Frank Lloyd Wright and the “Gift” of Genius
2009; Wiley; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1542-734x.2009.00715.x
ISSN1542-734X
Autores Tópico(s)Art History and Market Analysis
ResumoFrank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) is probably the most famous architect in the world. He is author of undoubtedly the most famous private home in the world, Fallingwater, which perches so dramatically on the cliff overhanging the eponymous waterfall near Pittsburgh. How did this acknowledged masterpiece, this work of such singular genius, come to be? The story of Fallingwater's inception serves as a perfect introduction to the persona that Wright, and to an extent those who knew him, fashioned for popular media consumption. It is related by one of his Taliesin fellows, Edgar Tafel: Fall 1935. Taliesin, Wisconsin: “Come along, E.J. We're ready for you,” boomed Mr. Wright into the hand-cranked telephone. The call was from Pittsburgh and E.J. was Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr., department store president. Mr. Wright was to show him the first sketches for his new house, “Fallingwater.” I looked across my drafting table at the apprentice in front of me, Bob Mosher, whose back had stiffened at the words. Ready? There wasn't one line drawn. Kaufmann, an important client, coming to see plans for his house, and was Mr. Wright still carrying the design confidently around in his head? … He hung up the phone, briskly emerged from his office, some twelve steps from the drafting room, sat down at the table set with the plot plan, and started to draw. First floor plan. Second floor. Section, elevation. Side sketches of details, talking sotto voce all the while. The design just poured out of him. … Poetry in form, line, color, textures and materials, all for a greater glory: a reality to live in! Mr. Wright at his eloquent and romantic best—he had done it before and would often do it again—genius through an organic growth along with nature. If we are to believe Tafel's report, the complex interlocking forms of the home—its cream-colored, cantilevered horizontals piled rhythmically atop one another and anchored by the dark, striated masonry, the interstices filled with diaphanous glass channels—all this was disgorged in one creative torrent onto a blank piece of paper, much as Beethoven's symphonies were reportedly “heard” in their entirety before being written unhesitatingly down by the maestro in a fair hand (Steffensen, “Wright and Beethoven” 24). Or, perhaps even more succinctly, as the ninety-year-old Wright himself was later to say of his designs in a 1957 television interview with Mike Wallace, “It's quite easy for me to shake them out of my sleeve” (“Wright Television Interview with Wallace”). Frank Lloyd Wright, who shook Fallingwater out of his sleeve, who designed the world-famous careering spiral of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, who launched a thousand quips—“I think Ms. [Marilyn] Monroe as architecture is extremely good architecture” (“Wright Television Interview with Wallace”)—is the granddaddy of the so-called celebrity “starchitect” of the twentieth century.1 1. In addition to his reputation as an architect, Wright is famous simply for being famous, and famous, too, for his arrogance and image manipulation. See Martin and Kahn. He got that way not merely by dint of his revolutionary ideas, Herculean output, and sheer, undeniable talent, but also because he was one of the first architects to harness the modern media machine for his own purposes. Wright created an image of himself as the modern architect-hero so potent that he remains today, nearly half a century after his death, a figure that looms even larger than the actual influence of his work (overshadowed in terms of widespread popular adoption by the practitioners of Bauhaus- or International-Style modernism). He accomplished this feat through the canny manipulation of his image via a prodigious output in print, as well as photographs, radio, and even the nascent medium of television. His popularity in his own lifetime may be epitomized by his appearance on the cover of Time magazine in 1938. It may be that Wright's greatest creation was, ultimately, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect, genius, hero. How was this creature born? How Wright fashioned this image of himself is one of the most fascinating case studies in an American tradition of self-fashioning. He drew upon older traditions of the birth of genius but also fashioned a new model for the genius of the twentieth century, and probably the most important document in this creation was An Autobiography, first published in 1932 during the Depression-enforced lull in the architect's career. So popular was this book that thirty years later (1962) it went into its eighth printing (it was also translated into French); in 2005 it was again resurrected and sold as a facsimile edition.2 2. An Autobiography was first published in 1932 by Longmans, Green