Mission to the World

Apprentice to Genius: Years with Frank Lloyd Wright By Edgar Tafel McGraw-Hill, 228 pp., $19.95 The title of this book is apt. If genius is defined as talent so transcendent that it leaves nothing in its field of activity unchanged, at home or abroad, then the only three American artists to whom the term can be properly applied are Walt Whitman, Eugene O’Neill, and Frank Lloyd Wright. And since architecture, unlike poetry or drama, affects all of us, altering the physical environment itself, Wright’s claim is the greatest. With an ego at least as overblown as the two writers’, Wright had a more enduring sense of mission. He never gave up expecting that his art would change the world. And, like the world’s great religious leaders, Wright collected around him disciples to carry his mission into the future.

I had seen these disciples myself, first at Taliesin in 1932, then at Taliesin West 25 years later, and finally at the Hotel Plaza, when the 89-year-old architect was still fighting the Establishment over his “outrageous” Guggenheim Museum and I was provoking his final sparks of wit and wisdom for the double interview with Philip Johnson in Conversations with Artists. I had observed that these disciples were of two sorts: those who slavishly carried out the Master’s dictates, the errand boys of genius; and those who clung desperately to their identities, waiting to be fired when Wright became irritated enough with their insubordination.

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Apprentice to Genius: Years with Frank Lloyd Wright By Edgar Tafel McGraw-Hill, 228 pp., $19.95 The title of this book is apt. If genius is defined as talent so transcendent that it leaves nothing in its field of activity unchanged, at home or abroad, then the only three American artists to whom the term can be properly applied are Walt Whitman, Eugene O’Neill, and Frank Lloyd Wright. And since architecture, unlike poetry or drama, affects all of us, altering the physical environment itself, Wright’s claim is the greatest. With an ego at least as overblown as the two writers’, Wright had a more enduring sense of mission. He never gave up expecting that his art would change the world. And, like the world’s great religious leaders, Wright collected around him disciples to carry his mission into the future.

I had seen these disciples myself, first at Taliesin in 1932, then at Taliesin West 25 years later, and finally at the Hotel Plaza, when the 89-year-old architect was still fighting the Establishment over his “outrageous” Guggenheim Museum and I was provoking his final sparks of wit and wisdom for the double interview with Philip Johnson in Conversations with Artists. I had observed that these disciples were of two sorts: those who slavishly carried out the Master’s dictates, the errand boys of genius; and those who clung desperately to their identities, waiting to be fired when Wright became irritated enough with their insubordination.