Frank Lloyd Wright: Autobiography And Biography is the text of a paper presented at a session about biographies of artists at the annual meting of the College Art Association in San Francisco in 1989.
Frank Lloyd Wright began dictating An Autobiography in 1926, and its first edition appeared in 1932. It was divided into four sections, or Books, as he called them. Book One, "Family", introduced his mother Anna and the Lloyd Joneses of Spring Valley, Wisconsin, who were her industrious Welsh relatives, and William Wright, his father who moved the family from town to town as he tried to earn a living. Wright also recalled selected events of his boyhood and youth until his departure for Chicago to seek his architectural future at the age of eighteen. In Book Two, "Fellowship", he detailed his early years as a draftsman, his marriage, his relationships with Louis Sullivan and other Chicago architects, and his own early independent practice. In Books Three and Four, "Work" and "Freedom" respectively, Wright wrote of his architecture up to 1932, his abandonment of his wife and family, which after twenty years of marriage included six children, and his subsequent liaisons with several women, two of whom he eventually married.
Seemingly influenced by the idiosyncratic literary style of Louis Sullivan's autobiography, which had appeared just eight years earlier, Wright also mused and philosophized about whatever came to mind. In all four Books he leapt back and forth chronologically, interwove personal and professional events, sometimes incoherently, and included abundant anecdotal detail and exactly recalled conversations. As one review of a later edition noted: "The same non-conformity which marks Mr. Wright's architecture also marks his writing. This is not the simple prose style adopted by the successful biographer of the time. It is rhythmic, poetic, and flows along unconscious of the traditional limitations imposed upon biographical literature."
Wright very likely wrote an intentionally catchy, popularizing book at that time in his life for several interrelated reasons. He needed money and hoped that an entertaining book would sell. He wanted publicly to rationalize and and put behind him flamboyant personal conduct of the previous twenty years. Above all, he probably viewed writing as being about the only means by which he could then keep his architecture and architectural ideas before the public. During the six years from 1926 to 1932 that he intermittently worked on the book, Wright was widely viewed as being an eccentric old has-been, as notorious for sensational personal escapades as he was famous for his Prairie School architecture that had such stunning world-wide consequence a quarter of a century earlier. Lacking a steady flow of design commissions, he turned to writing and lecturing about architecture -- and himself.
The depression year of 1932, which saw the publication of his autobiography, also marked, at the age of sixty-five, the beginning of an amazing professional renaissance for him and the founding in his ancestral Spring Green of the Taliesin Fellowship, which variously has been described as a school, an extended family, an architectural commune, a feudal village, or a benevolent dictatorship. In 1943, Wright, who by then had produced a new string of masterful acclaimed buildings, appended to the unchanged original four Books, a lengthy new Book Five, "Form", which told of those successes and of the Taliesin Fellowship. Ever his own man, he decided that there was so much new material in Book Five that it deserved to be called a first edition, and its imprint omitted mention of the 1932 book -- hence a certain amount of bibliographic confusion.
Because of Wright's regained professional stature the 1943 edition, unlike that of 1932, gained a wide professional audience. Without exception reviews acknowledged the accomplishments of Wright the architect and praised his buildings, but the response to Wright the man and Wright the autobiographer was more critical. It centered on the matter of ego. Wright's manifest ego offended most reviewers as for years it had offended other architects, clients and the general public. True, ego arguably generates most autobiography, but in this particular case, it seemed excessive. Niklaus Pevsner for example wrote of this edition: "It all reads somewhat exasperatingly until one returns from the book to the buildings and remembers what brilliant structural and esthetic solutions Mr.Wright has given us during fifty years of undaunted pioneering." Another called the book "an epic of self absorption." To be fair, we should remember that ego was just about all that had remained at the nadir of Wright's professional life when the original four Books had been written.