and Company (London, New York and Toronto); the first printing was only 500 copies. Longmans, Green and Company published a second edition of 2,000 in 1933 and a third edition of 2,000 copies in 1938. In 1943 the book was taken up by Duell Sloan and Pearce (New York), which released 3,000 more copies in that year (the edition referred to here). Further printings occurred in 1945, 1946, 1947, and 1962. Pomegranate Publishers (San Francisco) released the facsimile of the 1943 edition in 2005. As an act of modernist self-fashioning, An Autobiography sets out to create a mythology of the architect as savior of the modern world. The book is a lengthy and complex document that deals with the architect's entire career to date and a complete analysis of it would in itself require a book. Rather, it is the stories of inception, birth, and childhood that shed an interesting light on Wright's act of self-creation, particularly on the much-loved trope of the famous Froebel “Gifts,” the childhood playthings of the boy genius. In his writing, Wright draws upon older traditions of genius in the stories of his infancy, boyhood, and youth in Wisconsin. Although Wright did not claim to have been hand-selected by God before his birth, as, say, Leonardo or Michelangelo purportedly were, or to be a product of the fickle forces of nature, as Mozart or Beethoven were, yet in his Autobiography, Wright cannot resist harnessing both religion and nature for his own origin story. Religion played an important role in Wright's family background, as his Welsh grandfather Richard Lloyd-Jones was a “firebrand” preacher, “an impassioned, unpopular Unitarian” (An Autobiography 105). His father, William Wright, was also a sometime preacher—thus it comes as no surprise that a certain prophetic tone infuses many of Wright's writings, including the poetically woven strains of the Autobiography. In the following passage, for example, Wright bows to the nineteenth-century Romantic and Emersonian tradition, as he describes himself as a boy becoming a disciple of the outdoors: As a listening ear, a seeing eye, and a sensitive touch had been given naturally to him, his spirit was now becoming familiar with this marvelous book-of-books, experience, the only known reading—The Book of Creation. (An Autobiography 121) Of importance to the emergence of his genius from this milieu is the admission of his sensitivities to nature having “been given naturally to him.” The “gift” here is his sensual receptivity and not his genius itself, whose mysterious origins lie elsewhere in the paradigm Wright creates for his personal evolution. That “gift” comes packaged in a different story, told later, in which Wright gift-wraps himself for presentation as the architectural genius of the twentieth century. Wright's An Autobiography is a document rife with stylistic quirks and inventive literary peculiarities, some of which constitute its unique charm, and many of which add to the interpretive possibilities lurking within the text. Wright himself invited such close inspection and interpretation, when in the second edition of the Autobiography (1943) he excused the many glaring omissions and inconsistencies in the text with the rationale: “I said at the beginning that the real book was between the lines. It is true of any serious book concerned with culture” (An Autobiography 161). Wright thereby grants his readers license to delve into the cultural possibilities represented by his own text. He subdivided the book into segments, in which his childhood and youth are titled “Book One: Family Fellowship” and the portion dealing with his youth is titled “Part One: Family.” He jumps about between the telling of factual, historical evidence and remembered anecdote. Somewhat like the interwoven architectural structure of a Prairie Style house, An Autobiography interweaves glimpses of his exterior—his family, his home, nature, and the outdoors—with those of his interior. Under the guise of literary self-analysis, Wright provides overt glimpses into the psychic development of the youth, but also the self-conscious literary construction of a youth who would go on to be Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. As a convincing literary tool at the service of the myth-making process, Wright employs the third person in his Autobiography from its beginning only until he leaves the University of Wisconsin (which he attended only for one year) and heads for Chicago, where he finds himself as an architect and as an individual. Thus, in the pages dealing with his childhood, he refers to himself as “the boy,” and to his parents as “the father” and “the mother.” This device was—according to the anecdotal record—suggested to him by his third wife Olgivanna, who had a strong literary background, as well as a close involvement in the writing of the book.3 3. “How will I tell about myself as a small boy on Uncle James' farm? That was such an important part of my upbringing,” Wright asked.