert Venturi, whose Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture appeared in 1966, classical grammar crept back into contemporary architecture.

Figure 25.5 Piazza d’Italia, Charles Moore. © Brendan Nee Www. picturethecity. com

Classical revivalism in the US included John Paul Getty’s museum for antiquities in Malibu, Califomia, designed in the early 1970s by the firm of Langdon & Wilson, with Norman Neuerberg as historical consultant and recreating the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. Architects have both condemned the Getty’s trompe I’oeil columns, false marble, and ‘‘contradictory painted shadows’’ and praised it as a good replica that functions appropriately for its purpose (Jencks 1984: 82, 94-5). The project served to make prominent the issue of historicism in the early 1970s.

By the late 1970s, there emerged a postmodernist classicism. Architects such as Charles Moore, James Stirling, Hans Hollein, Aldo Rossi, and others incorporated convention, metaphor, ornament, and polychromy to create a ‘‘free-style classicism’’ (Jencks 1984: 147). Moore’s Piazza d’ltalia (1976-9), an open plaza dedicated to the Italian-American Community in New Orleans, Louisiana, exemplifies this new classicism. This project draws upon elements inspired by the Greek Agora and the Roman forum, including classical arches and columns, although there are also echoes of Renaissance and Baroque architecture. But Moore had his Ionic capitals made of spirals of bright stainless steel, the impact of which he enhanced by adding the glow and color of the neon light. Such bold revisions led architect Robert Stern to dub this variant of postmodernism, ‘‘ironic classicism.’’