![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
This article analyzes the formative role of medieval theology and aesthetics in the development of postwar American architecture by focusing on the architectural theory and practice of Mies van der Rohe and Jean Labatut, both of whom became actively interested in Neo-Thomism from the late 1940s. More specifically, a closer look at their reliance on the work of Jacques Maritain, the preeminent promotor of Neo-Thomism, sheds light on the transmission and circulation of old and new concepts within twentieth-century architectural theory. By revealing how Maritain’s ideas helped to codify the latter and thus exposed the premodern ideas at the heart of modern architecture, I argue that modernist aesthetics should be re-evaluated with regards to its definition of “the new” and its emphasis on the breakdown or mutation of premodern frames of reference.
Notes
An earlier version of this article was originally presented in the panel “An Intellectual Hinterland: Religion and Modernist Art in the Postwar Period,” at the Annual Symposium of the International Society of Intellectual History (ISIH), “Intellectual Hinterlands,” The University of Toronto, Canada, June 22–25, 2014.
1. Crucial in this regard are entries 702 and 705 in Denham, ed., Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 244.
2. This is certainly the case for the two studies Maritain wrote in the United States: Art and Poetry (1943) and Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953). The latter was also known to Frye.
3. Hart, Northrop Frye., xv.
4. On Neo-Thomism, see this forthcoming study: Heynickx and Symons, eds., What’s So New about Scholasticism?
5. Harold Bloom’s view of Frye. Quoted in Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory, 117.
6. Ter Braak, “Het opium der vormen,” 365. My translation.
7. Fecher, Philosophy of Jacques Maritain, 10.
8. On Maritain’s reception among interwar modernist artists, see Heynickx and De Maeyer, eds., The Maritain Factor.
9. Benjamin, “Erfahrung und Armut,” 213–19. Benjamin shared Frye’s criticism, as seen in his review, “Jacques Maritain,” where he wrote: “To discuss Jacques Maritain’s writings outside the sphere of Catholicism does not make sense” (480). My translation.
10. When the war started at the end of 1939, Maritain was teaching, as he had been doing every year, at the Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto. He decided not to return to France and soon moved to the United States, where he started teaching at Princeton University (1941–42), and then at Columbia University (1941–44). During the war he remained in the United States and took part in the war effort by recording broadcasts destined for occupied France. In the spring of 1948, he returned to Princeton as Professor Emeritus, though he also lectured at other universities, including the universities of Notre Dame and Chicago.
11. Munro, “Society and Solitude,” 39.
12. Schaper, “Philosophical Surveys,” 367.
13. See Somol, ed., Autonomy and Ideology.
14. Alford, “Modern Architecture,” 107, note no. 8.
15. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism.
16. A term coined by Heilbut in Exiled in Paradise.
17. Labatut has not yet received the full scholarly attention he deserves. The only well-documented study of his work is Otero-Pailos’s “Eucharistic Architecture: Jean Labatut and the Search for Pure Sensation,” in his seminal book, Architecture’s Historical Turn, 25–99.
18. The scholarship on Mies is enormous. For a helpful guide, see the bibliography of the revised edition of Schulze’s acclaimed 1985 critical biography, Schulze and Windhorst, Mies van der Rohe.
19. Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River, 117–28.
20. Levine, Dreamland of Humanists, 283–84.
21. See the reflections of Labatut’s former students—Heath Licklider, Robert Venturi, and Emilio Ambasz—in the exhibition catalogue, Princeton’s Beaux Arts, 19–21.
22. Labatut, “Adventure in Light-Color-Polychromy,” 8.
23. Ibid., 7.
24. For an analysis, see Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism, 148–50.
25. Maritain, “Modern Sacred Art,” 8.
26. For more on the chapel, see Grubiak, “Educating the Moral Scientist,” 1–14.
27. As quoted in Van der Rohe, “A Chapel,” 19.
28. Labatut, “Adventure in Light-Color-Polychromy,” 8.
29. Puente, ed., Mies van der Rohe, 32–33.
30. Ibid., 21.
31. Honey, “Who and What Inspired?” 99–102.
32. Schulze, Mies van der Rohe, 228.
33. Puente, ed., Mies van der Rohe, 52–53.
34. The origin of this line is unclear. It is an old joke about the University of Chicago of the 1950s. In recent years, it has been used by the The New York Times columnist David Brook; see, for example, https://thegathering.com/news-posts/transcript-david-brooks-gathering-2014/.
