ART REVIEW : Exploring Wright’s Fascination With Japanese Artwork

Frank Lloyd Wright helped establish Japanese art in America. His own boast--never something to be relied on--was that he had either owned or secured almost all the Japanese prints that had come to this country. He collected them. He promoted them. And, although he would never acknowledge any influence on his own designs, he “digested” them--his word--into his own creative output.

So enthusiastic was Wright about Japanese prints that he lent them to two exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1906 and 1908 and published an interpretive booklet about them. He also held annual “print parties” at his studio Taliesin, in Wisconsin, where he would preside over the cooking of a sukiyaki meal, then go into his vaults, pull out a selection of his favorite Hokusais and Hiroshiges, and explain their finer points to his “boys”--the ever-obedient apprentices who also went on to collect prints or received them as gifts from their master.

Julia Meech, an independent curator who organized the exhibition “Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, estimates that 20,000 prints must have passed through Wright’s hands. Between 1905 and 1922, he made seven trips to Japan and each time came back laden with acquisitions. In 1912, he met two wealthy Bostonians who gave him $250,000 over a five-year period just when print collecting was taking off in America. This allowed him to mop up whatever he liked, often forcing what he bought on his clients, sometimes in lieu of the loans that he had reneged on. In addition to his unparalleled spending power, he also had good and loyal advisers, and he bought well and in quantity. Dealers must have hated him, Meech thinks.

Meech’s exhibition, attractively installed in Bruce Goff’s Pavilion for Japanese Art, brings together 50 of these prints recently discovered in a box at Taliesin West, Wright’s winter retreat near Scottsdale, Ariz. It also includes 200 other items that once belonged to Wright--screens, textiles, sculptures, ceramics and books. These art objects, with their conservative motifs, were central to Wright’s vision and served as focal points for the interiors he created under his low, heavy, Shintoesque roofs. Aline Barnsdall, who had him build the Hollyhock House in Los Angeles, used to recall Wright dictating what art she could and could not display. The general rule was that if she got it from him, it was OK.

Wright appreciated the art objects but did not “digest” them into his work in the way he digested the prints with their small, intensely worked areas and large empty spaces. The exhibition makes this point by juxtaposing two long thin panels, Hiroshige’s “Java Sparrow on a Rose Branch” and Wright’s drawing of the Hardy House in Racine, Wis. The house, barely visible, is so high up and foreshortened that it is dwarfed by a flower that appears from nowhere halfway down the page. If Wright had been drawing from life instead of in his studio, he would have broken his neck stretching up to see it.

What elevates the prints above the furniture and fabrics is their flouting of convention. Hokusai was a graphic risk-taker. For Wright, who dared to ride around town in open-top cars with other men’s wives and build houses that cantilevered out over promontories and waterfalls, this touched a personal chord. Its equivalent in other eras would be the extreme mannerism of Late Gothic “Perpendicular” architecture of 16th-Century England and, in our own time, the Post-Modernism of Michael Graves.

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Meech’s exhibition, which opened at the Phoenix Art Museum earlier this year and travels to Japan in 1997, does not distinguish between the graphic and three-dimensional exhibits. It also pulls its punches in sidestepping the new questions it raises about Wright’s reputation. This may have been politic, given the touchiness of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which lent much of the material, but it leaves a hole at the heart of the show.

What is the controversy? Although the show was only two years in the making, Meech has been researching Wright’s collecting for 15 years. In 1980, as a curator at the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, she decided to examine the museum’s gifts of Japanese art and kept coming across items labeled “Vendor: F.L. Wright.” She cross-checked and found letters from the great man to the then-curator, negotiating prices on 400 prints. Among the items he sold were six prints by Utamaro now in that artist’s first major show at the British Museum.

The letters, which no one had seen since 1918, are dynamite because they establish that Wright was a dealer--he says so in his own words. This introduces self-interest into what had been thought of as just a sideline to his creative pursuits. It also begs a question that touches his status as an innovator: Did Wright help create the market for Japonaiserie or was he created by it? There’s more. Meech says that proceeds from the sale of prints supported Wright throughout his life and that the profits from this business equaled and may have exceeded those he made from his work as an architect.

When she has raised these issues at symposiums, Meech says she has offended those Wright specialists who still tend toward hero worship. Here on her own turf, however, she does not declare her hand. This is disappointing, not because we need to hit on Wright, but because the relationship between creativity and salesmanship in art needs to be better understood.

Wright is an object lesson in this regard. Meech alludes to this in her unpublished manuscript on “Wright’s Other Passion” but the text didn’t become the catalogue for this exhibition. There is in fact no accompanying literature or any presentation of a thesis. For once, all we have to look at are the exhibits.

* “Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan” continues through Jan. 7 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 857-6000.