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Book Description
Renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright was an avid and important collector and dealer of Asian art. His personal collection included thousands of Japanese color woodblock prints, and it was his discerning eye that helped build the foremost private holdings in the United States, which in turn became the cornerstones of the important collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This lavish book-which accompanies an exhibition at the Japan Society Gallery in New York-examines Wright's passion for Japanese art and illuminates the profound impact it had on his personal and professional life.

Author Julia Meech has devoted years to researching this aspect of Wright's life and work. Her fascinating study-which spans Wright's entire career and is lavishly illustrated with color reproductions of works of art and scores of archival photographs-adds a rich new chapter to the body of scholarship on the great American architect.

About the Author
Julia Meech, a scholar and art historian, is a senior consultant in the Department of Japanese Art at Christie's in New York City, where she lives.

Customer Reviews
The Passion of Frank Lloyd Wright, April 14, 2001
Reviewer: Robert Sayers (Arlington, VA USA)
It's almost unimaginable that anyone could find something new to say about this protean figure of the 20th Century. And, in fact, another author, Kevin Nute, has also written in recent years about the architect's lifelong fascination with things Japanese. Yet where Nute concentrates on the Orientalist ideas and design concepts that Wright so readily and brilliantly adapted in his own work, Julia Meech turns her attention to a different--and darker--side of the architect's personality: his passion for Japanese prints and art collecting. As she tells it, this obsession (his print purchases often exceeded the money that he took in on architectural commissions) not only drove Wright into bankruptcy, but ensnared him in a debilitating scandal over the resale of "revamped" artworks to several of his wealthy patrons.

Wright, the driven, self-absorbed genius, is everywhere apparent in this fascinating, well-researched saga. But so is the conflicted man behind the famous persona. (This isn't to say that he emerges as a particularly sympathetic figure: Meech relates, for instance, how Wright helped organize a memorial exhibition following the untimely death of his Japanese mentor, the young and talented printmaker Hashiguchi Goyo. She adds, however, that no evidence exists to show that Wright ever owned one of Goyo's prints--a bit ironic given the high regard in which Goyo's work is held today.)

Equal to Meech's riveting account, I would have to say that this is one of the most beautifully-designed catalogs (it accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Japan Society Gallery in New York City) that I have ever encountered. It is both lavish and tasteful, if that's possible, with gorgeous color plates and scads of rare photographs of the architect and his cronies, his places of refuge (including hotel suites and other temporary dwellings chock-a-block full of art treasures), and persons and places relevant to the story. For Frank Lloyd Wright fans already burdened by a surfeit of wonderful books, make room on your shelf for a fine new acquisition.

• Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan : The Role of Traditional Japanese Art and Architecture in the Work of Frank Lloyd Wright
  by Kevin Nute [ISBN: 0415232694]
  Kevin Nute's book, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, is written with an unusual depth of inquiry. Thorough and clearly labeled illustrations and descriptive text identify connections between real Japanese buildings and works of art and Wright's architecture and design motifs.
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• Frank Lloyd Wright in the Realm of Ideas
  by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Gerald Nordland, Frank Lloyd Wright, Dallas Museum of Art, Scottsdale Arts Center Association [ISBN: 0809314223]
  This collection of essays complements a traveling exhibition of Wright's work organized by the Scottsdale Arts Center Association. Five scholarly essays cover different aspects of the master's work, from his early career in Chicago to his principles of organic architecture...
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