Because of Wright's regained professional stature the 1943 edition, unlike that of 1932, gained a wide professional audience. Without exception reviews acknowledged the accomplishments of Wright the architect and praised his buildings, but the response to Wright the man and Wright the autobiographer was more critical. It centered on the matter of ego. Wright's manifest ego offended most reviewers as for years it had offended other architects, clients and the general public. True, ego arguably generates most autobiography, but in this particular case, it seemed excessive. Niklaus Pevsner for example wrote of this edition: "It all reads somewhat exasperatingly until one returns from the book to the buildings and remembers what brilliant structural and esthetic solutions Mr.Wright has given us during fifty years of undaunted pioneering." Another called the book "an epic of self absorption." To be fair, we should remember that ego was just about all that had remained at the nadir of Wright's professional life when the original four Books had been written.
To the degree that in both editions Wright had written about architecture, architectural events and his relationship with other architects, most notably Sullivan, his autobiography also contained elements of architectural history. Therefore, unconventional literary style notwithstanding, it had a significant impact on the way that American architectural history was written for the next several decades. You have to put that statement into proper historiographical context. In 1932, and even in 1943, the profession of art history in this country was in its infancy. There simply were not many books being published -- particularly about a subject as declasse in the art historical hierarchy as American architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hard-pressed as we all are today to keep up with the flood of publications that threatens to overwhelm us, whatever our specialty, it is hard to imagine that such a dearth ever existed. But it did.
An Autobiography was cited as authority, usually without question, by architectural historians dealing with the subject of American architecture in general and with Wright in particular. True, Grant Manson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, in their monographs on Wright's work, questioned certain of its biographical facts -- as elemental as the date of Wright's birth--but after consultation with Wright, the questions were relegated to footnotes. Wright's versions of various matters prevailed more or less as fact until the late 1960s.
During those same years, based on normal architectural history inquiry of the day, which then was largely focused on finding and examining the roots of modernism, the analytical and interpretive literature about Wright's work grew--as indeed it did for the whole of art history. But the fund of biographical data on Wright remained fairly static. For a long time few architectural historians were interested in checking the kinds of public sources that historians and biographers routinely consult, such as school and court records, census data, obscure newspapers and the like that lay outside of the self-contained bibliography of architectural history. However, in the 1960s Thomas Hines, then a graduate student working in the Wisconsin State Historical Society, consulted those overlooked public records in the process of working up a fact sheet on Wright's youthful years in Madison--the Book One years in his autobiography that is--that could be distributed to people, including hordes of children preparing school reports, who often sought information from the historical society about Wright, one of Wisconsin's most famous citizens.
Hines laid his findings before the scholarly community in a bombshell article in the December 1967 issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Irrefutably he showed that much of what Wright had written about his early life made a good story, but it simply was not true. Soon the new biographical data enabled or even caused architectural historians to look at Wright's earliest work from a different viewpoint, and new insights about that phase of his work began to make their way into print. Questions arose. If many of the recounted events of his early life were largely fictive, what about those pertaining to his later life? What about his version of architectural history? Bit by bit, individual architectural historians scrutinized, challenged, and re-evaluated his autobiography. The net result of their published findings has been a clearer, more objective and subtler understanding of certain aspects of Wright's life, his architecture and the architectural milieu from which he came. For example, Wright is now seen as at times taking from the architectural world as well as steadily giving to it -- a major change from the picture he presented in his autobiography,.
This collective changing of the biographical and historical record initially brought forth derisive responses from various members of Wright's surviving Taliesin entourage who viewed changing anything in An Autobiography as akin to tampering with sacred scripture. As a group more interested in promoting hagiography than accurate biography or architectural history, they were unable to grasp the significance of the revisions and viewed the activity merely as academic nitpicking intent on destroying the reputation of a great architect--which reputation they were of course still professionally trading on. In truth Wright's stature has not been diminished one iota, much less destroyed. Quite the contrary. A Frank Lloyd Wright who, like others less gifted, occasionally had to struggle personally, professionally and artistically, is actually a more heroic figure than the confident architect in the autobiography who more or less effortlessly sprang full-blown into the architectural world at the age of eighteen. For a long time the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation was of the same mind as the Taliesin Fellowship, and until recently it tightly restricted research access to the thousands of documents, mainly letters and drawings, that constitute the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives housed at Taliesin West outside of Phoenix.