“Simply refer to yourself as ‘he,’ and when you are done with that part of your boyhood and early youth, and arrive in Chicago to pursue your life in architecture, change the ‘he’ to ‘I,’ ” she replied. As quoted in the introductory notes to the Autobiography. It is an effective literary device, which lends authenticity to the narrative voice, distancing Wright himself from authorship and suggesting the voice of objective authority and omniscient narratorship. He begins the narration without warning the reader of this device. Only once he is through telling the story of his youth—and the reader is fully drawn into the conceit of third-party narration—does he alert the reader to the shift he is about to make when he arrives in Chicago. Then, just as he leaves the third-party narrative voice, he bids adieu to that voice: Childhood! Boyhood! Youth! Ever-living parts of manhood—told, in perspective, against the warm indispensable background of Family. The telling none the less faithful for having the quality of life in a fond dream? Now individual independence is to begin. Beyond … are untold events: events ready to meet the adventurer at every step, as he goes forward step by step with courageous faith to meet them. … Here say good-bye to “the boy.” Henceforward, on my own, I am “I.” Wright even has the authorial temerity to allude to the fictive quality of the narrative, which precedes this switch from third- to first-person narration: “The telling none the less faithful for having the quality of life in a fond dream?” It is a disarming technique that to a certain extent quells the voice of doubt; by pointing out the possible discrepancies between autogenetic fiction and documentable fact, he in fact helps to lull the reader into an easier acceptance of all that has come previously—and what comes previously is the “evidence” of the nascence, infancy, and childhood of the “world's greatest architect,” as claimed by Wright himself.4 4. Wright made this statement under oath, in a court appearance, when asked about his profession; it is a favorite among Wright aficionados (Martin 91 and many others). The idiosyncratic literary techniques of the Autobiography signal the book's role as emissary for the man who changed the face of the built environment in the twentieth century. Like his buildings, his book is constructed not in a linear fashion, but “breaks the box” and often jumps around from subject to subject, place to place, musing to musing. Among these idiosyncrasies is a device related to the employment of the third-person omniscient narrator in the portion of the book dedicated to his youth. A more conventional narrator would have referred to his parents and himself in the first person as “my mother,”“my father,” and “myself,” or in the third-person voice, referring to the same players as “Anna,”“William,” and “Frank,” or “his mother” and “his father.” Instead, Wright chose to refer to the three key players of his youth as “the mother,”“the father,” and “the boy” (emphasis added). This objectification of his parents and himself—the “the” thing—creates nameless, somewhat disembodied universals or archetypes out of rather humble nineteenth-century Midwesterners, and thus further enhances the prophetic tone surrounding the boy who would be an architect. It also tends to objectify or distance the author from his engagement with his childhood, authenticating his experiences for his audience. If Wright harnessed all his available resources to create a genius persona for the twentieth century, he still employed devices associated with other artistic predecessors—some as old as the Renaissance, some as recent as his own twentieth-century contemporaries. Like many artists, Wright sought to control his own history, from birth onwards, and it is particularly in the realm of birth and childhood where Wright's story draws upon older literary traditions of genius. In such histories, childhood occupies a chimerical position. With the few prodigal exceptions like Mozart, the childhoods of most important artistic figures are unremarkable and therefore not much is generally recorded. Thus the formation of the genius in childhood is especially susceptible to the myth-making process by which history, popular culture, and the author of the persona of the genius—from Giotto to Frank Lloyd Wright—form the image of the genius as a singular and remarkable individual. If the genius is a person apart, then the child, too, must be extraordinary in certain ways. The process of literary genius-construction, whether autobiographical or third-party, must cast itself backwards in time when dealing with the childhood of its subject. Additionally, as even embryonic geniuses are unaware of their future, the actual facts of the genius's childhood are unlikely to lie within the realm of verifiable fact. Thus, the childhood of the genius is peculiarly malleable and may have cast upon it any vision, interpretation, or variation of the facts that suits the myth-making process. It appears, too, that