Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What Was That About The Dark Side Of Genius ... ?, August 27, 2006
For years I have been devoted to Frank Lloyd Wright, seeking out his buildings and reading all I could get my hands on about his life and work. His one-of-a-kind genus created a body of work which has lost none of its power. For me that power holds a nostalgia, too, for an era we will never see again, a time when cheap labor and an architect's take-no-prisoners charisma could get astonishing structures erected. Those elegant Usonian homes from the 1940s do make me pine for an era of cheaper materials and fewer code restrictions. One can read the histories of his structures and grow dewey-eyed: To think there was a time when one could build a house for $5,000, and have that house be an exquisite cedar and brick jewel box, sited magnifiecntly on a bluff with a glorious view of the valley below -- in very short order proclaimed a masterpiece -- !
But so much of the canonical Wright literature is hagiography. This book is anything but. Its first pages, for instance, rip away the veil of obscurity regarding Iovanna, Wright's & Olgivanna's child, who was still living when then the authors began the project. Until I read these passages, it had not occured to me that the woman was mysteriously absent from what I read about Wright and the Fellowship. The authors tracked her down to a mental institution. There is clearly a tragedy surrounding her, one that the keeper's of Wright's legacy have ... hidden? avoided? dismissed?
She seems lucid enough when the authors talk to her.
It is sad of course to have one's heroes diminshed. Wright does not come off well in this book. His and Olgivanna's antagonistic relationship is fully exposed. And she in particular seems an absolute horror. Perhaps I am unrealistically devoted to the ideal of independence of the human creative spirit, but I found the evidence of her meddling in the lives of the people around her to be appalling stuff. Wright's pettiness also had me confounded. Frequently his behavior was downright childish.
Towards the end of the book a good case is made for a strong history of manic-depression on both Wright's and his Olginanna's part, and certainly so in the case of their only child.
This book is filled with background on Gurdjieff In previous books his influence on the Fellowship has been alluded to but never has it been discussed in such detail. I found much of the detail to make for tedious reading however; I decided immediately Gurdjieff to be the very epitome of the Cult Of Gobbledygook (as such, a perfect foil for Wright himself -- did you ever try to read HIS writing??).
I must confess that as much as I love Wright's architecture and will continue to seek it out as well as the buildings designed by his apprentices, it is a bit of a relief to read it is not ALL regarded as masterwork. There are 2 books available covering the work of Wright's apprentices (Tobias Guggenheimer's "A Taliesin Legacy" and the official Taliesin Assosciate Architect's coffee-table style "A Living Architecture") and in each are examples of dubious architectural achievement. Of course architecture is a 3-dimensional experience and should not be judged by photographs alone. Wright, like any architect, had his share of the not-quite-beautiful. Wright built over 400 structures in his 72 year career, so seeming aesthetic missteps were inevitable. Maybe not everyone would agree what's on that list... but, is it just me or is Pfeiffer Chapel at Florida Southern College ugly?
Five years ago I made my first trip to Taliesin West, something I had been looking forward to for years. Indeed it was, and will continue to be, stunning. The aura of one person encompassing so many others, and in such an extensive built environment springing from that one mind, with little precedent, is humbling. But even then I got a spooky feeling from that Taliesin Fellowship, listening to grown apprentices or the children thereof give out tour-guide reminiscences, worshipful and rather too rehearsed. I knew then that being a Taliesin apprentice couldn't have been all that great ... and this book confirms my apprehensions vividly.
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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Essential Book, February 18, 2007
This is one of the most engaging non-fiction books I've read in the last few years. The reviewer who said that it combines the joys of People magazine and scholarship definitely has a point. The story of Wright's fellowship is wonderfully peculiar, amazing, and sad. I came to the book with some knowledge of Wright (I've been to both Taliesins and have visited a number of his other buildings) and a strong interest in 20th century American cultural history. But Wright's always been a puzzle. He was a great genius, but his roofs leaked. His architecture (to me, anyway) is infinitely more appealing than that of the International Style, but somehow became an also-ran. No strong proteges ever emerged to carry the torch.
This book certainly provides many clues to the puzzles of Wright. For one thing, it places him in the context of his culture. For example, I had no idea of the strong influence the occultist Georgi Gurdjieff had on Wright and especially his wife Olgivanna. And while I'd always heard that Taliesen was something of a "cult of personality," well, it was more than that -- it was pretty much a cult in the literal sense. Wright and his family occupied an almost godly position, and the "apprentices" slaved away uncompensated and bent to the Wright's every whim or were asked to leave.
