“Frank Lloyd Wright and the Fine Arts”

AboutEdgar Kaufmann, Jr., a close personal acquaintance of Frank Lloyd Wright and son of the client for Fallingwater, surveys Wright's lifelong, often contradictory engagement with painting and sculpture despite his public denunciations of modern art, arguing that Wright's late-life campaign to build the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was not an attempt to subordinate the fine arts to architecture but the culmination of a genuine, Emerson-rooted belief in the integration of the arts. Kaufmann traces this sensibility to the Anglo-American Arts and Crafts tradition of Emerson, Ruskin, and Morris absorbed during Wright's Wisconsin upbringing, and follows its development through Wright's apprenticeship under Louis Sullivan at Adler & Sullivan—where the Auditorium Building's rich figural ornament and murals set an early model—into Wright's own house and studio, where sculptor Richard Bock and painter Hermon Atkins MacNeil supplied statuary and murals. The essay documents Wright's collaborations with Bock across the Larkin Building, Heller House, and other early houses, his friendship with English Arts and Crafts figure C. R. Ashbee, and his increasingly self-authored abstract glass and relief ornament culminating in the Coonley Playhouse windows, Midway Gardens murals, and the Imperial Hotel's ballroom decoration. Kaufmann describes Wright's turn toward Japanese and East Asian art (including the tokonoma display niche) as a more satisfying substitute for Western fine art collaboration, and closes with personal recollections of Wright's visits to Fallingwater, where he continued to actively curate the placement of modern sculpture despite his rhetorical hostility to it.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0079-0958%281963%298%3C37%3AFLWATF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V