there is a fundamental need for many artists to reclaim their own childhoods in an Oedipal gesture that denies the priority of the father. This is common enough that it is possible to identify persistent threads; for example, the apparent need of many artists to reinvent their parentage, manufacture new dates for their own births, or rename themselves. All of these acts wrest the seemingly inconsequential accidents of birth from the random machinations of history and subject them to autonomous control. The stories of artistic birth, infancy, childhood, and youth share these common threads but reflect the vicissitudes of history regarding their particular manifestations. The differences reflect historical notions regarding the origins of genius within different periods of time. The obvious place to begin is with birth; but even the simple fact of birth plays into the literary construction of the genius, often relying on a story of birth that is remarkable in some manner. Many great artists appear to have created for themselves, or have had others create for them, a noble parentage not in concordance with actual fact. For example, Michelangelo's contemporary biographer, Ascanio Condivi, concocted a noble ancestry for the artist (with his implicit consent), asserting that he “derived his origin from the Counts of Canossa” (Condivi 1). This disingenuous piece of information was happily perpetuated by Count Canossa himself, who acknowledged the famed artist as his relative much later in his life (Hughes 12–13). In the eighteenth century, Beethoven also indulged in a fantasy of royal lineage. Beginning in 1810 and circulating up until the end of his life, rumor had it that Beethoven was the illegitimate son of the King of Prussia. During his lifetime, Beethoven himself refused to discredit this imputation (Solomon 5).5 5. In a private letter written shortly before his death, the composer made this statement regarding his parentage: “You say that I have been mentioned somewhere as being the natural son of the late king of Prussia. Well, the same thing was said to me a long time ago. But I have adopted the principle of neither writing anything about myself nor replying to anything written about me” (Solomon 5). Beethoven gave permission in this letter for a refutation to be published; but then he failed to post the letter. The composer's deliberate silence on this point was nearly as good as—if not better than—a claim to nobility, and was happily adopted by both popular and scholarly circles of the time. Beethoven's complicity in the story allowed him a paternal lineage of his own creation, one that better suited his own claims to musical nobility and genius. In the democratic American Midwest, Wright could not claim kinship with counts or kings. Instead, he constructed a lineage for himself more subtly, but also with greater historical daring and ambition. One of the keys to the literary construction of Wright's childhood is the Marian imagery he applies to his mother Anna (and it is too delicious a coincidence for an historian not to observe that the Biblical Mary's mother was Saint Anne). Wright constructed his fantasy parentage through the employment of religious imagery and language. Dubbing his mother “Sister Anna” before his own appearance in the tale can bestow the title of “the mother” upon her, Wright endows her with an heroic status as a teacher who also communed with the Wisconsin countryside she roamed as part of her job. He tells us “Education was Sister Anna's passion … All this family was imbued with the idea of education as salvation … she believed Education the direct manifestation of God.” He describes how she knew intimately “the ferns, the flowers, by name, the animals that, startled, ran along the road.” As Wright put it, “This ‘league with the stones of the field’ must have given power to her imaginative vision” (An Autobiography 108). The quotation is from Job 5:23. Having created a character of a woman aligned with the Old Testament and possessed of a powerful connection to both god and nature (or “God” and “Nature,” in Wright's own orthography), Wright goes on to announce his own nativity, introducing himself before introducing his own father into the narrative: The boy of this story was her first child. Sister Anna came by him as the law prescribed—by marriage with a man who satisfied her ideal of “Education.” The highly inventive phraseology Wright employs to describe his appearance in this world—“Sister Anna came by him as the law prescribed”—removes his father from any genitive effect by putting it in the passive voice. Even more Biblical is the phrase “as the law prescribed,” which has the curiously opposite effect of suggesting that, like Joseph, William Wright may have been married to the baby's mother, but not necessarily technically involved in its procreation. Having set forth such a Marian persona for his mother, Wright goes on to give her prescience in the matter of his eventual role on earth as savior to modern