One negative review complained that contradictory descriptons of Wright's behavior indicate that that the book is full of falsehoods. I take the opposite tack. I think the book draws a very believable portrait of a contradictory man. Wright is shown as a homophobe who nonetheless tolerated and treasured numerous homosexuals in his inner circle and an anti-Semite with many Jewish followers. Both are quite believable, partly because Wright had no interest in (and was not capable of) being consistent and because both prejudices were absolutely normal in early and mid-century America. I also have little trouble understanding that the great champion of a Democratic architecture could be at times both a fascist and communist sympathizer. He was a great elitist, and the sort of thinker who elevates Mankind in the abstract but has little sympathy for ordinary humans.
It's fun and illuminating to see Wright and Olgivanna take the measure of other 20th century luminaries -- Olgivanna dismissed "Atlas Shrugged" as "slush." And it's also fun to see how Wright, a stunningly imperious soul, could be intimidated by other even more imperious types -- especially if they were connected to money.
In truth, Wright emerges from this book as something of a monster, or as Gurdjieff put it, "an idiot." But anyone who knows anything about Wright's life already suspected that. What redeems him is the fact that he really was a genius, just as he always insisted.
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32 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Zellman and Friedland's literary coup!, August 23, 2006
Harold Zellman, architect and architectural historian and Roger Friedland, Professor of Religious Studies and Sociology at UCSB, have pulled off a major literary coup. They've written a book that will not only satisfy the academic rigor of their colleges, but also will be a sure-fire best seller full of sex, lies and architecture.
The new book The Fellowship - The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & The Taliesin Fellowship is a mesmerizing account of the drama, scandalous sexual escapades, spiritual journey, and artistic achievements of a man many believe was the premier architect of the twentieth century.
The book, published this week by Regan Media, has already been selected by Book of the Month Club, cited in Vanity Fair and The New York Post's Page Six
Zellman and Friedland's ten-year opus on Frank Lloyd Wright originally began when the two teamed up as Getty Scholars to examine a modernist cooperative community built in West Los Angeles after World War II. While researching Crestwood Hills, the two traced its origins back to two men--an architect and a violist--both of whom had been apprentices at Taliesin, an architectural commune set up in 1932 by Wright and his wife, the mysterious Olgivanna.
Taliesin was created to be an experimental center for both architecture and living. Staffed by young, eager aspiring architects -- mostly male -- who wanted to learn from the master, it quickly evolved into a "cult of genius," a place where Olgivanna, Wright's third wife, could promote the teaching of Georgi Gurdjieff. This bald, mustachioed, charismatic Russian trickster-guru claimed his eyes could not only penetrate a man's psyche, but also bring a woman to orgasm from across a room.
For the next thirty years, Taliesin became a place where Wright would not only get free in-house labor, but his wife would be able to have total sway over the mental, physical and sexual lives of the architect's devoted followers.
Zellman and Friedland were able to crack the hitherto impenetrable world of Taliesin, to show how many of the hundreds who came to study there were transformed by the Wrights into willing instruments of Olgivanna's will, how she was able to exert, total control, both emotionally and sexually over many of Wright's protégés. Frank Lloyd gave his wife the ultimate gift, her own live-action dollhouse.
In addition, The Fellowship depicts how the Wrights created one of the few safe havens for homosexuals of their era. Taliesin became one of the great closets in American history. Gay men could be safe there at a time when overt homosexual activity was still a dangerous activity in our country. However, a number of them paid quite a price.
The chapters on Olgivanna's playing with her doll house are riveting, particularly the stories about Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, who became a virtual slave of the Wright's and complained that her father's hours was not as an emotionally scaring experience as being at Taliesin.
The best sections of the book however are on Wright. The authors' insights into who Frank Lloyd really was are both insightful and pretty scary. Mr. Wright was the Mel Gibson of his era. Wright's anti-Semitism had to be kept under control: A majority of his clients were Jewish. Not only did Wright publicly endorse Charles Lindberg and Henry Ford's political charges blaming the Jews for America's entry into World War II, but, like Mr. Gibson, when provoked, Wright would resort to anti-Semitic screeds. For example, when a Jewish apprentice came in over bid construct an exhibition Wright had given him no plans, Wright sniped: "Let your beard grow back and go on being a rabbi." The apprentice was Jewish; he was not, however, a rabbi.
Friedland and Zellman also have done ground-braking work on Frank Lloyd Wright's sexual ambiguity, his life-long struggle with his own manhood, how he identified himself with Socrates bi-sexual lover, Alcibiades, a code-word for gay leaning men, how many of his closest male friends were homosexuals, how he confessed to one: "there but for the grace of God, go I."
What the authors do best is abjure the accepted myths about Frank Lloyd Wright and his profusely talented archetypical legacy. They show us with exquisite detail what it was like to live and create some of America's most famous architectural monuments.
The Fellowship is a true guilty pleasure. A book that you can read and feel smart about yourself, but one that will amuse and titillate the reader as much as this weeks copy of "People" magazine.
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