Toward the end of his long and successful career as an architect, Frank Lloyd Wright remembered Japan, the scene of so much of his inspiration.
He spoke of "shrines for the artist pilgrims in need of worship or in search of light." Earlier he spoke of houses as "vessels of space," and the art as transcendental. "The Japanese lavish loving care on their beautiful things. To them beautiful things are religious things and their care is a great privilege."
Wright also lavished loving care on beautiful examples of Japanese art, in particularly the woodblock prints which he collected. "The Japanese print is one of the most amazing products of the world and I think no nation has anything to compare with it." Feeling as he did, he collected many examples.
That Wright was a print-dealer is fairly well known. Not until Julia Meech began her investigatory proceedings, however, was the extent revealed.
Wright, it turns out, at one point made more money on print dealing than he did on his architectural ventures, and like any successful trader he bought low and sold high. He bought thousands of prints from the 1890s until his death in 1959.
As one collector told the author: "Oh, Wright had lots of these things; he liked them because they were cheap in those days." The extent of this dealing proved so enormous that Meech found that she might append a subtitle to her book: "The Architect's Other Passion."
Indeed, the other passion defined the architect. For a time Wright was more famous as a seller than a builder. In quoting Brendan Gill, who referred to the architect's "many masks," Meech adds that among them was "certainly the mask of Japanese art expert."
Which (a mask being a mask) is to imply that he was really no such thing -- that is he was not a real professional. Proof might be the several bad buys he made and his entertaining attempts to escape the consequences.
He had sold a number of prints for a large amount of money to several well-known collectors who found that some of them had been recolored. Wright maintained he had been cheated by the Japanese dealers (with whom he was on terms of the most cordial ill will) and promptly replaced the faulty items from his own collection, but the whole catastrophe might not have occurred if Wright had been a true professional.
Meech on the other hand is truly professional. She is a pre-eminent scholar in her field, was formerly Asian art curator at the Metropolitan Museum and is now a consultant on Japanese art at Christie's in New York. I do not imply, of course, that she -- like her subject -- sells; rather, that she is the complete expert and has here brought together all of the evidence necessary to create the permanent book on her subject.
And most engaging it is. Lively to read but set in the granite of scholarship, it follows in full picaresque detail the ups and downs of the architect's other passion.
It is like reading a Vanity Fair tell-all report couched in the vernacular of Forbes. All the personal details are here as well as all the financial ones.
Prints and how much they were sold for are tracked down, all the financial reports (fiddled or otherwise) are examined. It is a business history -- "he bought cheaply in Tokyo, and sold at notoriously high prices back home" -- with lashings of personal biography.
Eminently even-handed and quite fair in its survey of this aspect of this sometimes impossibly self-serving man, the book nonetheless is so thorough about the trade that a reader might think that Wright's expressed feelings had remained unconsidered.
So they are, to a point. One of the pleasures of the book is to compare his pious aestheticisms with his wallowings in a market place so often (and so wrongly) contrasted with the ivory tower.
The difference between what the man said and what he did contains something ironic. One remembers his saying that for the Japanese "beautiful things are religious things and their care is a great privilege." We now know of what the care largely consisted.
What would certainly have pleased the architect/print seller is not the text but the extent of the pictorial evidence. Print after print is wonderfully reproduced, photograph after photograph of the places and people talked about are included. I have never seen a scholarly thesis better illustrated.
So much that it has inspired an exhibition, curated by Meech, for which this book might be considered a super-lavish catalog.
The exhibit is on display at the Japan Society Gallery in Manhattan (under the directorship of Alexandra Munroe) and continues until July 15. If you cannot get there you can at least acquire this portable version.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.