architecture: No doubt his wife loved him no less but now loved something more, something created out of her own fervor of love and desire. A means to realize her vision. The boy, she said, was to build beautiful buildings. Faith in prenatal influences was strong in this prospective mother. She kept her thoughts on the high things for which she yearned and looked carefully after her health. There was never a doubt in the expectant mother's mind but that she was to have a boy. Fascinated by buildings, she took ten full-page wood engravings of the old English Cathedrals from Old England, a pictorial periodical to which the father had subscribed, had them framed simply in flat oak and hung upon the walls of the room that was to be her son's. Before he was born, she said she intended him to be an Architect. Even orthography is a servant to Wright's story: he was not merely to be an architect, but a capital-A“Architect.” As a place to begin any biography, the date of the subject's birth would seem to be an obvious and reliable point of departure. The birth stories of Michelangelo, Beethoven, and Wright share not only suggestions of noble or divine parentage, but also manipulations regarding the dates of their births that reallocate the act of creation from the human parents to the artists and their biographers. A deeply controlling and possessive personality like that of Michelangelo, for example, attempted to reclaim his own birth via the information passed on to biographers to whom he manifestly fed stories and information (Hughes 7). Although we now know that Michelangelo was born in 1475, his biographer Condivi assisted in the manufacture of the specifics of Michelangelo's birth, recording that he was born “in the year of our Lord 1474, on the sixth of March, at four o'clock in the morning, on a Monday” (Condivi 3). By bombarding the reader with the minutiae of the artist's birth, Condivi allows no room for uncertainty. If we know that Michelangelo's birth occurred on a Monday at four in the morning, then surely the author cannot be wrong about something so much more obvious as the year. Similarly, Beethoven fostered a deliberate obduracy regarding his own birth date. Termed by one of the foremost Beethoven scholars his “birth-year delusion,” the composer himself believed and perpetuated—despite ample proof to the contrary—that he was born in December 1772 rather than 1770.6 6. Even though close, trusted friends provided Beethoven with copies of his baptismal certificate, he apparently chose to believe that these documented the birth of his brother, also named Ludwig, who was born in 1769 and died six days after his birth: “To fix my age beyond doubt, this brother must first be found, inasmuch as I already know that in this respect a mistake has been made by others, and I have been said to be older than I am. Unfortunately I myself lived for a time without knowing my age” (Solomon 4). Beethoven's concoction of an alternate birth year, asserting that he was two years younger than he actually was, would not have made him a child prodigy like Mozart. He came into his own only as he hit thirty and beyond. Rather, Beethoven's invention of a birth year, like that of Frank Lloyd Wright, allows him to repossess his own nativity, wresting it from an unworthy and indeed abusive father and reclaiming the facts of his own birth for himself. The sense of inevitability that colors many of the biographies of influential artists is also adopted by Wright regarding his own birth and youth. As part of that self-creation, Wright, too, invented the facts of his birth. In An Autobiography, Wright is notably cavalier about specifics like dates and never in fact mentions the year of his own birth. Like Michelangelo, Wright had willing biographers to report on the facts of his birth instead. In Wright's case the source was (among others) his third wife Olgivanna who definitively declared in the prologue to her 1960 biography of her recently deceased husband, The Shining Brow: Frank Lloyd Wright: “June 8, 1869 will forever mark the beginning of a new epoch for the world.” Antiphonally, she repeats the date two times more, “On June 8, 1869 a great gift was bestowed upon America and the world.” And, finally: “June 8 marks the birth of Frank Lloyd Wright” (Wright, Shining Brow 15). Three times she intones the false birth date. Although in hindsight this appears to be a case of the lady protesting too much, nevertheless the repetition has its effect: it is almost, as it presumably was intended, Biblical, and rings sonorously like the tolling of a bell at a very portentous occasion. Unlike Michelangelo's falsified birth date, however, it would take no half millennium to uncover the truth; Wright's actual year of birth two years earlier in 1867 was uncovered within a decade of his death in 1959. Brendan Gill, author of the 1987 classic Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, was a biographer of Wright who combined his personal acquaintance with the architect with a discerning eye and a nose for truth. He reported in the early part of his book that he had asked Wright point-blank about the year of his birth: “he replied that he saw no reason to doubt his mother's recollection that the year was 1869—‘if she didn't know, who would?’