35. See Michel, La Pensée catholique en Amérique.
36. Mies exchanged ideas about architecture with John Nef, an economic historian and co-founder of the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought in 1941, where Maritain gave annual lectures as visiting professor. As we can learn from their correspondence, Mies probably attended some of Maritain’s lectures and in 1944 he was contacted for a (never realised) plan, supported by Hutchins, who founded the Committee, to give a series of lectures on the modern city. John U. Nef Papers, Box 31.
37. Harrington, “I Gave Myself a Shock,” 55–61.
38. Letter from Maritain to Labatut, April 14, 1956, Labatut Papers, Box 7, folder 4.
39. Mertins, “Mies’s event space,” 147. The same idea was defended earlier in Levine, “‘The Significance of Facts’,” 70–101.
40. See Teyssot, Topology of Everyday Constellations, 160–61. See also Hollier, “The Architectural Metaphor,” 14–46.
41. Maritain, Approches de Dieu, 84–86. This insight appears in Maritain’s earlier work, as, for example, in Le songe de Descartes, 23, and Religion et culture, 10. All my translations.
42. Morpurgo-Tagliabue, L’esthétique contemporaine, 488.
43. For the first time beautifully analysed in De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique médiévale.
44. Aquinas: “Nam ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur. Primo quidem integritas sive perfectio: quae enim diminuta sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt. Et debita proportio sive consonantia. Et iterum claritas.” Summa Theologiae, I, question 39, art. 8. This quotation can be retrieved from a set of catalog cards, now in the American Library of Congress, containing the outline of a speech Mies gave in London in May 1959, on receiving the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. The series of talks that followed this speech were composed on its model with almost identical words and typical aphoristic verve. For a facsimile of these catalog cards, see Dal Co, Figures of Architecture, 283.
45. Aquinas famously said that “pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent” (“beautiful things are those which please when seen”), Summa Theologiae, I, question 5, art. 4 ad. 1.
46. Allion, ed., Oeuvres Complètes, 620.
47. Ibid.
48. Already in 1931, Belgion wrote in his article “Art and Mr. Maritain” that Maritain’s theory of art was “neither the Schoolmen’s nor the Ancients’, but his own and the theory is false.” The article was republished in 1967 in Belgion, The Human Parrot (the quotation appearing on page 54). The bibliography of Eco’s Art and Beauty includes the following note on Maritain: “Expressions such as pulchrum est id quod placet are accepted as authentic Thomistic formulae by people who do not care, or perhaps are not aware that this definition was devised by Maritain himself. What Aquinas actually wrote was pulchra dicuntur quae visa placent. The difference is considerable. Maritain’s proposition is a dogmatic attempt to define once and for all the ontological character of beauty. Aquinas’s is more like a sociological finding. It means ‘things that give pleasure when they are perceived are called beautiful’, and this is to introduce the problem, not to solve it.”
49. O’Connor, The Habit of Being, 216.
50. Gordon, Continental Divide, 3–5.
51. Holsinger, The Premodern Condition.
52. Ibid., 4.
53. Banham, “The New Brutalism,” 355.
54. The description that is central in Whiteley, Reyner Banham.
55. Banham, “Pop and the Body Critical,” 25.
56. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 73.
57. See Eliade, Images and Symbols, 17. An example of this redistribution of old meaning may be seen in the American skyscrapers of the 1930s in their blending of Assyrian-Babylonian decorations and Ziggurat silhouettes with iron constructions, which resulted simultaneously from the American dream-logic and the fascination with the paradigmatic Jerusalem/Babylon tower. See Van Leeuwen, The Skyward Trend, 48–53.
58. Eliade, Journal III, 98–99.
59. Ibid., 99.
60. See “Lecture by Jean Labatut for the opening of the exhibition on Auguste Perret sponsored by the French Embassy on May 18, 1950,” Labatut Papers, Box 12, folder 11. For a more detailed account, see Labatut, “Depuis les Vitraux aux fontaines,” Labatut Papers, Box 12, folder 11.
61. See also Labatut’s working notes in Labatut Papers, Box 57, folder 11.
62. Letter from Labatut to Maritain, March 13, 1960, Labatut Papers, Box 7, folder 4.
63. Labatut, “Depuis les Vitraux aux fontaines,” Labatut Papers, Box 12, folder 11.
64. Puente, ed., Mies van der Rohe, 51.
65. Ibid., 54–55.
66. See Neumeyer, The Artless World, chap. 2.
![Supercharge Your Next Research Paper: Research and write your next paper with Jenni AI.]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/112444/Skyscraper-humanities.png"})