|
|
 |
|
|
Frank Lloyd Wright's Japanese Legacy
Jon Burbank
|
Facade of Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel, Meiji Mura,
near
Nagoya, Japan. (Manuel Anastacio)
Click image to enlarge.
A hundred years ago the ship “Empress of China” steamed across the Pacific from America to Japan. Among its passengers was an architectural genius, an art dealer known to overvalue his portfolio, a father of six, a repeatedly vilified adulterer, a haughty self-promoter, a discerning connoisseur, and a fashion dandy with enough vanity to fill the ocean the “Empress” sailed over.
Given the hundreds of passengers the ship carried that may not seem surprising, but all of these personalities were squeezed into just one passenger.
Frank Lloyd Wright strode out of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth like an American Colossus. It’s a portrayal he would think fair to make. Testifying as a witness in a court case, Wright was asked to identify himself. He stated he was the world’s greatest architect. When asked how he could make such an astonishing statement, Wright responded since he was under oath, he had no choice.
Many of his works are gone now, but those that remain are still icons of American architecture, including his home at Falling Water, Pennsylvania; New York’s Guggenheim Museum; and the Robie House in Chicago.
A largely unknown side of Wright emerged on this trip: He developed into one of America’s foremost ukiyo-e woodblock print collectors and dealers. Today, prints Wright collected are prominent in America’s best art museums’ Japanese collections. He also probably did more than anyone else to foster an appreciation of Japanese prints in America.
Of course, Wright studied Japanese architecture on his trip. Later he acknowledged the importance of Japanese architecture to his own work, but he also paid homage to the great print makers of Edo-era Japan as his architectural mentors:
“The print is more autobiographical than you can imagine. If Japanese prints were to be deducted from my education, I don’t know what direction the whole might have taken.”
The sale of ukiyo-e prints also saved him financially throughout his life. Julia Meech, in her book "Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan,” estimates Wright made well over $200,000 from the sale of prints by the 1930s. His fee for Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel was about $17,000. Wright’s life work may have been architecture, but dealing Japanese prints paid Wright’s bills.
What few bills he had, he deigned to pay. Wright never understood why he should have to pay for his hand-tailored clothes, his frequent studio remodeling, his beloved prints, or his lavish dinner parties; after all, he was Frank Lloyd Wright.
How could a boy born in rural Wisconsin in 1867 become an expert print collector, let alone a world famous architect? Wright seized the threads that chance and fate laid before him and then followed them like a modern-day Theseus through the maze, to a life many would envy, although few of us would want for our own.
In 1871, as the infant Wright was already constructing with colored blocks, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern, starting the Great Chicago Fire that destroyed the city. When young draughtsman Wright arrived in 1887, Chicago was the booming de facto capitol of America’s west. Chicago needed to rebuild and had the money to do it. The city was a “perfect storm” of architectural thought and development.
On his fourth day looking for work, surviving (he claimed) on ten cents worth of bananas, Wright found work in the office of Joseph Lyman Silsbee, one of Chicago’s most respected architects. In a contemporary photo of Silsbee’s living room a "kakemono” painting hangs by the hearth. This may have been Wright’s first exposure to Japanese art.
Even more fateful, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, America’s foremost expert on Japanese art, decorated by the Emperor Meiji himself, was Silsbee’s cousin. Fenollosa stayed with Silsbee on trips home. At some point Wright met Fenollosa, later recalling:
“When I first saw a fine print it was an intoxicating thing. At that time Ernest Fenollosa was doing his best to persuade the Japanese people not to wantonly destroy their works of art…. On one of his journeys home he brought many beautiful prints, those I made mine were the narrow tall decorative form hashirakake--these I appreciate today more than I did then.”
Those “hashirakake” turned Wright’s thoughts eastward forever. “The first prints had a large share I am sure in vulgarizing the Renaissance for me.”
Wright soaked up Fenellosa’s lectures on Japanese art and architecture: harmony with nature, simplification, honest use of materials, and minimal decoration. Wright wrote on Japanese houses, “…all ‘ornament’, as we call it, they get out of the way the necessary things are done or by bringing out or polishing the beauty of the simple materials used in making the building.”
In 1893 Chicago hosted the World Columbian Exposition celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage. Chicago’s architects built a gleaming “White City” of Beaux Arts pavilions; pseudo-classical “temples,” all columns and wedding cake molding. Wright was not impressed: “The fair soon appeared to me more than ever tragic travesty….”
In stark contrast Japan sent a group of Japanese carpenters who constructed the Ho-o-den, a replica of Kyoto’s 1053 Ho-o-do of the Byodo-in. Wright greatly admired it.
Daniel Burham, of the architectural firm Burham and Root and one of Chicago’s most prominent architects, recognized Wright’s potential. “Uncle Dan,” as Burham was known, offered to pay for Wright’s study in Europe, the “grand tour” all aspiring architects felt necessary. Wright turned him down and used his own money to travel to Japan instead.
Wright was remarkably quiet about his three months in Japan. We know he stayed April 23,1905 at the famous Kanaya Hotel in Nikko and two days later checked into Hakone’s Fujiya Hotel. He also visited Shikoku, Nagoya and Kyoto. Wright declared the Shugakuin, a seventeenth-century imperial stroll garden in north Kyoto, as the world’s greatest work of art. “All that was like an open book to me,” he recalled of the garden’s design, “and I knew how to read it. I could read every word in it…. It was a great educational experience.”
