Author: Xin Wu

Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13:

Patricia Johanson was one of the earliest minimalist painters and a friend of Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, all artists trying to supersede the Modernist agenda for the arts set by Clement Greenberg. In 1969 the course of her career was dramatically deflected by an unexpected garden commission from the House & Garden magazine. It resulted in 150 garden proposals (146 of which survived and are presented here) and seven companion essays. Neither these proposals nor the essays have ever been published or exhibited as an entity before this book. The House & Garden Commission redefined the course of Johanson's art. She immediately gave up painting and started to create art in landscapes through a highly personal way. This commission reveals an unknown development of the late 60s New York Art world, putting forth a renewal of garden art in defiance of well known cultural trends of the time: formalism and modernism, earthworks and environmentalism. A comparison between Johanson and Scottish poet-gardner Ian Hamilton Finlay demonstrates two parallel attempts to re-instate an ethical dimension in the arts and their profound differences, since Finlay builds an intimate garden upon a return to the classical Mediterranean world, while Johanson translateds non-Western natural ethics and aesthetics into answers to issues of contemporary urban society. Thus the House & Garden Commission proposes, beyond a renewal of garden design, a new role for the visual arts in pursuit of the unfinished project of modernity.