The Japan Connection

We saw in the last article how Wright was not a true functionalist in the austere sense discussed last time.  European Modern architecture had reached a point of elimination and sterility that even he could not accept.  Also, the modern moves in non-objective art were antithetical to where Wright drew his inspiration.  A clue to where Wright drew his contrary ideas of architecture comes not from the West and Europe, but from the East and Japan.  

FROM FORM AND FUNCTION TO THE VALUE OF THE AESTHETIC

Because Wright did not claim inspiration from very many other influences, we may take special note when he did admit to influence on his thought and work.  He did acknowledged influence from Japanese architecture and woodblock prints, and even so, perhaps did not give it as much credit as it really had on his work and his formation of organic architecture. 

Not only was Wright an avid dealer in Japanese woodblock prints, but in 1912 he published a not widely known book entitled, The Japanese Print: An Interpretation.  Presumably a book about Japanese prints, this little book in fact is very revealing of his ideas of organic architecture and how Japanese art influenced that development, even though he preferred to refer to this influence on his work as “confirming” of it.  In Wright’s book, he discusses how the Japanese artist “grasps form always by reaching underneath for its geometry….he recognizes and acknowledges geometry as its aesthetic skeleton. By this grasp of geometric form and sense of its symbol-value, he has the secret of getting to the hidden core of reality.”  Wright saw his own architecture in a similar way of geometric abstraction rather than literal imitation of nature’s forms.  Japanese art and architecture also expressed “an organic form, an organization in a very definite matter of parts or elements into a larger unity — a vital whole.”  Wright also referred to the Japanese print as revealing the “gospel of the elimination of the insignificant,” something he would refer to again many times in his own work.  

Many would say that by 1912 (publication of The Japanese Print: An Interpretation) or even 1905 (his first trip to Japan) that Wright’s theory of organic architecture was already solidified and therefore was not influenced by Japanese art in its development.  However, according to Kevin Nute’s excellent book, , we have good reason to believe his exposure to Japanese influence was both earlier and deeper than he admits, even earlier than the Japanese pavilion (Ho-o-den) at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  Nute’s book describes a lineage of influence available to Wright from his first job at Silsbee’s office in Chicago via Ernest Fenellosa and others that were key in bringing exposure to Japanese art to the United States.

The modern movement in Europe was rooted in a form of reductionism.  However, what Wright saw in the East was the idea of finding the inner truth or “idea” of the thing and then abstracting it or conventionalizing it.  When Wright espoused simplicity in architecture, he was not speaking of a Loosian elimination of ornament but of a Japanese sensibility, one of the elimination of the insignificant that heightens the essential nature of the place.  Also, as Nute points out in his book, Hegel had described that the artistic genius could penetrate “to the essence of external things.” And “This natural gift…to seize the particular element of objects and their real forms is the prime condition of artistic genius.” Hegel also said that “Art does not consist in mere fidelity in the imitation of nature. The real has been soiled by its mixture with the accidental, and Art must eliminate this defilement, and restore the contemplated object to its harmony with its veritable Idea.”  Wright often emphasized the importance of the “Idea” when expressing the concept of a design, for it was in the Idea that the essence of the design lay.  Further, this essence was more important than the perfection of every detail of the building, unlike, say Mies Van der Rohe who sought to perfect the detail but did not have the same concept of the integrated whole as Wright practiced it.  The conventionalization process as referred to by Wright was the process of distilling the underlying geometric forms to their essence rather than a literal imitation or realism.  In this vein Wright described the famous Japanese Ukiyo-e artist Hokusai one who “never drew Fujiyama honestly, the way Hiroshige did. He always lied about it, he liked to make it pointed.  He thought it was too heavy and to flat, so he improved on it…He knew what would be natural but he wanted to get that lovely effect, and he got it.”  Here Wright was using the term lying in the poetic sense, or what we often call “artistic license” today.  The more important point of this being that he was not positioning himself as a realist in the Western sense, but intending to draw out the “ideal” truth, or how it ought to be.