—Frank Lloyd Wright
1931–32 … Lining Up the Architects
Mr. Wright—Johnson addressed the man with his honorific as most everyone did—did things in his own time. Johnson’s other contributors seemed to grasp the significance of deadlines, but Exhibition Director Philip Johnson had trouble extracting so much as a photograph from Frank Lloyd Wright.
Johnson’s summer abroad had begun with a meeting in the Hague with J. J. P. Oud, whose featured design in the show would be a model of the proposed Homer and Louise Johnson home in Pinehurst, North Carolina, a vacation house (never to be built) with a plan that included a swimming pool and tennis court, along with a dramatic elevated sunroom with the footprint of a tennis racket. When Johnson moved on to Germany, he met with Walter Gropius, where they agreed that a model of the Bauhaus headquarters in Dessau suited the MoMA show. Meanwhile Hitchcock visited Le Corbusier to commission a model of his Villa Savoye, a just-completed house in Poissy-sur-Seine. Built on a square plan with its main living space on the second level, which was cantilevered over supporting piers, the Villa Savoye shared with the Tugendhat House a grid of steel supports that meant the outer walls were not load bearing. On the roof terrace, the cylindrical walls of a solarium resembled a great steamship stack. Le Corbusier’s design, a stark geometric exercise, seemed to embody his notion of a “machine for living.”
With models in the works by masters Corbu, Gropius, and Oud, Johnson could claim excellent progress on three key fronts.
The arrival of Johnson, Barr, and Hitchcock in Berlin would be remembered by Miës as an “invasion.” The Americans hoped Miës could be persuaded to design a house specifically for the exhibition, but after their visit to his atelier, Miës proved reluctant, ignoring a series of promptings from Johnson. Eventually, Alfred Barr proposed a solution. “Why not have him do the Brno house,” he wrote to Johnson, “since it is the largest and most luxurious private house in the style?”1 All parties soon agreed to the choice of the Tugendhat House, inspiring Johnson to travel to Czechoslovakia for a repeat visit. By August 15, he cabled home, his sense of relief easily read between the lines: MODELS STARTED ENLARGEMENTS ALMOST DONE … FEEL WORK IS ALMOST DONE.2
Four months later, in December 1931, Frank Lloyd Wright would put Johnson’s jaunty confidence to the test.
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During the summer, Wright’s commitment to the show had taken physical form when two large crates, sent at his expense, arrived in New York, packed with drawings and photographs. Always keen to be the center of attention, Wright had soon been unhappy to learn that, aside from a model, only half a dozen poster-size photographs would represent his large body of work.
He refused to grasp that he was merely a contributor to a group show, despite having seen the prospectus Built to Live In, which included images of buildings by the Europeans Gropius, Miës, and Oud, along with the work of a number of architects working in the United States, some American-born and others émigrés. Perhaps Wright persuaded himself to contribute because he expected that his stature as the best-known among them would guarantee his work would overshadow the Europeans, who were little known to the American public. Whatever Wright’s thinking, Johnson had reason to worry when, months later, as the trees lost their leaves, no freight carrier delivered a model from Taliesin.
Wright had gone off on a junket to Rio de Janeiro to judge a competition, but his secretary, Karl Jensen, wrote in November to assure Johnson that two models, one for a theater, another for a house, neared completion. When Wright was the only contributor who had failed to deliver his model by the official deadline of December 1, the exasperated Johnson wrote a firm letter. He expressed his preference for the house rather than the theater, adding, “The model absolutely must leave Taliesin before December 30th.”3
It didn’t, though the New Year brought another promise. This time Johnson learned that three models were being readied. One model was of the previously mentioned theater, the second a house identified (for the first time) as House on the Mesa, and the last a gas station.4
An anxious Johnson faced a catalog deadline for which he needed a photograph of the Wright project. The exhibition schedule looked impossibly tight, with the opening of the show barely two weeks away. But Johnson could do little but wait and worry. When no photograph arrived for the January 18 press date, he wired Wright, demanding that photographs and plans of the House on the Mesa be sent by express.