Following Hines' lead, Robert Twombley, another Wisconsin historian, in 1973 published the first edition of his full-scale biography of Wright. He presented a meticulously documented chronicle of Wright's life and work, certain parts of which again changed information in the autobiography. But unlike Hines, Twombley also attempted to position Wright and his architecture in historical context--which meant that he was in essence dealing with the facts and issues of architectural history. As Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James has observed, a literary biographer must be able to deal authoritatively with issues of literary form, criticism and history. Similarly the biographer of an architect must master analogous matters. Unfortunately Twombley's interest and skills as a contextual interpreter of Wright's work and its very considerable place in the mainstream of architectural history did not match his skills as a compiler of biographical and chronological data. His grasp of those critical and historical issues was merely superficial. It was clear that he had not made much use of the newer insights that I have just referred to. Nor could he truly probe the richness of his subject.
Denied access to the archives, some of whose subsequently published letters have revealed Wright to be a vibrant, resilient, witty, appealing yet sometimes exasperatingly thin-skinned, petty human being, Twombley gathered his data primarily from public records and obscure newspapers and magazines. He methodically reconstructed from myriad tiny pieces the sequential happenings of Wright's life and rolled them past the reader, occasionally pausing to supply a bit of superficial historical context. This generic biographical methodology could just as well have been used to write the chronicle of Frank Lloyd Wright, ace accountant. But it is the architecture after all that has secured Wright's place in history. The true measure of his architectural genius, the true scope and impact of his awesome architectural intelligence, virtually unmatched in our time, are only glancingly dealt with. Nor is there consideration of why and how time and again, and seemingly so easily, it all artistically came together.
In his 1987 biography of Wright, called A Man of Many Masks, Brendan Gill ostensibly confronted some of these matters along with the persona of Wright. However, instead of objectively following his complex subject with an openly inquisitive mind, Gill, an acquaintance of Wright, shaped and stuffed him to fit certain pop-psychology preconceptions. In attempting to deal with architectural matters, Gill, who had at the time recently switched from writing theater criticism to architectural and urban environment criticism for the New Yorker, wrote, in egregiously vernacular literary style, often wrong-headed and opinionated biography and architectural history. In spite of the appearance of scholarship provided by pages of generally worthless notes, the book has been deplored by scholars. Nevertheless, because of it, Gill, is now lecturing at various schools of architecture and professional conferences as an authority on Wright.
So where are we now vis a vis a good biography of Wright? The journalist's misleading book can be dismissed. Its only appeal will be to the uncritical general reader who probably will not recognize the degree to which Wright and his architecture have been trivialized. The historian has produced a useful but limited compendium -- the scholar will consult it for facts but will look elsewhere for significant interpretive insights, and the general reader will perceive only a rather pale view of the man. And well-trained architectural historians have kept on writing architectural history about Wright. It seems to me that they are in an excellent position to put forth everything about Wright and his work that a good biography will have to address. Considering the longevity of Wright -- almost ninety-two years--the magnitude of his work, the voluminous literature already extant, and the thousands of copied archival documents available since 1985 at the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, the task of writing a good biography of Frank Lloyd Wright is daunting indeed. But the need is there, both for the scholar and the general reader.
© Eileen Manning Michels 2010
Hines laid his findings before the scholarly community in a bombshell article in the December 1967 issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Irrefutably he showed that much of what Wright had written about his early life made a good story, but it simply was not true. Soon the new biographical data enabled or even caused architectural historians to look at Wright's earliest work from a different viewpoint, and new insights about that phase of his work began to make their way into print. Questions arose. If many of the recounted events of his early life were largely fictive, what about those pertaining to his later life? What about his version of architectural history? Bit by bit, individual architectural historians scrutinized, challenged, and re-evaluated his autobiography. The net result of their published findings has been a clearer, more objective and subtler understanding of certain aspects of Wright's life, his architecture and the architectural milieu from which he came. For example, Wright is now seen as at times taking from the architectural world as well as steadily giving to it -- a major change from the picture he presented in his autobiography,.
