I weighed in
recently on the Great Frank Lloyd Wright Cyberspace Imbroglio, prompting this crisp response from the normally thoughtful City Comforts:
Teachout repeats the conventional thinking that FLW was a “genius” but then gets on to the interesting stuff: anecdotes about FLW’s personality….my preference is that we would leave the poor tortured man alone and in peace and simply consider the merits or demerits of his work without the use of conclusory terms such as “genius.”
Ah, yes, as opposed to inconclusory terms like “poor tortured man,” right? I fear this isn’t quite good enough (aside from being the least little bit snippy). For openers, it isn’t merely “conventional thinking” that Frank Lloyd Wright was a genius–it is a long-standing and near-universal manifestation of the consensus of taste. And when I call Wright a “genius” in a very short posting, it’s a piece of shorthand intended to suggest my own considered view of the merits and demerits of his work.
Much of the recent wrangling has centered on Fallingwater, the Wright-designed Pennsylvania home whose roof leaks and whose unusual design required substantial ex post facto structural work in order to keep it from fallingdown. Of course I don’t know what it would feel like to live there, but Fallingwater–as well as many of the other Wright houses I’ve seen and in some cases toured–seems to me both remarkably and self-evidently beautiful. This says nothing about the no less self-evident structural unsoundness of the house’s design and original construction, but I don’t really think that’s relevant to the issue of its beauty. Is a great painting less great because it makes use of innovative but chemically unstable pigments that change over time?
As for the leaky roof, well, I think I’d be willing to put out the occasional bucket in return for the privilege of spending my days and nights in a house that looked like this. I know, I know, that’s a matter of opinion, but I dare say my opinion of Fallingwater is far more widely shared than that of Wright’s detractors, and not just by art critics, either.
On the other hand (there’s usually another hand, isn’t there?), I was sorely disappointed by “From Picasso to Pollock: Classics of Modern Art,” the Guggenheim Museum’s ongoing exhibit of works from its permanent collection (it’s up through Sept. 28), and Frank Lloyd Wright was partly to blame, though not entirely. Let’s start with the description of the show posted on the Guggenheim’s Web site:
Featuring more than 100 works spanning six decades, this exhibition provides a unique opportunity to view the Guggenheim’s exceptional collection in great depth….Wright’s visionary building is presented as he intended: as a haven for spiritual and artistic contemplation. Baring the original ivory-colored, curved walls and allowing natural light to stream in from the oculus, the museum is once again, as the architect stated, “a space in which to view the painter’s creation truthfully.”
The complete version of this statement rates a thorough fisking, but I’ll restrict myself to a few words about the Guggenheim’s exhibition policy, which has something to do with the fact that “From Picasso to Pollock” provided a “unique” opportunity to view the Guggenheim’s permanent collection in “great depth.” And why, pray tell, should that opportunity be so unique? Because (1) the Guggenheim now regularly devotes most of its available space to temporary exhibitions of ephemeral interest (Matthew Barney, call your agent) and (2) the Wright-designed main building eats art. The attention-grabbing rotunda and inward-slanting walls pull your eyes away from the paintings on display as effectively as a fireworks display. If Wright really thought he was creating “a space in which to view the painter’s creation truthfully,” he was as wet as the occupants of Fallingwater on a stormy day.
Me, I think it more likely that he meant to draw attention away from the art. After all, his houses, Fallingwater very much included, tend to do exactly the same thing. To me, that’s their one drawback: the visual statements they make are so powerful that they snuff out any possible competition. I can’t imagine a serious collector of art wanting to live in Fallingwater–which is perfectly all right, of course, so long as you don’t collect art. The Guggenheim is by definition a different story, a museum building so beautiful in its own right as to be paradoxically ill-suited to its intended purpose.
On the other hand (yes, there’s a third hand), the Guggenheim happens to be more beautiful than much of the art that it houses. It’s an odd collection, at once idiosyncratic and strangely lacking in absolute distinction, not at all like such indisputably first-class one-man shows as the Frick and Phillips Collections. The fact that so little of the permanent collection has been regularly displayed in recent years has tended to obscure that fact. “From Picasso to Pollock,” by contrast, rubs your nose in the deficiencies of the Guggenheim’s holdings. Once I’d trudged all the way up the spiral, having looked earnestly at everything, I was struck by how few of the paintings I longed to take home with me (as opposed to taking them straight to the nearest dealer). Sure, there were a few treasures, including some luscious Brancusis and one of the Guggenheim’s zillion-odd Kandinskys, the show-stopping Black Lines, but after that, the pickings were surprisingly slim.
What kind of architect designs a museum that upstages the paintings it was built to display? A bad one? Or a supremely great one who knew he had to give the patrons something cool to look at? I never enter the Guggenheim without asking myself that question, which is a tribute, albeit something of a backhanded one, to–yes–the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright.