The building is non-traditional, non-representational, non-historical abstract art in its own right; indeed, it not merely coincides with the contents, it supersedes them. You may go to this building to see Kandinsky or Jackson Pollock; you remain to see Frank Lloyd Wright.
—Lewis Mumford
June 1943 … Spring Green, Wisconsin … Taliesin
Frank Lloyd Wright received an invitation to Johnson territory in mid-1943. The sender wanted Wright’s help as Manhattan gave birth to another museum. “Could you ever come to New York,” the letter began, “and discuss with me a building for our collection of non-objective paintings[?]”1
Looking at the handwritten letter, dated June 1, Wright didn’t recognize the graceful, rolling script on the blue stationery. He also drew a blank on reading the signature, but if the writer’s name sparked no recollections, Hilla Rebay’s association did, as the title appended was “Curator of the S. R. Guggenheim Foundation.” Certainly Wright knew the name Guggenheim. And he knew it meant money, New York money, and lots of it. A scion of Meyer Guggenheim, Solomon Richard had inherited a handsome share of his father’s immense copper mining and smelting fortune, and, a savvy businessman himself, had greatly increased his wealth.
The letter could hardly have arrived at a better time. Fewer than five Taliesin fellows remained in Spring Green that summer. Some had enlisted in military service after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Others resisted the draft, seeking conscientious objector status, and in several cases, their principles, reinforced by Wright’s strident isolationist stance, had resulted in imprisonment. The war had meant a dearth of new construction, and even a Wright-designed housing project for defense workers, planned for Pittsfield, Massachusetts, had been canceled. Wright’s vocal opposition to the war had won him few friends; when he tried to get Broadacre City, his sprawling plan for rethinking the American town, designated a “worthy national objective,” his petition met with silence from the White House.2 As a result, the remaining Taliesin fellows spent more time tilling victory gardens than manning drafting tables.
On reading the entire letter, Wright found Rebay’s note described a singular commission. That he had never designed a museum posed no impediment to the intrepid Mr. Wright; nor, it seemed, did the writer desire a traditional gallery. “I do not think these paintings are easel paintings,” the letter explained. “They are order creating order and are sensitive (and corrective even) to space. As you feel the ground, the sky and the ‘in-between’ you will perhaps feel them too; and find the way.”
This was the sort of challenge Wright could embrace. It wasn’t simply a request for a design; the writer seemed to understand Wright’s character. “I need a fighter, a lover of space, an originator, a tester and a wise man,” Wright read. “I want a temple of the spirit, a monument! And your help to make it possible.”3
Gratifying to read, the words also piqued his curiosity. But as usual, Wright had limited funds. To avoid the expense of a New York trip, he decided to respond by issuing what had become his standard invitation. He could play the master’s role at Taliesin once again, the welcoming host and, not incidentally, the tour guide who revealed to his guest the Wright manner very much on display at his Spring Green property.
His reply, then, inverted the invitation: “Why don’t you run down here for a week end? Bring your wife. We have room and the disposition to make you comfortable.”
The Baroness Hilla von Rebay promptly and politely declined. “I am not a man,” she advised Wright, adding, “I built up this collection, this foundation.” More important, she explained, “Mr. Guggenheim is 82 years old and we have no time to lose … Mr. Guggenheim is soon leaving for the summer and is seldom there in the winter. It is not easy.”
The second note prompted Wright to move quickly. Within days, he boarded a train for New York, and less than a fortnight later, a formal letter of agreement was executed. It required Wright “to furnish preliminary studies, complete plans, final specifications and supervision necessary to the erection and completion” of the new museum. The construction cost was to be not more than $750,000, and Wright’s fees were not to exceed 10 percent of the actual cost.4
The man who repeatedly professed a loathing for urban streetscapes had suddenly received an assignment in the nation’s largest city. Though the fees represented a return to solvency for the financially straitened Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, that seemed less important to the impecunious Wright then the chance to design a building that would again remind the world—and the likes of Philip Johnson and his International cadre—of Wright’s genius. For a man well past the expected age of retirement (Wright turned seventy-six that June), the task of designing a home for what was then to be known as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting amounted to the perfect birthday present.
1928–29 … New York City … Carnegie Studios
Unlike the triumvirate of women who founded MoMA (Mesdames Rockefeller and Sullivan, together with Miss Bliss), Hilla Rebay (b. 1890) was an artist in her own right. The daughter of a German army officer, Hildegard Anna Augusta Elizabeth Freiin Rebay von Ehrenwiesen grew up in comfort in her native Alsace. At nineteen, she enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris, where she studied drawing and painting.
By age twenty, she knew art would be her life’s work. Her training prepared her to be a portraitist, but after moving to Munich in 1910, Rebay found she reveled in what she described to her mother as the “luxuriousness of color.”5 During the next decade, her peregrinations took her to London, Zurich, back to Paris, and on regular excursions to her family home in the Alsace countryside, then part of Germany. Her artistic inclinations led her steadily away from reproducing what she saw in the world and into the realm that, in 1911, Wassily Kandinsky labeled “non-objective painting.”
