BOOKS TOWERING INFERNO
By Greg Goldin
LA Weekly, CA
Wednesday, September 13, 2006 – 12:00 pm
Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship
Illustration by Mitch Handsone On the last page of The Fellowship:
The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship, we
are told that without the Greco-Armenian mystic Georgi Gurdjieff, there
"very likely" would have been no Fallingwater, no Johnson Wax building,
no Guggenheim Museum. This claim is bold, and something new. Frank
Lloyd Wright was many things – unkind and uncaring toward his children,
violent and abusive of his wives, relentlessly egotistical among
his peers and apprentices, profligate and exploitative – but he was
no stooge.
The teachings of an occultist who happened to be his third wife’s guru
had as little to do with the 20th-century icons he produced as they
had to do with his own, homegrown monomania. Despite page after page of
attempts to link America’s greatest architect to the Montenegro-born,
self-proclaimed healer, it becomes obvious that Wright wasn’t taken
in by the muddle of Buddhism and Sufism that Gurdjieff promoted at
his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, in Paris.
Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman, the authors of this long,
ramshackle discourse on the seamy side of Frank Lloyd Wright
and his Taliesin Fellowship, themselves provide sufficient proof
to contradict their own final assertion. In 1950, Wright’s wife,
Olgivanna, and their daughter, Iovanna, urged all the apprentices at
Taliesin to read Gurdjieff’s All and Everything. The architect, ever
imperious, "countered by buying an entire carton of his own American
philosopher-sage Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings and giving them out to
the apprentices." He then declared that Emerson would be "obligatory"
reading at the Fellowship. How refreshing, and a fitting anodyne –
except that this recital of Wright’s clearheadedness is colored black
by the authors’ equation of Emerson’s followers to Gurdjieff’s. Which
is a sneaky way of bolstering their point: Frank Lloyd Wright was
under the sway… of someone.
Alas, the authors are stuck in a trap of their own making. The
Fellowship is an intriguing slog because it is about a genuinely
fascinating cult figure: Frank Lloyd Wright. Dozens of his apprentices
traipse through the book, forming lifelong devotions to Wright –
devotions that he almost never reciprocates. Why did they become
and remain his partisans, his boys, as he called them? Why did they
sacrifice their own talent and happiness to slave away in Wright’s
studio, their ambitions stunted, their ideas crushed? Why did they
literally wait on him, hand and foot, as cooks and carpenters,
chauffeurs and secretaries – paying him tuition for the privilege?
His son, Lloyd, a talented architect, wrote to his father, saying
that the fellowship "is in fact and principle a very sorry business
all around. And the sorriest part of it is the feudal business of
your students. That will make them ashamed of themselves and you if
they think and have any perspective and if they don’t they will go
thru life… as cowards and fools. God help your school if this is
what it turns out. You wonder why your pupils are such washouts."
Every word of this assessment is true, yet Wright carried on
unscathed. "He lived from first to last like a god: one who acts but
is not acted upon," Lewis Mumford said, and he too was right.
Mumford, who was Wright’s early champion and oftentimes friend (he
persuaded Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock to include Wright
in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal 1932 exhibit, "The International
Style"), said he possessed "the insolence of his genius." Like it
or not – and he was more than occasionally unlikable – Frank Lloyd
Wright was one of those protean 19th-century figures able to tower over
the 20th century. Goethe’s model of the self-taught man who remakes
the world reverberated continuously in Wright’s mind. Beethoven’s
symphonies rang in his ears as he drew his buildings. Ruskin’s sense
of beauty limned his own. Wright was also a born huckster, in a line
of great American con artists stretching from Benjamin Franklin to
Mark Twain. He shared their uncanny instinct for deception, for making
up a persona who was strictly for public consumption.
The early tragedy of his life (his second wife and two of her
children were axed to death after a servant set Taliesin aflame),
his philandering, his illicit and bohemian lifestyle, were tabloid
news. But these events were, for the most part, a sideshow.
Architecture was the center of Wright’s life, and little else troubled
or distracted him. Perhaps this is one of the marks of genius. Another
is the ability to see your vision realized. Frank Lloyd Wright never
backed down, never acceded to a client’s wishes. He was an absolutist,
with unshakable faith in his designs. That was, arguably, his greatest
gift, and he made it manifest any number of times in the face of
powerful opposition.
So, at Fallingwater, he was warned against cantilevering the house
over the rocks at Bear Run.
More concrete, more steel, the engineers said. Wright persisted,
persuading his client, Edgar Kaufmann Sr., to build Wright’s house
Wright’s way. Fallingwater, of course, is an acknowledged (if
crumbling) masterpiece; the second half of Wright’s career, which
began after 20 years without a paying client, was launched from that
precarious work out in the woods of southwestern Pennsylvania. At
the Johnson Wax building, Wright was told by Racine officials that
his inverted, cone-shaped columns would collapse, but he got his way
by building a demonstration column and piling it high with sandbags
and rocks far outweighing the proposed load, then, cane in hand,
walking under the perilously overburdened column as if on a Sunday
stroll. At the Guggenheim, he stuck to his unprecedented spiral, which
pushed the limits of both conventional museum walls and concrete work,
waiting nearly 13 years for the museum to begin construction.
For such a man, and such accomplishments, there would always be a
steady supply of aspiring acolytes. Once at Taliesin, apprentices were
subject to Wright’s all-encompassing will. Unflinchingly, he would
tell you how to dress or whom to marry. He would mete out favors;
he would instigate punishments. He was the master. To live in a
world of one great man’s conception, apart from the confusion and
ambiguity of the outside, was like a gift. To some, the confinement
was liberating. Others simply fled.
In such a place, though, there could be no room for a competitor
hawking self-abnegation as a form of personal fulfillment. Frank Lloyd
Wright called Gurdjieff "the Devil and the God," and he was abundantly
clear when he told his wife, "You’re not going to turn this into a
Gurdjieff Institute. Not while I am alive." Olgivanna had to wait
until he died, and even then, The Fellowship says, she failed.
Taliesin is forever associated with Wright. Gurdjieff remains on the
margins, where he belongs.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
