Building Taliesin

by Ron McCrea

  DAMAGE CONTROL

  As the year 1912 opened, the Chicago reporters had gone home, but Wright still had to deal with relatives, parents of Hillside students, and some peevish clients.

  The week after New Year’s Day, Wright gave the Dodgeville Chronicle a written statement that said in part, “It is perhaps only fair to my relatives to say that they are in no way implicated in my situation here. Their countenance or support has neither been given nor sought.”20 That was not entirely true. He had sought editorial support from his cousin Richard Lloyd Jones, the editor and publisher of the Wisconsin State Journal.

  Richard refused, saying, “I can’t run any story in my paper.” He told Wright he did not make any public comment “until I found that the reporters were preparing to interpret your presence here on the basis that you went among your own relatives who would harbor you and befriend you and lend you society at a time when you were isolated from society generally by virtue of your experiment.”

  Fig. 111. Frank Lloyd Wright stands at his drafting table in his studio in 1947 in a photo by Pedro Guerrero. The model behind him is the 26-story skyscraper he designed in 1912 for the San Francisco Call. It was never built, but Wright always kept the model in view.

  At that point, “with the advice of my father, I published a paragraph saying the family was not harboring you in this experiment and that it was not approving of your actions at this time and in that place. I felt it was only just to the Hillside School that its patrons should be reassured in this manner.”21

  One account, which referred to Wright’s home as “the Crazy House bungalow,” reported Richard as saying that “while Mr. Wright had become a member of the family through marriage, the members of the family do not now recognize him as such.”22

  Wright seethed about this. In a letter to clients Francis and Mary Little, he said, “The animosity of current morality hisses like a snake in my ears. The ‘Jones conscience’ of which I once stood in awe manifests itself chiefly as fear.”23

  The fear was not entirely unfounded. One father of a 10-year-old boy at the school, A. Cole, owner of Cole Manufacturing Co. in Chicago, a maker of industrial blast ovens, warned Wright: “I am writing Aunt Nell today that unless you can be persuaded to move from Hillside or vicinity at once I will have to take my son out of school. I have talked with others who have children there and I am sure that the parents of all the children there feel exactly as I do about the matter.”

  Cole said he feared that “the example you are setting to the pupils of the Hillside School will begin to bear fruit when the children the age of my boy are ten or twelve years older.”24

  FAMILY COURT

  There were reports that the Lloyd Joneses were gathering to sit in judgment on Wright. The Waukesha Freeman reported, “The Wright-Cheney ‘spiritual hegira’ is to be passed on by as bizarre a tribunal as ever was drawn together to further the ends of justice. Frank Lloyd Wright is to be ‘tried’ by a court composed of his own relatives.”25

  But if such a family council ever convened, it lacked one key member: Anna Lloyd Jones Wright. Wright’s mother held the deed to Taliesin and could have called the sheriff to demand that he evict her son. Anna said nothing and did nothing.

  “[Mamah Borthwick] has her remunerative work as I have. She is quite able to supply her own needs—and we work together.”

  Frank Lloyd Wright to Francis and Mary Little, 1912

  In the end, Wright’s only concession was to issue a notarized letter for his aunts to distribute. “To check certain mischievous statements intended to injure the Lloyd Jones Sisters’ Home School by involving them with me and my situation here in some way, I wish to once more and finally force upon public attention the fact that my aunts are in no way connected with me socially or financially,” he said.

  “They are guided now as they have been in the past by their own ideas of right and wrong and depending on their own financial resources for any move they make. It is unfair to them to connect my residence in this county with them or with their school in the slightest degree.

  “I am not even a neighbor. There could be no less intercourse between us were I in another world, and so far as any intention or expectation on my part or theirs is concerned, they will remain so.”26

  Some parents might have been placated by this statement (though it was obvious to anyone who visited the school that Taliesin was a neighbor) but the numbers suggest that Hillside did suffer losses. The graduating classes of 1908, 1909, 1910, and 1911 had between 10 and 13 students. In 1912 the number dropped to 5 and stayed there.27

  SAVING THE NORTHOME COMMISSION

  If Wright was cavalier with his aunts, he also was unrepentant when he replied to Francis and Mary Little. “I am only sorry that when they [the newspapers] were through I had seemed to apologize and complain whereas I did neither,” he said.