As Philip Johnson would discover in the next decade, Berlin in the 1910s offered a heady mix of art and culture. While the upper echelon of the capital’s society made for a ready market for portraits painted by the wellborn Rebay (she inherited the title of Baroness Hildegard Rebay von Ehrenwiesen), the city’s diverse culture fostered new forms of art. Rebay found congenial company amid a subculture of avant-garde writers, filmmakers, painters, and other artists.
Hers was a compelling presence, despite her small stature. With thick blond hair, dark eyes, and intense seriousness—lightened, occasionally, by a radiant shy smile—she attracted well-placed suitors from her parents’ world. But she chose companionship instead from the ranks of struggling artists. For a time, Rebay took as her lover the artist Hans (Jean) Arp (of mixed parentage, he was known by both German and French Christian names). Arp introduced her to paintings by Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, and Franz Marc, artists who made increasingly less literal images and experimented with color. Rebay was influenced by Arp’s friends the Dadaists, among them Tristan Tzara and Kurt Schwitters.
During the Great War, Rebay herself painted large oils and tiny watercolors. While some early images portrayed recognizable elements of dance, her work increasingly focused on form, as the figurative dissolved, giving way to colorful abstractions. To earn money, she still painted people, pleasing the well-to-do who could afford images of themselves and their loved ones, but the art she made to please herself featured lines, planes, dots, and geometric figures. Like Kandinsky’s, her works often bore titles linked to musicology, including Composition, Allegretto, Fugue, and Capriccio. Gaining the respect of her peers, her work hung on gallery walls in Cologne, Zurich, and Berlin.
During the war she fell in love with another painter. By 1917, she shared her life with Rudolf Bauer, but their time together was far from idyllic. Despite the influence she had on his development, Bauer held her work in low regard. Their off-and-on relations proved difficult for Rebay. Over the next decade, she had recurring headaches, throat ailments, and various illnesses, including a life-threatening bout with diphtheria. She repeatedly contemplated suicide. She lived for a time in Italy, in part to escape Bauer, who had come to rely upon her for living expenses. Though she felt diminished by him, she tirelessly promoted his work and revered Bauer as an artistic genius.
On the advice of friends, she crossed the Atlantic, arriving in America on the SS President Wilson in early 1927. She had $50 in her pocket, but aristocratic connections soon opened doors. The Baroness von Rebay found that New Yorkers seemed drawn to her, to her vital presence, and to her art. By autumn, an installation of her work at the Marie Sterner Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street found numerous buyers. Not content with acquiring a Rebay collage and a painting, one collector, Irene Rothschild Guggenheim, sought out the artist. The two women became friends, and by the time the baroness sailed a few months later for a summer visit to Europe, the farewell messages in her stateroom included a bon voyage telegram from Irene Guggenheim.
After returning to New York in October 1928, the artist resumed work in her spacious one-room studio above Carnegie Hall. Though her calling was her non-objective works, she continued to accept other assignments, including one from a Manhattan dealer to copy a portrait of George Washington at the Metropolitan Museum.6 More important, however, was a commission from Irene Guggenheim, who, with her husband, Solomon, occupied a large suite nearby in the Plaza Hotel. Mrs. Guggenheim wanted the baroness to paint a portrait of her husband.
He duly arrived at Rebay’s tall-ceilinged studio with its ample northern light. Surrounded by Bauer’s canvases, her own collages and paintings, and the works of other advanced European artists, the artist set to work over multiple sittings to record Guggenheim.
Theirs was an unlikely meeting of art and commerce. Rebay worked in oils to limn a recognizable likeness, a task that posed no particular challenge. A life-size Guggenheim emerged, a serious-seeming American businessman dressed in a tie and matching vest, jacket, and knee breeches of brown wool. Seated in a leather armchair, the subject looked to be at leisure, a man of late middle years, his legs casually crossed and his hands resting on his thighs. But the expression Rebay recorded belied the ease of his posture. His look is direct, fixed.
The baroness talked as she painted. Mr. Guggenheim may initially have been dubious about what he heard Rebay saying, but certainly he listened intently. During the preceding decade, the cause of non-objective art had nourished her, giving purpose to her life. Some observers labeled non-objective canvases “abstract,” but Rebay, Bauer, and Kandinsky resisted the term. They saw their work not as abstracted from another source but as something entirely original. As Rebay had told Bauer in their early months together, “Reason and conscious intellect are of no help on our work, since it is based on feeling, and feeling corrects itself.”7 As Bauer put it, “The creations of the spirit must be non-objective.”8
When Rebay explained her passion for this new art, Guggenheim grasped that the paintings held a powerful spiritual sway over the baroness; this art amounted to a religious vocation. She believed the most gifted of the non-objective artists had an ability to channel God, making the paintings of eternal importance. She insisted that they needed to be seen, the word of them spread. For Rebay, they carried a message of “rhythmic action, spiritual uplift, exquisite joy.”9
The heat of her arguments warmed Guggenheim’s interest in this new art, but her mystical beliefs in the power of nonrepresentational art made it all the more ironic that the painting of an entirely traditional portrait of her new friend “Guggie,” as she soon called him, would be the pivot point in her life. When he had arrived in Rebay’s studio overlooking Fifty-Seventh Street, his taste in painting began with Old Masters and ended with the rural landscapes of the mid-nineteenth-century Barbizon School and early Impressionists. But her passion, together with the non-objective works he saw in Rebay’s Carnegie Hall studio, enlarged his artistic universe. In the coming months and years, she would become his guide, his sole adviser on a quest that, until he met her, had never entered his mind. Against the odds, Rebay converted Guggenheim. He would, in turn, enable her to become a curator and the founding director of a great museum.
