Wright and ukiyo-e: profiting from prints

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan: The Architect's Other Passion. by Julia Meech, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 2001; 304 pages, $49.50.

Shortly before Sir Edmund Walker, a distinguished Canadian collector of ukiyo-e, embarked on a print-purchasing expedition to Japan in 1917, the scholar and connoisseur Frederick W. Gookin wrote cautioning him about the dealers he would encounter there: "Frank Wright I think you know something about. He is a fascinating, adorable, and utterly irresponsible genius, full of magnetism, selfish to the extent of violating all the conventions if he sees fit; and an artist to his fingertips." Architectural historians have long been familiar with Frank Lloyd Wright's admiration for the Japanese print, but the extent of his involvement as a dealer has until recently been little known or appreciated.

In the early `80s Julia Meech, then a curator in the Metropolitan Museum's Far Eastern art department engaged in researching the provenance of the museum's print holdings, repeatedly came across the name "F.L. Wright" listed as vendor. For 1918 alone there were almost 400 such entries. Meech's discovery was the catalyst for a nearly 20-year investigation of auction and sale records, museum archives, state court and probate proceedings, county historical societies, turn-of-the-century press accounts and the architect's own voluminous correspondence. The story she unearthed has never before been fully told--in Meryle Secrest's standard biography of Wright, this chapter of the architect's life receives only half a dozen passing mentions--and with the publication of Meech's Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan: The Architect's Other Passion, it is hard to imagine anyone's telling it better.

As Meech's elegantly written and authoritative account makes clear, Wright's fortunes as an architect and his career as a dealer in ukiyo-e were inextricably related, and without an awareness of Wright's personal history, his activities in the art market would make little sense. His work as an architect from 1905 to 1925 ranks among his most brilliant and innovative. The Prairie Style houses (especially Frederick Robie's), Hollyhock House and Taliesin, the architect's own baronial estate at Spring Green, Wis., revolutionized domestic architecture in the United States and created the basis for 20th-century residential design. These same years were also Wright's most active as a dealer, and he played a key role in the formation of many of the great American collections. Meech, now a senior consultant in the department of Japanese art at Christie's, says that "despite fierce competition, [Wright] brought more and finer Japanese prints to America than anyone else, with the exception of Ernest Fenoliosa."

The fact that Wright was not a rich man never stopped him from behaving like one. His general improvidence and fecklessness kept his wife and family in perennially exigent financial circumstances, and his lawyers and accountants in a state bordering on despair. Although Wright's work in the United States, and on Tokyo's Imperial Hotel, won him an international reputation, contracts for Chicago skyscrapers, business emporia, factories and other commercial ventures were almost always awarded to less visionary and more reliable competitors. Architect's commissions were customarily based on 10 percent of building costs, and because virtually all of Wright's designs during this period were for homes, his practice was never particularly remunerative.

In any given year, revenue from his print sales often exceeded what Wright was able to earn from architecture. Meech contrasts the $3,650 (yielding probably $1,800 in clear profit) Wright received from the New York collector Howard Mansfield for a print from Utamaro's "Ten Classes of Women's Physiogomy" series in 1919 with the $2,700 he was paid to design the Henry Allen house in Wichita, a project that took three years to complete. She estimates that during Wright's two decades as a print dealer, his gross income from documented sales alone exceeded $300,000. This computes to about $150,000 net profit (or $7,500 annually), as compared to the six-year fee of $30,000 (or $5,000 per year) that Wright was paid to design the Imperial Hotel. Meech notes that the $703 one of Wright's clients spent on an 18th-century print in 1913 was equal to the entire annual wage of a Ford Motor Company worker at the time. (Historians generally agree, by the way, that the average price of a ukiyo-e print when originally issued was about that of a bowl of noodles.)

Few art dealers have cut quite so imposing a figure. His long flowing hair and distinguished countenance, the architect Richard Neutra recorded, called to mind Franz Liszt. Although his broad-brimmed hat, fin de siecle cravat and cape, and the cane he used to punctuate his conversation, would have seemed absurd and affected on anyone else, Wright carried the look off with considerable panache. He had a "delicate and warmly modulated" voice, Alistair Cooke recalls, that for over 50 years "seduced wax manufacturers, oil tycoons, bishops, university boards of trustees, and at least one Emperor of Japan."