—his jocular dismissal of the matter was, I have come to perceive, not nearly so offhand as he may have wished me to suppose it was” (Gill 23). Certainly Wright's mother must have known the year of her own son's birth, and she must therefore have given at least implicit consent to the deception. Gill points out, however, that Anna Lloyd-Jones Wright was in no position to throw stones on this score, having manufactured a birth date for herself that was three years to her benefit. As Gill remarked on Wright's little deception, “the motive may have been nothing more obscure than the conventional one of desiring to be thought younger than one is” (Gill 23). Certainly by making himself out to be slightly younger than he really was, Wright's early accomplishments seem all the more brilliant—but not by much. His first built design, the architecturally unremarkable Hillside Home School he built for his aunts in Spring Green, WI, dates to 1887. Wright was twenty but would have been in his inventive mathematics eighteen. Still, this was no historical or artistic breakthrough of epic proportions, and the innovations of the Prairie Style which were Wright's entrée to the history books began in 1901 and were the works of his mid-to-late thirties (much like Beethoven). Two years, in other words, makes little difference in the perception of his age regarding his accomplishments. Like Beethoven, Wright was no Mozart-style child prodigy—but then, there really is no such thing as a child-prodigy architect; children who may harmlessly enough compose music or paint are not given the opportunity to build great buildings. For all the myths Wright erected about his childhood, the child prodigy was not one he cultivated. Instead, the childhood he creates is more a literary construction which puts into place some of the mythological-style stories that foretell his future greatness and which allow him to lay claim to the status of “genius.” If the facts of birth are malleable, so, too, is the name of the artist, especially in the twentieth century. The act of self-naming seems to enjoy a particular popularity among twentieth-century artists, a number of whom come quickly to mind. Picasso (1881–1973), for example, is a near contemporary of Wright with a similar mythology of his childhood and a strong example of self-naming. As was Spanish custom, Picasso's given last name was “Ruiz y Picasso,” but in every signatory act of his painterly career, the artist chose to drop his father's surname, Ruiz, in favor of his mother's family's name, Picasso. Ruiz was as common a surname as Picasso was an unusual one, and most historians have interpreted this choice as indicative of a strong relation to the female members of the Ruiz household; but it also signals a deliberate act of creative self-control (Daix 3–9). As much antipathy as Wright famously felt toward his European contemporaries, the other figure who inevitably comes to mind when discussing architects and acts of self-naming is Le Corbusier. Even more than Wright or Picasso, Le Corbusier generated an act of public naming that would make even a mononymous twenty-first-century pop-star proud. Le Corbusier (1887–1965) was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in rural French-speaking Switzerland but moved to Paris in 1916, and in 1920 at the age of 33 adopted his new appellation. “Le Corbusier” was a slight variation on the architect's maternal grandfather's name “Lecorbésier.” The usual interpretation of the name is to suggest that it translates as “the crow-like one” because le corbeau is raven in French. Although Le Corbusier was possessed of an admittedly sharp profile, the change of name is perhaps even more resonant with the themes of self-fashioning and paternal rejection common to great artists. Like Picasso, the association is with the maternal side of the family and therefore an autogenetic reclamation of his own parentage. It may also be that, like Wright's insistence on the use of the to describe his childhood character in An Autobiography, the choice of a name with the definitive article le (“the”) before it suggests singularity and universality—as does the choice of a single-word name, which suggests celebrity and universal recognition (“Cher,”“Madonna,” and “the President” come to mind). Le Corbusier and Picasso share their preference for the maternal clan's name with Wright. Wright did not, like Le Corbusier, completely rename himself, nor even, like Picasso, actually drop his father's surname, but he did participate in an act of self-naming. Wright was actually born “Frank Lincoln Wright” and changed his given middle name from “Lincoln” to “Lloyd,” his mother's
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