Building Taliesin
Page 15
Wright was on deadline; the Chicago Architectural Club’s annual exhibition show was opening in just 10 days at the Art Institute and Wright was up to his neck in work on the Midway Gardens. There is no record of a reply from Woolley, and no indication he came. The show went on as scheduled.
Wright, anxious to show Chicago that he was “up and running,” was able to put the spotlight on himself at the Art Institute. He got his own dedicated room and put on a show of work not just from the preceding year, which was what all the other architects were doing, but of his total output “since spring of 1911”—since building Taliesin.
Wright’s exhibits included not only completed work (Taliesin, Northome, the Coonley Playhouse) but also work in progress (Midway Gardens, not yet open), work yet to be done (the Imperial Hotel), and work that would never be done (the San Francisco Call skyscraper and the Goethe Street townhouse). It included an educational toy for one son (Llewellyn’s puppet theater) and toys “worked out” by two others, Lloyd (“A Toy Garden Scheme”) and John (“Child’s Building Blocks.” John would later invent Lincoln Logs.) He tossed in everything he could think of.
This created a furious backlash among other architects, some of whom boycotted the show. “It is not putting it too strongly to say that the Chicago Architectural Club sold out to Wright,” one architect growled. It was alleged that Wright had paid $500 to the club to make up a deficit, which a spokesman denied.67
Wright was defiant. “Let them talk,” he said. “Let them say what they will. Let them resurrect all the old scandal of the past three years. What do I care. I have three walls for my work. I’m erecting the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and I’m doing other big work in the world—both the scandal and what I’m doing artistically will bring in bigger crowds. Let them talk, let them talk.”68
Fig. 125. The sign over an exhibit room at the 1914 Chicago Art Institute show says, “Work of Frank Lloyd Wright Exhibits Continued to Work Done Since Spring of 1911.” The white model in the right foreground is of Midway Gardens. The dark model in the center is of the Coonley Playhouse. The large rendering on the wall at right is of the Imperial Hotel. Statuettes at upper left are of The Queen of the Gardens, left, by Alfonso Iannelli, and a Contemplative Spindle, or sprite, right, by Richard Bock, at Midway Gardens. The three types of wooden Japanese print stands can be seen, two of them sitting on the back of the marionette theatre made for Lewellyn Wright (notice curtain at right). A Clarence Fuermann photograph of Taliesin, taken from the roof and showing the tea circle, is in the immediate foreground.
Fig. 126. In a 1911 photo, Ellen Key, right, sits with a younger woman and her St. Bernard Vilda on the front steps of her new home, Strand, above the shore of Lake Vättern, Sweden. Mamah Bouton Borthwick was among the first visitors that year, signing the guest book on June 9. Photograph courtesy of Hedda Jansson.
MAMAH BOUTON BORTHWICK AT WORK, 1911–1914
SECRETS OF THE HIROSHIGE
In the summer of 1992, a curious Swedish art historian visiting Ellen Key’s lakeside mansion Strand turned over a picture on a wall and found a key that unlocked most of what is known today about Mamah Bouton Borthwick. The print was “an exquisite woodcut,” of the “highest quality,” a color landscape by the Japanese master Hiroshige. “The elegance of its frame is quite astonishing,” Lena Johannesson reported. “A very thin, stained strip of oak frames the picture, which has been mounted without passe-partout [matting] but is flanked on each side by blind parts in brownish cardboard.” she saw that on the back of the picture Ellen Key had written, “A gift from the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.”69
“Frank is sending you a little Hiroshige which we hope you may care to hang in your new house.”
—Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key
No one in swedish scholarship had ever made a connection between Wright and Key. They were “two giants,” Johannesson said, both philosophers of “ideal living in modern aesthetics.” She went to the Royal Library in Stockholm and pored over the Key archive. There she found the missing link: Martha Bouton Borthwick, always called Mamah (MAY-mah). Ten letters written between 1910 and 1914, five of them typewritten, and a handwritten letter from Wright tell the story of Borthwick’s dealings with Key and her life with Wright.
The Hiroshige story leaves an impression of the character of all three principals. The print was a gift sent from the couple during their first Christmas together at Taliesin. “Frank is sending you a little Hiroshige which we hope you may care to hang in your new house,” Borthwick says. They sent it despite receiving a hurtful criticism of their relationship by Key, which they address in the same letter. Key had told Borthwick she should leave Wright and return to her children and ex-husband. “I feel as if I had lost a friend,” Borthwick quotes Wright as saying.70
Wright had the gift framed twice before he was satisfied to send it. It arrived in sweden with $3 postage due, despite having been prepaid, and Key complained. Wright delayed in sending a money order, so Mamah finally resolved the matter by sending a personal check from her own account.
Key gave the print pride of place. “The Hiroshige print, the joint gift of Mamah and Frank to Ellen Key, will be seen even today as a gesture of attachment and sincerity,” Johannesson said.71
Fig. 127. The woman on horseback may be Mamah Borthwick. Taylor Woolley took this photo during the time they both were at Taliesin, 1911–1912, and included it in an album titled “Taliesin.” It is the only portrait of an individual woman. She appears to be the right age—Borthwick was 42. There is no identification.
Wright offered the print out of attachment to Mamah, to support her ambition to be Key’s American translator. Mamah sent the gift with love and admiration to Key despite having been slapped down by Key about her relationship with Wright. Key responded to the gift, a rare work of art, by complaining about an extra postal charge.
Fig. 128. Mamah Bouton Borthwick signed the guest book at Strand on June 9, 1911. She was already using her maiden name. Ellen Key noted her death on August 15, 1914, and marked it with a cross.
Fig. 129. Ellen Key’s sitting rooms at Strand, built in 1910, show her taste for pale walls, minimal curtains, plank floors, woven rugs and runners, green plants, and fresh flowers. Photo courtesy of Hedda Jansson.
Fig. 130. Ellen Sofia Key at 58 in a portrait by Danish painter Ejnar Nielsen. Mamah Borthwick said, “Can’t you persuade him to paint out that most inharmonious curtain draped at each side of the top? The folds are so out of feeling [and] the two blots at each side of the head are ugly.”
Fig. 131. Ellen Key’s spacious home, Strand, sits above Lake Vättern in central Sweden. Mamah Borthwick Cheney met with her there on June 9, 1911, when it was still new. For Key’s 60th birthday in 1909, Swedes from all walks of life contributed money and presented her with an “alternative Nobel Prize” that she used to build Strand. It included four guest rooms reserved for working-class women in need of a vacation. Photograph courtesy of Björn Sjunnesson.
These themes appear again and again in the dealings of Wright and Borthwick with Key during the years 1911–1914. Wright invests himself in Borthwick’s work with little or no reward for himself other than building his relationship with Mamah. Mamah pursues her goal of spreading Key’s message—and embodying it in her life—with a joy that overrides repeated insults and discouragements from Key. Key provides Mamah with the inspiration, and them with a reality check.
“Only when there is nothing ugly available for sale, when beautiful things are as inexpensive as ugly ones are now, can beauty for everyone be fully realized.”
—Ellen Key, Beauty in the Home
THE PROPHET
Ellen Sofia Key (1849–1926) was in fact a giant in Scandinavia and Europe when Mamah Borthwick first made contact with her in the spring of 1910. She was a leading public intellectual, writing and advocating for reform in education, women’s and children’s rights, marriage, divorce, and the conditions of the working class. She was a peace activist
and social Darwinist who believed that war was at odds with human evolution. She inclined toward socialism but believed in the individual right to self-development.72 Her book The Century of the Child and her writings on state support of children, including children of single mothers, evolved into basic policies of the Swedish welfare state, today among the most liberal in the world.73
Key rejects the idea that “while God walked in Paradise and founded marriage, the Devil went about in the wilderness and instituted love”—and sex.