This collective changing of the biographical and historical record initially brought forth derisive responses from various members of Wright's surviving Taliesin entourage who viewed changing anything in An Autobiography as akin to tampering with sacred scripture. As a group more interested in promoting hagiography than accurate biography or architectural history, they were unable to grasp the significance of the revisions and viewed the activity merely as academic nitpicking intent on destroying the reputation of a great architect--which reputation they were of course still professionally trading on. In truth Wright's stature has not been diminished one iota, much less destroyed. Quite the contrary. A Frank Lloyd Wright who, like others less gifted, occasionally had to struggle personally, professionally and artistically, is actually a more heroic figure than the confident architect in the autobiography who more or less effortlessly sprang full-blown into the architectural world at the age of eighteen. For a long time the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation was of the same mind as the Taliesin Fellowship, and until recently it tightly restricted research access to the thousands of documents, mainly letters and drawings, that constitute the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives housed at Taliesin West outside of Phoenix.
Following Hines' lead, Robert Twombley, another Wisconsin historian, in 1973 published the first edition of his full-scale biography of Wright. He presented a meticulously documented chronicle of Wright's life and work, certain parts of which again changed information in the autobiography. But unlike Hines, Twombley also attempted to position Wright and his architecture in historical context--which meant that he was in essence dealing with the facts and issues of architectural history. As Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James has observed, a literary biographer must be able to deal authoritatively with issues of literary form, criticism and history. Similarly the biographer of an architect must master analogous matters. Unfortunately Twombley's interest and skills as a contextual interpreter of Wright's work and its very considerable place in the mainstream of architectural history did not match his skills as a compiler of biographical and chronological data. His grasp of those critical and historical issues was merely superficial. It was clear that he had not made much use of the newer insights that I have just referred to. Nor could he truly probe the richness of his subject.
Denied access to the archives, some of whose subsequently published letters have revealed Wright to be a vibrant, resilient, witty, appealing yet sometimes exasperatingly thin-skinned, petty human being, Twombley gathered his data primarily from public records and obscure newspapers and magazines. He methodically reconstructed from myriad tiny pieces the sequential happenings of Wright's life and rolled them past the reader, occasionally pausing to supply a bit of superficial historical context. This generic biographical methodology could just as well have been used to write the chronicle of Frank Lloyd Wright, ace accountant. But it is the architecture after all that has secured Wright's place in history. The true measure of his architectural genius, the true scope and impact of his awesome architectural intelligence, virtually unmatched in our time, are only glancingly dealt with. Nor is there consideration of why and how time and again, and seemingly so easily, it all artistically came together.
In his 1987 biography of Wright, called A Man of Many Masks, Brendan Gill ostensibly confronted some of these matters along with the persona of Wright. However, instead of objectively following his complex subject with an openly inquisitive mind, Gill, an acquaintance of Wright, shaped and stuffed him to fit certain pop-psychology preconceptions. In attempting to deal with architectural matters, Gill, who had at the time recently switched from writing theater criticism to architectural and urban environment criticism for the New Yorker, wrote, in egregiously vernacular literary style, often wrong-headed and opinionated biography and architectural history. In spite of the appearance of scholarship provided by pages of generally worthless notes, the book has been deplored by scholars. Nevertheless, because of it, Gill, is now lecturing at various schools of architecture and professional conferences as an authority on Wright.
So where are we now vis a vis a good biography of Wright? The journalist's misleading book can be dismissed. Its only appeal will be to the uncritical general reader who probably will not recognize the degree to which Wright and his architecture have been trivialized. The historian has produced a useful but limited compendium -- the scholar will consult it for facts but will look elsewhere for significant interpretive insights, and the general reader will perceive only a rather pale view of the man. And well-trained architectural historians have kept on writing architectural history about Wright. It seems to me that they are in an excellent position to put forth everything about Wright and his work that a good biography will have to address. Considering the longevity of Wright -- almost ninety-two years--the magnitude of his work, the voluminous literature already extant, and the thousands of copied archival documents available since 1985 at the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, the task of writing a good biography of Frank Lloyd Wright is daunting indeed. But the need is there, both for the scholar and the general reader.
© Eileen Manning Michels 2010