Solomon R. Guggenheim: businessman, philanthropist, and art collector. (Underwood Archives/Getty Images)
Yet these transformations were a consequence of more than one woman’s passion, an old-world title, and her skills as an artist. As Guggenheim himself soon explained, a lingering sense of rejection from his own youth predisposed him to his improbable shift.
Rebay traveled to Europe with the Guggenheims in 1929 and again in 1930. An artistic insider in the Old World, she easily gained entrée for her patrons to artists’ studios to buy fresh works for their rapidly growing collection of the new art. She wanted them to understand the rich creative culture, and one July evening in 1930, the Guggenheims dined at the home of Walter Gropius in Berlin.
Arriving overdressed for the occasion, the Guggenheims were a little taken aback at the unfamiliar Bauhaus furniture, all skeletal chrome tubes and strips of leather, a stark contrast to the traditional chair in Guggenheim’s portrait. Seeking to make her guests feel welcome, hostess Ise Gropius inquired of Mr. Guggenheim how he had become interested in modern painting. Rebay stood by, translating.
In English, Guggenheim explained that, as a young man, he had devised a new method of extracting copper. But his father, Meyer Guggenheim, had dismissed the idea. For the younger Guggenheim, the experience embodied a life lesson. As he explained to Mrs. Gropius, one should “never underestimate the works of those people who tried totally different methods.” Solomon Guggenheim translated the notion to the art he had begun to collect. It was totally new—and he wished to support it.10
By the time Frank Lloyd Wright first met Guggenheim in 1943, the Baroness von Rebay had invested the industrialist’s money well, collecting a remarkable array of contemporary art. For a time, its owner had contemplated a bequest to the Metropolitan Museum, but guided by Rebay, he had long since decided upon his own museum. Now he wanted a suitably unique building in which to house it.
1939–43 … New York City … 24 East Fifty-Fourth Street
“Who would be the best architect for such a plan?” Baroness von Rebay had wondered years earlier, in 1930.11 Having already won her benefactor’s approval to think such thoughts, she confided in Rudolf Bauer, whose work she continued to revere, of her dream of a “Temple of Non-objectivity.”
With Guggenheim’s money to back her, Rebay thought big. In a long letter to Bauer, she described a temple “built in a fabulous style.” She specified a restful entrance room: “[It] must have blue ceiling lights, like Napoleon’s Tomb in Paris; a room … where one can get away from the noise of the streets before entering the temple of art.” The galleries (she called them “exhibition halls”) were to be “festive, yet cozy,” with the music of Bach audible everywhere. She also wanted a library, a hall for lectures and musical performances, and a shop for the sale of reproductions “at cost.” This was, after all, an evangelical endeavor. And it had to be in New York, “truly the only possible city,” according to Rebay.12
The name Frank Lloyd Wright had been far from the first to come to mind; in fact, the concerns he expressed to Mumford years earlier about “reading my obituaries” proved very real. Rebay had known of his work since at least 1931, when she saw a Wright retrospective in Berlin, but Rebay later claimed that she thought he was dead.13 In any case, her first instinct had been to look to Europe.
The extraordinary series of studio visits during the summer of 1930 netted the rapidly expanding Guggenheim collections many works of art. The Guggenheims and their guide met Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian, and Fernand Léger in Paris, Kandinsky at the Bauhaus, and Bauer in Berlin. Rebay arranged for her American friends to meet several architects, too, and in addition to dining with Gropius, they made the acquaintance of Le Corbusier, who, Rebay learned, dreamed of establishing “the 1st truly modern museum.”14
Mondrian recommended that Rebay consult architect Frederick Kiesler in New York. The expatriate-Austrian Kiesler dismissed Le Corbusier as “journalistic,” but impressed the baroness with “his plan for a new museum that has no windows.” As Rebay reported, “[It] is 14 stories high [and] very, very interesting.”15 Rebay consulted with German architect Edmund Körner, with whom she discussed “matching the museum to the painting, to the galleries, just as one custom-creates the frame around the picture.”16 Other names were bandied about, including Alvar Aalto, Marcel Breuer, and Richard Neutra. Before Wright was consulted, Rebay and company considered Walter Gropius (Bauer dismissed him as “too small-time”) and Miës, whose “incredible glass structures” seemed ill-matched to a museum.17
Another kind of conversation altogether began when, in 1935, the Rockefellers and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia developed a master plan for a cultural pedestrian avenue that would link Radio City Music Hall and the MoMA with a proposed new home for the Metropolitan Opera—along with a Guggenheim museum. The plan for the Municipal Art Plaza stalled when rapidly rising land prices intimidated even the Rockefellers, though the discussions did prompt Solomon Guggenheim to initiate the legal formalities that led to the establishment of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation on June 25, 1937. The founding document stated explicitly that one of the foundation’s aims was to open a museum.