Her lectures at the Worker’s Institute and at student clubs in Stockholm in the 1890s “gained her great fame,” says Barbara Miller Lane. “She was by all accounts a bewitching speaker. Her talks—vivid, extemporaneous, presented with a modest (almost shy) demeanor and in a low voice—commanded attention from huge audiences of artists, architects, philosophers, literary figures, politicians, students, and workers.”74 She also presided at a weekly salon of friends at her apartment. Her books and articles were translated into many languages, and royalties from these sales provided her living. She never married or had children. For Key’s 60th birthday in 1909, swedes from all walks of life contributed money and presented her with an “alternative nobel Prize” that she used to build strand on a slope above Lake Vättern in central sweden. There she was able to display the simple, beautiful swedish style she had advocated in her books Beauty for All (1899) and Beauty in the Home (1913).
Both were practical guides for women to use in banishing “the most garishly cheap German taste” that she believed prevailed in Swedish homes—“ugly, ostentatious, crowded, dark, and gloomy.”75 She preferred “light-filled rooms, pearl-gray furniture, plain deal [wide plank] floors, and thin white curtains to let the sunshine in.”76
Fig. 132. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the frame and mounting for this Hiroshige print from his collection that he and Mamah Borthwick sent to Ellen Key in December 1911 as a housewarming gift. The print, Amusements at Gotenyama from the series Famous Places of the Eastern Capital (1833–1843), shows people picnicking under cherry blossoms at seaside, an appropriate gift for Key’s new lakeside home. Photograph courtesy of Björn Sjunnesson.
Fig. 133. Ellen Key’s handwritten inscription reads: “Color print (of Hiroshige, the Japanese artist). A gift from the great American architect Frank Loyd [sic] Wright.” Photograph courtesy of Björn Sjunnesson.
Key and Frank Lloyd Wright had ideas in common when it came to design, though Wright and Borthwick probably were not aware of this side of her reputation. Like Wright, Key believed that the properly designed home “could be the source of creative change in both the arts and society,” though with the woman driving it as mother, educator, and chief artist.77 she believed that “a room does not have a soul until someone’s soul is revealed in it, unless it shows us that someone remembers and loves, and how this person lives and works every day.”78
Fig. 134. The Ralph Fletcher Seymour edition of Love and Ethics carries Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Bouton Borthwick’s names as co-translators. The Chicago publisher delayed publishing this book because it was too controversial, even though Wright put up the money.
She believed that useful objects in the home should be beautiful. “It is bad taste to imagine that the useful becomes beautiful by concealing its purpose behind decoration,” she said. “No household implement can be beautiful which does not convince you, first, of its usefulness, and, second, of a neatness that is in full agreement with its intended use.”79
“All the publishers were afraid. You cannot realize how provincial America is when it is a question of a thought in advance of its time.”
—Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key
In a statement that helped set the course for modern Scandinavian design and anticipated both Orrefors and IKEA, she said: “Only when there is nothing ugly available for sale, when beautiful things are as inexpensive as ugly ones are now, can beauty for everyone be fully realized.”80
THE DISCIPLE
Mamah Borthwick was, by contrast, a novice in literature, translation, and publishing. She was born June 19, 1869, in Boone, Iowa, to a railroading family that moved to Oak Park, Illinois. She and Key were both of Scottish descent; there is a Borthwick Castle near Edinburgh, and Key was descended from McKays.
Fig. 135. This is a second edition of the rival Love and Ethics published by B.W. Huebsch in New York. The first edition came out in 1911, stealing Wright and Borthwick’s thunder and the sales of their own translation. They later discovered that Ellen Key had made a separate deal with Huebsch.
Mamah was a well-educated woman, fluent in French and German, with a master’s degree in teaching from the University of Michigan and an interest in writing. She had worked as a librarian, married Edwin Cheney, a well-off electrical engineer and business owner, took in her sister’s girl as an infant, then had a boy and girl of her own.81 she participated in suburban women’s literary clubs and had once made a joint presentation on Robert Browning with Catherine Tobin Wright. She could quote poetry from heart, and did so in one of her first letters to Key. She could drive an automobile and use a typewriter. She was modern. She was 20 years Key’s junior and romantically linked to a famous architect. That was her résumé.