When Wright sailed back to America he took back a head full of architectural ideas and boxes (and more boxes) of woodblock prints, several hundred by the artist Hiroshige alone.
In 1914 tragedy devastated Wright’s blossoming professional and personal life. As he worked on a project site in Chicago, one of the servants at his Taliesin country estate calmly served lunch to Wright’s live-in mistress Mamah and her two children on the porch. He then went inside, lit a gasoline fire, and then took an axe and bludgeoned Mamah and the children to death. Wright rushed to the scene to find perhaps the greatest love of his life dead and his beloved home reduced to blackened ashes.
A downward spiral followed that nearly ruined him. His commissions dried up. He started a self-destructive relationship with Miriam Noel, a sometime sculptor who dressed “artistically,” smoked, and used a monocle. Her passion for the arts and her intellect enchanted Wright. Miriam also took drugs and was emotionally unstable: like a flapper-era version of Glen Close in “Fatal Attraction.” For a time their passion carried them, but soon they were trading bitter accusations of selfishness and infidelity.
“What saved him,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable in her Wright biography, “was the commission for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.”
In Wright’s version an Imperial delegation traveling the world sought him out and hired him instantly. But as Huxtable writes, “In the life he constructed for himself, vanity and verities merge.” The truth is he tried long and hard to get the commission and used recommendations by print dealing friends to do it.
The commission became official in 1916. Wright came to Tokyo in 1917 with Miriam. Until 1922 Wright basically lived in Tokyo, with occasional trips home
|
Wright cherished the ukiyo-e prints, such as this beautiful
woodcut by Hiroshige, Suruga, Satta no Kaijo (The Sea
Off Satta, Suruga), 1859. (Library of Congress)
Click image to enlarge.
He stayed at an annex of the old Imperial Hotel. Tokyo was rushing into the future as quick as it could. There were electric wires, trolley lines, motorcars, and people trying to look “modern” everywhere.
Wright still saw a ukiyo-e Tokyo, “Wide, bare-earth streets swarming with humanity…shuttered sedan chairs, scarlet and gold…shops crammed with curious and brilliant merchandise…red paper lanterns on bamboo poles, little cages of fireflies…moon-lanterns glowing under spreading pine trees, geisha…undulating noiselessly….it all looks…just like the prints!”
The critic Arthur Drexler wrote Wright had “the capacity to nourish inspiration with hard work.” Wright’s main concern was what he called the “terror of the temblor.” The problem was the foundation: the site was essentially a sea of mud. The standard solution, driving piles deep in the mud, would only amplify an earthquake’s effect.
He (and his engineer Paul Mueller) formulated the idea of floating the various hotel sections on a series of independent pads. Wright used tapered walls to keep the center of gravity low and a large reflecting pond to provide water to fight fires. The main building materials, brick and “oya” (lava stone), gave it a weighty appearance. Wright called it a battleship. It didn’t look Japanese, but it didn’t look out of place.
Rumors swirled throughout the protracted construction. The overseeing government committee pulled their hair and withheld payments over the long delays. Wright said he made his choice at an early age between “hypocritical humility and honest arrogance.” He bullied aside their concerns and did as he wanted. He finally felt confident to go home in 1922.
On September 1, 1923 the Great Kanto Earthquake struck Tokyo, killing 100,000 and destroying the city. A Chicago newspaper based on an early incomplete report proclaimed Wright’s hotel a failure. It was several days before Wright received his famous telegram from the building committee’s chairman, “hotel stands undamaged as a monument to your genius.” The floating foundations worked. The water pond even saved the hotel from subsequent fires.
The Imperial Hotel’s success rejuvenated Wright’s sagging career. The building commissions that followed secured his place in American architecture. He freed himself of Miriam and married his third and last wife, Olgivanna.
Money troubles followed him all his life, and he relied on his prints to save him. He took loans from wealthy clients, gave them prints as collateral, then cajoled them to sell the prints to their friends and give him the profits. A typical telegram reads, “Can anything be done with the prints. If not would you be willing to lend me half their value for six months.”
But the prints never became just investments to Wright. Curtis Besinger, a Wright student in the 1940s, remembered dinners Wright held: “After the meal…Wright ‘talked’ about the [ukiyo-e] prints…It seems to me that what he talked about were ‘ideas’ or principles that he saw at work in the prints and which he used as the basis for his work. And also, somewhat more nebulous and difficult to explain, were certain ‘experiences’ that one had from viewing a print which he attempted to translate into three (or four?) dimensional experience in architecture.”
Wright never traveled to Japan again. He always kept his beloved prints close by. He traveled the country lecturing on them even as he continued his architectural practice. When he died in 1959 he had about 6,000 prints in his personal collection.
It’s the rare person who leaves behind one valuable legacy after passing away. Wright left two. His ideas on architecture still carry weight; his buildings are still studied and admired. And in museums across America, after admiring that beautiful ukiyo-e print, look below the title. There’s a good chance a note will mention it came via the collection of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Jon Burbank is a freelance photojournalist based in Chiba-
Ken,
Japan.
|
|
|
|
|
