Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder by Claudia Kalb

Author:Claudia Kalb [Kalb, Claudia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4262-1467-7
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2016-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

WRIGHT SPENT THE FINAL YEARS of his life overseeing construction of the Guggenheim in New York City, where he set up camp at the Plaza Hotel. Never wavering from his aesthetic ideals, the architect overhauled his suite, which he named “Taliesin East,” with velvet curtains, Japanese gold wallpaper, and, of course, a grand piano. A Saturday Review writer who interviewed him there in 1953 described the 84-year-old architect pacing about in a gray robe, beaded green slippers, and an orange-blue scarf, his long hair flowing. In a booming voice, Wright grandstanded about his favorite subjects—the poetic elegance of Japanese art, the debacle of American architecture (“Look at the U.N. Building—a great slab in a great graveyard”), and his ongoing efforts to “wake my people up” to the fact that without worthy architecture, there would be no culture. “They’d call that arrogance, wouldn’t they?” Wright quipped. “Well, I suppose it is.”

The Guggenheim, one of Wright’s most iconic achievements, would take 16 years to build, from start to finish. On April 9, 1959, just six months before it opened, Wright died at age 91 in a Phoenix hospital, where he had been transported after suffering an intestinal obstruction at Taliesin West, a winter home he built in the Arizona desert.

The Guggenheim’s debut that fall was met with both acclamation and disdain. By then, numerous tweaks had been made, including the addition of metal rods that allowed the paintings to be hung vertically instead of tilted back against the sloping walls. In a review in the New Yorker that December, Lewis Mumford extolled Wright as “a true artist, one of the most richly endowed geniuses this country has produced” before skewering his design. The color was dull, the concrete “sullen” and fortress-like, and then there was the building’s “ruinous” interior, commandeering both painting and viewer. “If the outside of the building says ‘Power’—power to defy blast, to resist change, to remain as immune to time as the Pyramids,” Mumford wrote, “the interior says ‘Ego’—an ego far deeper than the pool in which Narcissus too long gazed.”

It is impossible to disentangle Wright the architect from Wright the boy, the husband, the father, the philanderer, the tyrant, the innovator, the narcissist, the visionary. He was all of these, driven by his unique tangle of circumstances and experiences. In the end, Wright drove his people into the ground and he woke his people up. In so doing, he created a towering legacy that lives on in the breathtaking structures he created—and the beauty he fashioned from nature.

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