  Wright changed his tone, however, when it came to salvaging his commission to build Northome, the Littles’ long-delayed summer home on Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota. Wright had designed a house for them in Peoria in 1902 and had borrowed $9,000 from them to go to Europe and purchase the press run of the Wasmuth Portfolio. Now his old admirers were calling him “a selfish piece” and demanding that he “wake up.”28

  Wright begged the Littles to believe that their money would help his Oak Park family. “Of course all I have and may earn is theirs still and will continue to be and there is no real happiness for me unless I can help them,” he said. Mamah Borthwick “has her remunerative work as I have. She is quite able to supply her own needs—and we work together.”

  “I love the woman who has cast her lot with me here not wisely but too well,” he admitted, but added in a postscript, “The phaeton awaits mother’s advent—this is her home as well as mine and she is expected soon.”29

  Wright’s tap-dance worked. The Littles allowed Wright to proceed with Northome. Wright had begun the design work before he left for Europe in 1909, and this large residence is one of the final great examples of his high Prairie style. Mary Little was an accomplished pianist who had studied with Franz Liszt and wanted to hold recitals, so the living room ceilings are unusually high and the room itself is unusually large.

  Northome was completed in 1914. When the house was demolished in 1972 the living room was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and later installed in its American Wing.30

  PUBLISHING

  Wright and Borthwick churned out books during their years together. He published three and she published four, plus an eight-page article. He was closely involved in her work, collaborating as a co-translator, content adviser, literary agent, and financial underwriter.

  While Borthwick’s first translations of Ellen Key were being published in Chicago in 1911 and 1912, Wright was pursuing subscriptions for the English version of the Wasmuth Portfolio and its companion photo book, the Sonderheft.

  “I am to own this work outright,” he told Charles Ashbee, “& have bought it because I believe it will be profitable and there is no cleaner way for an architect to find his money than in the sale of his own works in this way.”31

  On the title page of Taylor Woolley’s personal copy of the portfolio, Wright wrote, “To patient, long-suffering ‘Wooley,’ [sic] with grateful appreciation of his devotion to this work—and a hope.”32 He hoped that together they would sell a lot of books. Woolley was in California taking orders for the volumes when Wright summoned him to Taliesin in the fall of 1911. In a letter to Woolley sent on April 22 of that year, he gave him lengthy instructions.

  “Libraries, building contractors, and private persons with money and interest in building” would be easier to sell than architects, he counseled. Lesser architects would be better than important ones, because “the more important ones feel compromised to have the work of a living contemporary in their libraries,” Wright said, adding wryly, “I can’t die to further sales.”33

  The best markets would be in the South and West, he advised. “All pu
blic libraries in all small towns in America should be taught the value of a copy. It will have a more cultured effect than anything else on the shelves.”

  Fig. 112. Wright published The Japanese Print in Chicago on rice paper in a fine edition in 1912.

  The volumes were to be carried in specially made cases and “presented in spic and span condition.” Sales on credit were approved for “young fellows” because Wright wanted them especially to have it. Woolley would receive $15 per volume (the price was $50) and handle collections. Wright would handle delivery.

  Wright closed with a pep talk, saying he was confident Woolley could succeed even though it might be discouraging at first. “Everything of the kind needs pushing and perseverance—and a method of getting at and presenting the thing which has to come with experience,” he said.

  CAPTIVATING EUROPE

  In Europe, the big, two-volume edition of Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright, with 100 plates of Wright’s best early work, was selling itself. “The leader of what was an essentially provincial movement completely outflanked the conservatives of New York and the East and gained almost instant European endorsement,” says architectural historian Alisdair McGregor.