Although it proved another false start, an idea Rebay floated that same year gave a new shape to the vision of a new museum. Rebay broached the idea of an exhibition for the forthcoming 1939 New York World’s Fair. Until then only a few New Yorkers had seen the Guggenheim collection. As early as 1930, Rebay had hung a selection in the couple’s second-floor apartment at the Plaza—it ran the full length of the Fifth Avenue side of the hotel—which had been redesigned with Art Deco furnishings. A few canvases had been lent to Alfred Barr at MoMA for 1933 and 1934 exhibitions.18 But by the late thirties, the collection approached a thousand works, many of them paintings by Bauer and Kandinsky, but with numerous other artists represented, including Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Seurat, and László Moholy-Nagy.
In thinking about the 1939 event, Rebay herself put on paper her mind’s-eye image of a special Guggenheim pavilion. It consisted of a dozen glass-roofed wings that extended like spokes from a central courtyard. Although the plan for the temporary structure in Queens never made it beyond her rough sketch on a piece of stationery, Rebay’s rendering anticipated a future circular building on a rectangular plot.
By the time Rebay’s letter prompted Wright’s trip East to meet her and Guggenheim in 1943, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting had had a public New York home since 1939, a low-rise commercial building at 24 East Fifty-Fourth Street. In the late thirties rumors of war—and its eventual outbreak in Europe—had temporarily ended talk of building an all-new museum. But Rebay had transformed a rented retail space into galleries. With the help of architect William Muschenheim, who had been featured in Johnson and Barr’s 1931 show Rejected Architects, she had adapted a forty-foot-wide storefront, which consisted of two floors plus a mezzanine on a hundred-foot-deep footprint.
The galleries surprised viewers. Many of the walls were hung with pleated gray velour drapery fabric, and the floors were covered with plush carpeting in a matching hue. For the first time in a gallery, newly available fluorescent lighting was used, the tubes concealed in the ceiling recesses. At Rebay’s striking installation for the exhibition she called The Art of Tomorrow, the canvases were hung below eye level, many of them snug to the baseboard.
She wanted gallery visitors to take a seat on the oversized ottomans provided. Rebay looked to set the mood: In an austere setting, with piped-in Bach and Chopin playing, the visitor could contemplate the visionary pictures. The paintings were the indisputable focus, set off by their broad, bolection-molded frames covered with silver leaf.
The new museum got mixed reviews. The Times critic thought it “theatrical.”19 On his visit in 1943, Frank Lloyd Wright thought that Rebay’s installation and, in particular, her calculated effects with the bulbous frames, amounted to little more than “a hideous lumber-yard.”20
With his unshakable confidence, Wright knew he could do better.
Fall 1943 … New York City
The woman that Frank Lloyd Wright met cut a formidable figure. Though she had grown stout with the years, the square-jawed and dark-haired Hilla Rebay carried herself with a confidence enhanced by her joint status as a European aristocrat, an artist well-known among the avant-garde, and the woman entrusted with Mr. Guggenheim’s museum dreams. Though not yet a citizen—she had briefly been detained as an enemy alien earlier in the war—she spoke precise English, despite an unmistakable German accent.
The fifty-three-year-old baroness was charged with imparting to Wright her vision for the museum—and she had grown accustomed to being listened to. She explained the exhibition halls would display a collection that consisted not merely of her favored non-objective works but also, as she put it, “paintings with an object.” These included such works as the elongated faces and nudes of Amedeo Modigliani, the primitivist canvases of Henri Rousseau, pointillist works by Georges Seurat, and the richly remembered dreamscapes of Marc Chagall, all of which, in Rebay’s view, anticipated the non-objective. She told Wright she wished non-objective and objective works segregated one from the other, but that she wanted more than just galleries, insisting that the building’s program also include a theater for film, studios for working artists, and even an apartment on the premises for herself.
Despite such requirements, Wright’s assignment remained surprisingly vague. In writing to him in the days before he signed the contract, Rebay described a vision less concrete than spiritual. He was, she advised, “with infinity and sacred depth [to] create the dome of the spirit: the expression of the cosmic breath itself.”21 The man with money was similarly unspecific. “No such building as is now customary for museums,” Guggenheim told Wright, “could be appropriate for this one.”22 They might know it when they saw it, but perhaps appropriately, the proposed museum they held in their minds remained a non-objective form.
For Wright, the greatest unknown was the site. He prided himself on responding to a place, on devising organic solutions that affixed a building to its setting. This new assignment came without a location. Instead, the contract specified a budget to acquire land ($250,000, not so large a sum given Manhattan prices) and a worrisomely short deadline by which to accomplish it. If by July 1, 1944, no site had been acquired, his contract automatically terminated.
Despite the entire world being at war—American troops fought their way atoll to atoll across the Pacific and the Allies conducted carpet-bombing raids over Germany, with devastating results—Wright had a compelling incentive to go shopping.
