Utopia and Heterotopia: Byzantine Modernisms in America

Summary

Dreams and visions of Byzantium traveled across the Atlantic Ocean many times over the course of the twentieth century, and they helped to determine the creation and understanding of modern art in America. Broadly speaking, the dreams were utopian desires on the parts of critics, historians, and artists for a world where unified humanity and essential art were possible; the visions were newly framed representations of Byzantium and no less historically wishful. Michel Foucault (1926–84) discussed this cultural dichotomy: he described one emplacement, on the one hand, as utopia, self-evidently no-place, a perfected form of society that does not exist; or, on the other hand, as heterotopia, a more difficult and interesting concept, that is a counter-site, “simultaneously represented, contested and inverted.” In broad terms, American engagement with Byzantium in the twentieth century takes either of these forms: when Willem de Kooning called New York City a “Byzantine city,” he projected an idealized version of Constantinople on Manhattan, and when John and Dominique de Menil commissioned a Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum in Houston, Texas, Foucault’s emplacement finds vivid expression in a “new” Byzantium, an active suspension between urban America and rural Cyprus.

This article examines these Byzantium “places” in America. Versions of Byzantium circulating in their milieus have informed modernist American projects. Dreams of Byzantium fueled modernist utopias, traces of which are in American art of the late 1940s and 1950s, but all dreams have some residue in them of the world. And, so, Byzantine utopias also lead to emplacement in the world, places like Houston’s Rothko Chapel and the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum, heterotopias where modern bodies and souls find themselves perfectly and strangely reflected. Those Byzantine “places” are threads of an intricate historical web, which cannot be fully analyzed within the scope of this article, but important changes took place in the sea voyage between Byzantium and America: in its new settings, Byzantium became both a forceful idea and a powerful reality, utopian and heterotopian, and always new.

Byzantine Utopias

An examination of Byzantine modernisms needs to begin in 1948 with the convergence of the ideals of an American master, Barnett Newman (1905–70), and of a French art historian and critic, Georges Duthuit (1891–1974).