  “A young Le Corbusier acquired a copy, and the atelier of Peter Behrens in Berlin is said to have downed tools for an entire day when their copy arrived. (Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe were both apprenticed to Behrens at the time.) Wright’s work had previously been known outside the United States only from magazine articles such as the 1908 Architectural Record. The portfolio would now form a focus of study for the architects of the Bauhaus in Germany and the De Stijl movement in Holland. The young Austrian modernists Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler were lured to the United States in part because of the portfolio’s impact.”34

  THE JAPANESE PRINT

  In 1912 Wright published The Japanese Print: An Interpretation, printed in Chicago by Ralph Fletcher Seymour, his friend in the Fine Arts Building. It was produced on rice paper and contained reproductions of prints from his own collection. Wright was so particular about quality that he had an unsatisfactory first printing destroyed.

  Fig. 113. Japanese men pose with a Wisconsin farm boy, John Davies, at Taliesin in the summer of 1918. At right is Arata Endo, Frank Lloyd Wright’s principal Japanese assistant architect in building the Imperial Hotel. The man at left, wearing an apron and holding a cooking spoon, may be Satsu, the house servant who traveled with Wright and Mamah Borthwick to Japan in 1913 but was detained upon return.

  Many consider Wright’s essay on the Japanese print to be the most important statement of his artistic philosophy. He praises the Japanese artist’s ability to evoke the “spell-power” of underlying geometric forms in every woodblock print, to get to the essentials. “The first and supreme principle of Japanese aesthetics consists in stringent simplification by elimination of the insignificant and a consequent emphasis on reality,”35 he says.

  Wright’s current struggles with prevailing sexual mores bubble up in The Japanese Print. He notes that many prints depict scenes from the Yoshiwara, the pleasure district of old Edo, the name for Tokyo before the modern era. These ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the Floating World,” feature kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers, samurai, and courtesans, including that rarefied figure, the geisha. She is depicted “with an innocence incomprehensible to us,” Wright says, “for Japan at that time—although the family was the unit of her civilization—had not made monopoly of the sex relation the shameless essence of this institution.”36

  DEALING IN ASIAN ART

  When Wright returned from his first visit to Japan in 1905 with Catherine, he assembled his treasures and in 1906 put on a precedent-setting show of Hiroshige prints at the Art Institute of Chicago. “They were the first ukiyo-e to be shown at that museum and, more remarkably, the world’s first Hiroshige retrospective,” notes Julia Meech, the authority on Wright and Japanese art.37 In 1908 he put on an even bigger show.

  Now, at Taliesin, he elevated his passion to a second profession. The years 1912 and 1913 saw Wright rise to become a world-class dealer in Japanese art. This new trade surpassed his architecture “in terms of both the attention he devoted to it and the financial gain,” Meech says.38

  Fig. 114. Arata Endo stands with John Davies in the Taliesin courtyard in 1918. Wright and his staff worked on plans during the summer and returned to Japan in the fall to begin building the Imperial Hotel. These photographs were discovered in a farm family album; the Davies family provided household help at Taliesin.

  In architecture Wright was at a disadvantage, being a solo practitioner and positioning himself as an outsider. But in the world of Japanese print collecting and dealing, “he was very much in the mainstream, a man of his times. He was limited by only his pocketbook, and sometimes not even that,” Meech says. “His U.S. clients included all of the big names in the print world.” These were “the golden years of print collecting in the United States, and the prints played a pivotal role in introducing Japanese art to the West.”39

  TRIP TO “THE FLOWERY KINGDOM”

  In the summer of 1912 Wright was introduced to two key patrons, the Spaulding brothers of Boston, by his fellow collector Frederick Gookin of Chicago. (He was not an uncritical friend. “Wright would have been shocked to know that the straitlaced Gookin secretly wanted him to be tarred and feathered by the philistines in Spring Green for his adulterous behavior with Borthwick. ‘It would be about the best thing that could happen to him,’” Gookin had told his wife.40)

  Fig. 115. The Avery Coonley Playhouse was commissioned by Queene Ferry Coonley and her husband in 1911. The progressive school is on the grounds of the Coonley estate in Riverside, Illinois. William Drummond later built a house nearby to house teachers. The three famous windows can be seen in the center.