He preferred building in the open, but here his assignment was the teeming streets of Manhattan. Wright reached out to Robert Moses. A builder of bridges and parkways and Wright’s cousin by marriage, Moses regarded himself as the man who could do for New York what Baron Haussmann had done for nineteenth-century Paris. Moses was perhaps uniquely suited to recommend sites in the vicinity, and within days, Moses himself took the wheel to chauffer Wright and Rebay to an eight-acre parcel in Riverdale, just north of Manhattan. The hilltop, part of a new park Moses was creating, overlooked Spuyten Duyvil, the turbulent confluence of the Harlem and Hudson Rivers.
For Wright, the prospect seemed the perfect departure from the dense Manhattan cityscape. Easily reached by car—which he, along with Moses, believed was key to the American future—the site, as Wright wrote to Guggenheim, seemed “a genuine relief from the cinder heap old New York is bound to become.”23
Wright had in the past tried to persuade clients to relocate their dream buildings to remote sites in keeping with his organic vision. In 1936, upon seeing the industrial setting for the Johnson Wax Headquarters, Wright invited Herbert Johnson to make his business part of Broadacre City; recognizing the unreality of the request, Olgivanna had prompted her husband, “Give them what they want, Frank, or you will lose the job.”24 Just as the Johnson Wax Administration Building rose where the client wanted it, Wright’s plea, in 1943, was rejected when Guggenheim and Rebay dismissed the Bronx site as too remote, since Riverdale was a full ten miles north of the existing midtown home of the Museum of Non-Objective Art.
Moses suggested alternatives, including lots on which two town houses sat on Park Avenue, between Sixty-Ninth and Seventieth Streets. But the asking price was twice the allotted budget. Next, two sites near MoMA were rejected. The possibility of sharing the same block with the J. P. Morgan Library, on the corner of Thirty-Seventh Street and Madison Avenue, ended when the property was sold to another buyer.
During these weeks, as the Wrights made repeated visits East, a bond developed between Hilla Rebay and not only Wright, but Olgivanna and their daughter, Iovanna. Rebay’s belief in the mystical extended to omens, and she told seventeen-year-old Iovanna that, during her search for an architect, a book had fallen off a shelf, striking her on the head. The book was about Wright.25
Rebay’s years of recurring maladies—incapacitating headaches, persistent throat pain—had led her to seek out exotic remedies, some of which she recommended to the Wrights. Utterly convinced that dental problems and tonsils had an insidious impact on the spirit, she persuaded Wright to have all his remaining teeth removed and replaced by dentures; she assured him that the extraction of the “dead teeth” would “purify” his blood. Olgivanna agreed to have teeth extracted, too, but the removals stopped when Rebay proposed teenaged Iovanna as the next candidate. “Hilla is not going to get her teeth as well,” Olgivanna told Wright within earshot of one of the apprentices. “Frank, this is a building for which you, for which we, have quite literally given our blood.”26 She did not exaggerate, as the Wrights had tried another of Rebay’s unusual regimens, throat leeches, intended to draw out the poisonous “old” blood to encourage the new. Wright found the leeching “lower[ed] one’s vitality for a week or two.”27
With the passing of the summer and autumn, Wright’s frustration rose. The search for a suitable piece of property produced nothing, but, Wright reported, his imagination was becoming crowded with ideas. He confided in Rebay, “I am likely to blow up or commit suicide unless I can let them out on paper.”28
With the year ending, Wright took stock. On December 30, 1943, he telegrammed Rebay that he thought that BY CHANGING OUR IDEA … FROM HORIZONTAL TO PERPENDICULAR WE CAN GO WHERE WE PLEASE.”29 On New Year’s Eve, he assumed a businesslike tone in writing Guggenheim. “It now seems probable, that our desire for a horizontal building is incompatible with real estate values.”30 Quite against his usual practice, Wright now accepted the need to take a more vertical approach in finding a solution suited to a city where towering skyscrapers were fast becoming the rule.
He offered Guggenheim no specifics, but seated at his drafting table as the snow accumulated outside Taliesin’s frosted windows, he set aside earlier unfinished sketches for a low, horizontal building. He began to give his newly vertical thinking tangible form.
January 1944 … Spring Green, Wisconsin … Taliesin
Without a specific New York site to explore, Wright had no choice but to imagine one. Given what he knew of Manhattan real estate prices and his clients’ demands for a complex building program, he calculated that a lot roughly 125 feet by 90 feet might be affordable and workable. This theoretical site resembled the plot near the Morgan Library that had been considered. Wright also decided such a corner site was essential.