Wright’s response—a fiery telegram—made matters unthinkably worse: “My way has been too long and too lonely to make a belated bow to my people as a modern architect.” He explicitly disowned two other architects in the show, Raymond Hood and his former protégé Richard Neutra, dismissing them as “a self-advertising amateur and high-powered salesman.” Then he dropped the bombshell: “No bitterness and sorry but kindly and finally drop me out of your promotion.”5
A stunned Johnson realized that Wright was withdrawing from the show.
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The letter that followed—addressed “My Dear Philip” and signed “Sincerely yours, Frank Lloyd Wright”—rewards a close reading. Perhaps more than any other missive of the many that Wright and Johnson exchanged over the nearly three decades of their association, the communication of January 19, 1932, consisting of some 650 words, unilaterally set the terms of their acquaintanceship.
Wright began by admitting to being “an uncompromising egotist.”6
Then—and later—Johnson could hardly disagree. Even with Johnson in a position of power (he was, after all, the exhibition director), Wright employed his one piece of leverage, his architectural work. He would be stepping aside, he said, letting “the procession go by with its band-wagon.”
Next he disclaimed responsibility for the problem, placing blame on Johnson, whom he accused of not making clear the character of the exhibition at the start. We can only imagine Johnson’s response, but surely—expletives deleted—he thought of the prospectus, shown to Wright at the start and from which the plan had deviated little. But Wright was refusing to see any missteps as his.
Moving on, the self-proclaimed visionary asserted himself: “I find myself a man without a country, architecturally speaking, at the present time. If I keep on working another five years, I shall be at home again, I feel sure.”
Did Johnson scoff? Likely he did, given his belief that the sun was setting on Wright’s career. However, Wright’s unlikely prediction would prove true. By 1938, just six years later, Wright would be on the cover of Time magazine, together with a house he built in a Pennsylvania waterfall. In a way he had never before been, he would be “at home again,” this time at the very top of not only the architectural world but as a genuine celebrity well beyond the usual boundaries for an architect.
Moving to the circumstances at hand, Wright’s letter of January 19, 1932, got personal: “I see too much at stake for me to countenance a hand-picked group of men in various stages of eclecticism by riding around the country with them.”
Hitchcock and Johnson himself were the subject of the next onslaught: “Propaganda is a vice in our country. High power salesmanship is a curse. I can at least mind my own business … and not compete or consort with what are to me disreputable examples of disreputable methods that will get our future architecture nothing but an ‘international style.’”
That new style, he observed, was a mere “cut paper style at that,” one destined to fade.
Wright’s letter was a withering dismissal of Johnson and the very idea of the exhibition. Wright even added an assertion of his own rectitude, explaining that to “join your procession” would be to “belie my own principles both of architecture and conduct … I shall at least not have sold out!”
Johnson read Wright’s rhetorical tour de force, with its a mix of subterfuge, disdain, exaggeration, and self-justification. Until that moment, Johnson had imagined he was on the verge of a transformative moment in his personal status and for that of architecture in the public realm; upon absorbing Wright’s words, Johnson’s sense must have been one of free fall. He was a week from taking charge of MoMA’s freshly emptied galleries to install an exhibition that was to be unlike any other ever mounted. Now, it seemed, he would have to do it without Wright, and despite his charge from the trustees, the show would lack a “forerunner.” A strong west wind from central Wisconsin looked to be on the verge of scattering Johnson’s ambitions like a house of cards.
But Wright hadn’t quite finished. He added as a closing paragraph what must be read as a disingenuous invitation: “Believe me, Philip, I am sorry. Give my best to Russell Hitchcock and I expect to see you both here at Taliesin early next summer—with your wives. If you haven’t got them now you will have them by then?”
With a final homophobic taunt—it was no secret that Hitchcock shared Johnson’s sexual orientation—Wright put the template in place for architecture’s odd couple. Like a dog and a cat forced to share the same home, Wright and Johnson would thereafter circle each other, looking for ways to coexist.