Adele Tutter Writings - WordPress.com

Adele Tutter, a psychoanalyst based in New York City, was inspired by childhood summers spent at Zelený Les and her Czech heritage to pursue the mythological and personal meanings of trees in a series of published essays:

Metamorphosis and the aesthetics of loss. I. Mourning Daphne—The Apollo and Daphne paintings of Nicolas Poussin. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 92, pp. 427–449. (2011) II. Lady of the Woods—The transformative lens of Francesca Woodman. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 92, pp. 1517-1539. (2011)

Writings on art, loss, and nationalism under political oppression: I. Angel With a Missing Wing: Loss, Restitution, and the Embodied Self in the Photography of Josef Sudek. 2012 Corst Essay Prize in Psychoanalysis and Culture Published Summer 2013 - American Imago / Psychoanaylsis and the Human Sciences, Vol. 70, No. 2 II. Sudek, Janacek, Hukvaldy—Eagle with a broken wing (in preparation).

In addition, the metamorphosis of Zelený Les informed her study of Philip Johnson’s Glass House estate, which was elaborated over roughly the same time period as the present-day Zelený Les. This work has been published in several essays, including:

III. Design as dream and self representation: Philip Johnson and the Glass House of Atreus. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Vol. 59, pp. 509-548. (2011)

Tutter is now working to collect these essays into a monograph on the Glass House, the preface to which here follows:

Preface: A Landscape of the Self The space we love is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed. It deploys and appears to move elsewhere without difficulty; into other times, and on different planes of dream and memory —GASTON BACHELARD

After graduating from college in 1982, I traveled to the country that was, at that time, called Czechoslovakia. In 1948 my father left this country, his home, because of his political differences with the Communist regime then in power. I do not know whether he would have done so if he knew that his dissident status would prevent him from returning, save for one visit in the early 1970s, until 1989, when the Velvet Revolution opened the borders. And so, in 1982, I was acutely aware of my role as my father’s eyes and ears when I arrived at the village near Prague where he was born, and met the sisters, uncles, and cousins whom he expected never to see again. I had never met anybody related to my father before; I was twenty years old.

Twenty-six years later, I traveled to Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. When I walked the grounds and surveyed Johnson’s life work, I was overtaken by powerful and quite unanticipated feelings. Among them was an apprehension having to do with not quite knowing what I felt—something definite, yet undefinable. I did not know it yet, but I had been there before. Johnson purchased his initial parcel in New Canaan in 1946, and then added to it until it grew to forty-seven acres; he built on it until his death, in 2005. He called the Glass House his “diary.” The aim of this book is to show that it not only a architectural diary, but also a profoundly personal diary, a constellation of memories and tableaux that resided within Johnson’s designing mind. It was his diary, yes—and also his dream. During my work on this book, I began to understand how my own experiences contributed to this conceptualization. I had to travel somewhat discreetly to my father’s hometown of Nová Cerekev, to shield my family from any complications caused by reports of a visitor from the “West”. Thus it was in the small hours of the morning when I encountered my first relative, immediately recognizable to me as my father’s older sister, who opened the great wooden gates of the family compound to me. Later, her husband took me for a walk in the nearby pine woods. Although we had no interpreter and could only communicate through gesture and drawings, it was clear that it was of utmost importance that I see the forest. But I did not need them to tell me: I knew, because I had been there before. When I was three years old, my father bought an old dairy farm on one hundred acres of land in upstate New York stood, drawn to it because of its patch of pine plantation on the hill behind the house, reminiscent of the evergreen forests of his youth, the fabled forests of Bohemia. From that day in 1965, until near his death in 2001—at the same time the Johnson lived and worked on his Glass House—he, too, gradually transformed his land into a materialization of memory, a dream of home. Like Johnson, he restored the pastures of the old farm, although they no longer cultivated for hay, and like Johnson he carved out a pond in a hilly recess. But, whereas Johnson created a park from a forest, my father created a forest from a meadow, planting over forty thousand trees to enlarge the original forest and to surround the property with a thick forested belt, with trails running all throughout. He would retreat there whenever he could, planting more trees and maintaining the trails. My father did not consciously set out to accomplish this recreation. It was, as he said, in his blood. He dreamt of putting speakers in the forest, so one could hear music in the trees. But one need not hear his beloved Smetana or Dvořák in our woods to listen to his dream of the Czech lands—Česky krásný. And so when I arrived at Nová Cerekev, I knew where I was: I felt intimately familiar with its particular topography: its fields and trees, paths and pond. My father’s trees now tower over me; they, too, are in my blood. It was, I imagine, the resonance with my father’s life work that helped me recognize, however unknowingly, that the Glass House is an expression of something bigger, something more than architecture and landscape—it is the landscape, the architecture, of Johnson’s mind, his history and memories, ambitions and longings. It is the landscape of a self. During my immersion in the Glass House, I noted a shift in my attitude toward Johnson the man: from a little contemptuous of this seemingly inconstant “accidental architect,” to a tender, more protective feeling. What has been assailed as a lack of originality and a mannered stiffness began to seem more like an inhibition of Johnson’s own voice. At the same time, I gained an admiration for that voice—ironically, the very thing he thought he lacked—and for the drive and vision that allowed him to build a citadel on an acropolis in a wood on a farm. I wondered—had Johnson charmed me, seduced me as he had others? But at some point, it struck me that what I was feeling was more akin to the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald’s conception of psychoanalytic love. And this is best described as the love borne of a deeper understanding.

- Adele Tutter