Though he told Rebay he was “busy at the boards,” he didn’t tell her in his letter of January 20, 1944, that he had worked out the essentials of a design that he would be soon be ready to show. A man who prided himself on putting pencil to paper only after an idea had begun to jell in his mind, Wright’s design for the large multipurpose building emerged with surprising speed.31
It wasn’t without precedent in his oeuvre. Since the early stages of his career, Wright had acknowledged that geometric shapes exercised “spell power” over his imagination. According to Wright, the square represented integrity, the triangle implied structural unity. Wright said he found the cube comforting, the sphere inspiring. Many years earlier, musing on what could happen when such “architectural themes” as the circle, the square, and the octagon were combined, he asserted that the inherent possibilities ranged from the Shakespearean to the “symphonic.”32
In designing Mr. Guggenheim’s museum, Wright chose a three-dimensional shape that, though it had fascinated natural scientists, mathematicians, and the likes of Christopher Wren for centuries, rarely inspired buildings. But it seemed to have currency in the Guggenheim circle. Rebay herself may have broached the idea to Wright; Bauer perhaps suggested it to her.33 Le Corbusier’s thinking could have influenced both when, circa 1930, he shared with Rebay his plan for the beehivelike Musée Mondial, an unbuilt swirl-within-a square for a Swiss site.
Such writers as Emerson and Goethe had long since identified the spiral as a transcendent form, regarding it as a potent metaphor for movement and growth in both nature and man’s mystical capabilities. That a mere line could rise into a three-dimensional figure possessed a certain magic. Yet in terms of built works, the spiral’s history was limited.
In Wright’s rush at New Year’s and after to make a design for Mr. Guggenheim—Wright was acutely aware that the months were passing, his contract expiration date approaching—he recognized that this geometric eccentric might suit the task of designing an utterly unique structure. He was to design a new museum for a new kind of art; that art sought to look beyond the quotidian. If most museum buildings had yet to declare their independence from the palatial traditions of the treasure house, his would do exactly that. He prided himself on making creative leaps that left traditional forms looking outdated.
As he worked at his drafting table during those early weeks in January, he corresponded with his clients in New York. He warned them to ready themselves for a shock: “The whole thing will either throw you off your guard entirely or be just about what you have been dreaming about!”34
Wright’s glance had fallen upon the spiral before. When he revised his Taliesin stationery a few years earlier, the Taliesin logotype had become a deceptively simple figure within a red square—though drawn in the style of ancient Greek fretwork, the rectilinear logo was actually a double spiral.
His experiments with the spiral went back to the mid-1920s, when he proposed a wedding-cake-like design for Sugarloaf Mountain near Frederick, Maryland. Called the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective and Planetarium, the structure was to have been an odd combination of access road and destination. In Wright’s renderings, a cantilevered roadbed in the form of a helix wound its way to the top of a structure that capped a mountain. From its scenic overlook, drivers and passengers would take in the panorama of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and once out of their cars, they could explore the interior of the immense structure, a large dome containing natural-history exhibits as well as a planetarium.
The Automobile Objective never progressed beyond drawings, but twenty years later the spiral idea found new purchase in Wright’s imagination. He intimated as much to Rebay in his letter of January 20. “A museum should be one extended expansive well proportioned floor space from bottom to top,” he wrote in a breathless, unpunctuated rush. Without disclosing the character of his geometric thinking, he elaborated slightly: the building should be suitable, he wrote, “[for] a wheel chair going around and up and down, throughout.”
Turning the earlier plan for the Automobile Objective inside out, Wright transformed the idea of an exposed roadway cantilevered on the exterior into an interior walkway, an unbroken ramp that encircled an atrium. The inward-looking design was an old theme for Wright; other urban buildings of his, such as the administration building for the Larkin Company in Buffalo, New York, and the Unity Church in Oak Park, Illinois, closed out the streetscape. For the Guggenheim, Wright imagined an interior ramp that would resemble a continuous circling balcony; inside, sealed with a continuous ribbon window high on the wall, the walkways overlooked not New York but a towering interior space that Wright called a “crystal court.”
Unlike the legendary Sunday morning nine years before when Wright rendered the waterfall house, Wright developed variant designs for the Museum of Non-Objective Art over a period of several weeks. The drawings shared basic elements, in particular a seven- or eight-story tower, consisting of the rising galleries and the central court. An attached, four-story wing extended to one side for storage, classrooms, and Rebay’s apartment. Below the main tower was to be a basement auditorium.
The first take that Wright and his boys finalized as a presentation drawing wasn’t a spiral at all; rather it was a stack of identical, hexagonal galleries with level floors.35 The geometry of an alternate version resembled Wright’s Automobile Objective, with its tower a rising spiral of diminishing diameter. But the next two embodied one of the most original ideas of Wright’s career, altering the dynamic entirely.
Wright’s startling insight was to invert the cone; if Rebay and others had dreamed spiral dreams, certainly none of them imagined a mass that, rather than tapering on ascent, expanded from one story to the next. Wright envisioned a cyclone, a building with a radius that increased with altitude, capped with the dome Rebay requested. It was unprecedented in the history of architecture.
In late January, he wrote to Rebay. He told her he would remain in Wisconsin, delaying his anticipated annual departure for the warmth of Scottsdale, until he completed the “preliminary exploration” for her building.36 Indeed, by mid-February, the walls of a room adjoining the drafting room at Taliesin had become the setting for a display of the preliminary drawings for the museum, where another client reported seeing no fewer than eight colored sketches of the proposed Guggenheim museum.37
As with the Kaufmanns’ Bear Run home, one drawing that Wright himself executed (some of the presentation drawings were the work of other Taliesin hands) presaged the future museum in a manner that can, many decades later, only be described as visionary. Unlike the Lilliputian view that signaled Fallingwater’s coming-out with its publication in 1937 in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the museum likeness was not a perspective but an unusual combination of sectional drawing and elevation.