  Fig. 116. The “kindersymphony” stained glass windows in primary colors march in a parade around the main classroom of the Coonley Playhouse. The motifs include balloons, flags, and confetti. The triptych is Wright’s most famous decorative design. Children were grouped at tables. Wright designed the furniture, which was built by George Niedecken of Milwaukee.

  Impressed by Wright, William and John Spaulding bankrolled him for a major collecting trip to the “Flowery Kingdom” of Japan, as the Dodgeville Chronicle quaintly termed it. Wright and Borthwick left Taliesin on January 12, 1913, but missed the boat in Seattle on January 15. They sailed for Yokohama two weeks later.41 The Chronicle said they had with them a Japanese servant named Satsu. He may be the person Borthwick mentions in a letter to Key in July: “I had just returned from Japan when your card came and as our Japanese servant was delayed I have been my own cook since then.”42

  They returned in late spring, and in July, while Mamah was cooking for herself, Wright spent three days with the Spauldings in Boston viewing 1,400 prints he had purchased for them. In the 1943 edition of his autobiography, he added a colorful account of his hero’s welcome by the brothers.43 The Spaulding prints would form the core of major collections at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Wright’s own collections, which he continued to build during his years in Japan, would find their way into museums across the country.

  Fig. 117. A stage and fireplace can be seen at the far end of the classroom. Wings on either side contain a kitchen and a craft workshop.

  ARCHITECTURE

  Wright was correct when he told the Chicago Tribune interviewer that the scandal over Mamah Borthwick might cost him work. Robert C. Twombly notes that in his three years at Taliesin with Borthwick, Wright “saw only seven designs reach completion for paying customers.”44

  Wright also was correct when he predicted that people would not want him designing their homes. From 1900 to 1910, two-thirds of his work had been resi dential. From 1910 to 1914, it was less than half. “By 1914 Wright was as much as commercial as a domestic architect,” Twombly says.45

  Fig. 118. A clerestory window from t
he Coonley Playhouse shows one of several patterns Wright used of balloons, confetti, and an American flag. Solid, bright colors and simple geometric forms were something new for Wright after he returned from Europe.

  But it was great commercial architecture. Wright was aiming high. One of his personal favorites from 1912 was a skyscraper—a 26-story tower designed for the San Francisco Call that included communal living quarters for journalists on the top floor. It was never built, but Wright kept the model in his studio.

  PRIMARY COLORS: THE COONLEY PLAYHOUSE

  Queene Ferry Coonley and Avery Coonley were wealthy Chicagoans. She was the daughter of the owner of the Ferry Seed Co. He also had inherited wealth. But they were unconventional people. Their daughter, Elizabeth Coonley Faulker, tells of her mother coming home from a lecture on the animal cruelty at the Chicago stockyards.

  “She said, ‘Avery, if you heard the lecture that I heard today, you’d feel just as I do. I just feel that I can never eat meat again. I think we should look into vegetarianism.’

  “My father sighed and said, ‘My Dear, we’re Christian Scientists and women suffragists, you run a progressive school and we live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Let’s not look into vegetarianism.’”46

  In one of the few studies ever done of what made a Wright client tick, Leonard K. Eaton compared two Coonleys, Avery and his younger brother Prentiss. Both had a Rolls-Royce radical as their mother, Lydia avery Coonley Ward, who knew Booker T. Washington and at whose funeral Jane Addams spoke. But when it came time for them to build houses in suburban Chicago in 1908, Prentiss hired establishment architect Howard Van Doren Shaw to build a traditional Georgian mansion in Lake Forest, while Avery hired Wright to build an unorthodox Prairie-style mansion in Riverside, a new suburb on the Des Plaines River designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and landscaped by Jens Jensen.