Executed on tracing paper, the sheet has a fragility despite being slightly larger than the perspective drawings that would eventually accompany it to New York (it is roughly twenty-six inches high and thirty inches wide, compared with the stack of twenty-by-twenty-four-inch perspectives on brown paper). The medium is different, too, of pencil and colored pencils rather than ink and watercolors. Yet the cartoon—it is more study than finished artwork—takes the viewer on a journey into the future building as the others do not.
Wright drew a front elevation; but he also bisected the building, dropping the guillotine of his section line along an axis parallel to the street. The sketch thus reveals both the rising mass of the tower and its inner volume as the ramp expands and rises beneath a shallow glass dome (see Fig. XIII). Since the drawing demanded a certain architectural sophistication to apprehend it, Wright set aside his square and triangles long enough to freehand a pair of small, thumbnail views to assure that his clients understood what they were seeing.
With his felicitous gift for describing his work, Wright added a provocative title, lettering the word ziggurat, alluding to the ancient Mesopotamian tower. In an afterthought, he added the German Zikkurat, perhaps out of respect for the German-born baroness. Then, as a fresh idea struck, he added a third title.
Penciled in with less precision than ziggurat or Zikkurat—Wright may been simultaneously writing and working out the letter sequence—taruggitz, in that fleeting moment, seemed to Wright a suitable label. Just as he inverted the Tower of Babylon, he reversed (more or less) the word ziggurat.
Wright brought the drawings to New York and permitted Rebay to glimpse them that March “for a short half hour”—and the spiritualist curator immediately liked Wright’s unique architectural vision.38 His inversion meant that her Museum of Non-Objective Art, though it defined an interior space, also implied ascendance. Wright’s widening gyre, rotating and rising to the heavens, conveyed the sense that no building could truly contain the art that carried such meaning for Rebay. However, the curator in her did have concerns about the adaptability of the building for the exhibition of the paintings; she gave Wright notes about reconfiguring interior spaces.
Before refined drawings could be completed, however, the long-hoped-for property purchase came to pass, when an empty lot at the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-Ninth Street was acquired by the Guggenheim Foundation. The plot was shorter and deeper than the one Wright had specified for his drawings, but the overall area was much the same.
The true moment of confirmation occurred in July. After her initial approval, Rebay admitted to having second thoughts; Wright, angry that she listened to “a group of small critics whispering to you concerning something about which they can really know nothing,” went to see Mr. Guggenheim.39 He traveled to New Hampshire to meet with the vacationing Guggenheims. He carried a sheaf of plans, duly revised.
Guggenheim paged through the drawings as Wright and Rebay watched. Some of them were elaborately painted illustrations. One, a so-called night rendering, had been drawn on black board with colored inks and tempera, suggesting the lanternlike quality the museum would have at night. Another portrayed the building cloaked in a rosy hue that Wright favored. (“Red,” he had assured Rebay, “is the color of Creation”; she did not agree.)40
After reaching the bottom of the pile, Guggenheim began again, working his way through the drawings, starting with the topmost, the tracing sheet that was both a section and an elevation. He concentrated on the drawings without so much as looking up at the architect and the curator waiting nearby.
Ever the deliberate businessman, Guggenheim said nothing, then made another pass through the portfolio Wright had brought.
Finally, Guggenheim raised his gaze. There were, Wright reported, tears in the man’s eyes.
“Mr. Wright,” he said, “I knew you could do it. This is it.”41
Wright may have recounted the story to his advantage, but his version, whatever its added colorings, aligns with the facts. After his time with Wright in New Hampshire, Guggenheim dispatched to Spring Green a check for $21,000 for the acceptance of the preliminary plans, decreeing Wright’s design “entirely satisfactory.”42 A model was commissioned, and with the plot purchased and Mr. Wright’s scheme approved, work on construction drawings could begin.
Mr. Guggenheim and Baroness von Rebay, it seemed, would get their museum.
The Plaza … Fifth Avenue, New York City … Autumn 1945
Word of Wright’s Manhattan project emerged gradually. In 1944, Rebay announced the acquisition of the property at Fifth Avenue and Eighty-Ninth Street, but few people seemed to be listening. By the time the press got a glimpse of Wright’s sketches for the new museum at a press luncheon at the Plaza Hotel on July 9, 1945, Wright had modified the plans again, dubbing the secondary structure adjacent to the tower the Monitor. But the reporters seemed as interested in a vacuum mechanism at the entrance as in the architecture (Life: “On entering the building, visitors will cross a floor grill where suction will pull dirt from clothes, help keep museum clean”).43
In September 1945, the volume of talk concerning Wright’s spiral rose measurably. A second Plaza press conference, this one attended by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and sixty-eight members of the press, engendered national publicity as the country shifted into peacetime mode with World War II finally over. Wright came to New York with a substantial set of working drawings—forty-two sheets, thirteen of them structural, all signed and dated by Wright on September 7, 1945.44 With paintings from the Guggenheim collection hung on the walls around him, Wright offered the public a look at the laboriously made Plexiglas model, also freshly arrived from Taliesin. Sections of Plexiglas had been heated in order to shape their curves, then painted a cream color. The labor-intensive fabrication, Wright told Guggenheim, had cost nearly $5,000, almost double what Wright had originally estimated.45 He also attached a new name to his project: Wright claimed to have designed “The Modern Gallery.”
Team Guggenheim: Mr. Wright, the baroness, and Solomon Guggenheim at the September 1945 New York press conference with the just-executed model. (Margaret Carson/New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection)
He posed for Life magazine with his big-as-a-bathtub model on the floor at his feet. In the magazine’s next issue, the lead article opened with a full-page photograph of “America’s most distinguished architect” looking doubtfully at the camera. He held the building’s dome in his hands, its surface scored to suggest the intricate glass tubes Wright planned to use. The accompanying text proclaimed, “When it is completed, probably in 1947, at a cost of $1,000,000, it will be the most unconventional building in New York City.”46
Wright was in pontification mode when he addressed the group of editors at the Plaza that Thursday in September, announcing, “This building is built like a spring.” He swung the front of the model open to reveal its dollhouse interior. “You can see how the ramp, which is coiled in the shape of a true logarithmic spiral, is one continuous piece from top to bottom, integral with the outside wall and the inside balcony.” Gently patting his brainchild, he told the surprised audience, “When the first atomic bomb lands on New York [the museum] will not be destroyed. It may be blown a few miles up into the air, but when it comes down, it will bounce.”47
The outrageous Wright made good copy, but some members of his audience, on returning to their desks, labeled his building “strange” and “bizarre.” At least one thought that the model looked like “a big, white ice cream freezer.”48 In the January issue of Architectural Forum, readers got a more fulsome view. Its editors predicted that, on ascending the circular glass elevator shaft and on descending the gallery ramps of the completed building, people “will have had their first real experience of what architecture can be like.”49
At the September 1945 press luncheon, a reporter from Time asked Wright whence the building’s form had come. The architect replied that he drew his inspiration from the Middle Eastern ziggurat, but that he inverted it because “the ziggurat is pessimistic.” His variation, he claimed, would produce a building that was “an optimistic ziggurat.”50
As years passed, Wright’s optimism would be tested. In 1946, an adjacent plot of land was acquired; the first parcel, which included the southeast corner of the intersection of Fifth and Eighty-Eighth, gained thirty feet of frontage on Fifth Avenue and an Eighty-Eighth Street access. However, the L-shaped parcel still left the building on the corner of the block in other hands. When Wright turned eighty the following year (admitting only to seventy-eight), construction had yet to begin. Guggenheim believed that, following a postwar rise in prices, construction costs would come down, but no such depression had come.
In 1948, exactly ten years after the issue dedicated to Wright introduced the house at Bear Run to the architectural public, Henry Luce and Architectural Forum editor Henry Wright handed Wright the reins again. As the editor’s note up front points out, “This issue was completely designed and written by [Wright]; the plans and sketches appear as they were drawn by the 50 young men who now compose the Taliesin Fellowship.”51 To prepare the January issue, the editor had journeyed to Taliesin, meeting again with Jack Howe and Wes Peters, apprentices he met a decade earlier (Peters by then was married to Olgivanna’s daughter by her first marriage, Svetlana, and had become very much a part of the Wright family).
Henry Wright knew the drill: “Things haven’t changed much. Everybody still gets up for breakfast at six; everybody washes his own dishes and takes turns cooking. There is still a movie in the theatre on Saturdays, dinner and music in the Wright living room on Sundays, lots of good talk every day when the drafting room knocks off for tea at 4:30.” But the focus, the editor wrote, always came back to “the silvery-haired Master, [sitting] at his own drafting table, in front of the roaring wall-size fireplace … turning his enormous dreams of life for Free Men into the reality of structure—his force and vitality undiminished.”52
When his turn came, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote in the magazine of his Fifth Avenue museum-to-be, “The Museum for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation will be built someday … Construction of the building is awaiting favorable building conditions.”53
As events unfolded, however, Wright’s optimistic ziggurat lost whatever momentum it had in November 1949. Wright had written to Rebay in June, complaining, “The cosmos sweeps onward and upward while we crawl on the surface like flies on a transparent window-pane.”54 His stairless structure met a new level of stasis when, on November 3, the once-imposing figure of Solomon Guggenheim, weakened by a battle with cancer, succumbed, at age eighty-eight.
Wright remembered the older man respectfully—by then Wright himself was well into his eighty-third year—and described Guggenheim as “the only American millionaire whom I knew or had heard of who died facing the Future. All others cuddle up to the past.”55 For some years to come, however, the future home for non-objective art that the dead man envisioned made little progress aside from the new name that Wright coined. He took to calling his ziggurat the Guggenheim Memorial.