“We went out to New York to see Mr. Huebsch, to insist upon his withdrawing his edition from the market, saying that I had your authorization. He told us that you had sold the rights to Love and Ethics to him, and showed us a check with your endorsement as proof.”
—Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key
Fig. 136. Ellen Key’s balcony at Strand overlooks Lake Vättern in central Sweden. Photograph courtesy of Björn Sjunnesson.
Fig. 137. Borthwick’s translation of The Morality of Women, published in 1911 by Seymour, won positive reviews and went into a second printing of 1,000 copies.
Fig. 138. The Torpedo Under the Ark had only 28 pages and sold only 39 of 1,000 copies. Ellen Key would not permit Borthwick to expand it with more essays as the Chicago publisher recommended.
While living in France, away from Wright during their first months in Europe, Borthwick discovered Key’s writings on sexual politics in German editions—either Love and Marriage (1903) or its follow-up, Love and Ethics (1905). Key rejects the idea that “while God walked in Paradise and founded marriage, the Devil went about in the wilderness and instituted love”—and sex.82 Key’s assurance that moral marriage is based on love alone, not law or church sanction, and that women should be free to fulfill themselves erotically, was an epiphany.
“You cannot know what you have been and are in my life—the embodiment of so many ideals,” she wrote to Key, “scarcely formulated until your light burst upon me in the little hotel in Nancy, where I was struggling so hard, against such frightful odds, to live the truth that you alone gave me strength and encouragement to cling to.”
Mamah had found a mission: to bring Key’s message to American readers. “I am concerned only with an opportunity to be the English mouthpiece for your words in which, as is Frank also, I am heart and soul interested,” she wrote. (she often adopted a Germanic sentence structure when writing to Key.)
Key gave her a chance. In a letter sent to Borthwick in Italy, she said, “I authorize you to commence with Ibsen and Women; some essays … and Love and Ethics in two small volumes as you proposed. And translated from the German. In the meantime you study Swedish and when Putnam has published Love and Ethics you are ready to offer him Essays translated by you from swedish. I would be delighted to make you my only authorized translator in your language if you learn mine.”83
Fig. 139. The American rejected Key’s writings as not popular enough. The centerpiece of this August 1913 issue is a story about shipwrecked sailors on an island who encounter a tribe of winged women.
FEAR OF PUBLISHING
Wright left Europe in September 1910, returned to Germany in January 1911, and departed again for the States at the end of March. It was then that Borthwick gave him the finished translations for the three small books
that he took to his Chicago publisher, Ralph Fletcher Seymour.
“I must confess we had to say many times, ‘That passage is better than ours.’ But we quite agreed in saying more frequently, ‘There we are better than he is.’”
—Mamah Borthwick, on comparing translations with Wright
The books were Love and Ethics (62 pp.), listing Borthwick and Wright as co-translators; The Torpedo Under the Ark: Ibsen and Women (28 pp.); and The Morality of Women (78 pp.). Morality was made up of three essays: “The Morality of Women,” “The Woman of the Future,” and “The Conventional Woman.”84
Fig. 140. British sexologist and eugenics advocate Havelock Ellis disliked Mamah Borthwick as a translator and told Putnam’s he was disappointed The Woman Movement was not “more distinguished.”
Fig. 141. Putnam’s published Borthwick’s translation of The Woman Movement in New York in 1912 with Havelock Ellis’s introduction.
Borthwick spent the winter in Berlin, where she taught English classes and ran occasional errands for Key. She writes of taking Key’s photo to a printer of visiting cards. The manager, Fraulein Boehm, “delighted me very much, for she too said that I looked like you—although ‘not so strong a face,’” Mamah said.
She and Key met face to face on July 9, 1911, at strand, where Borthwick may have stayed in one of the four guest rooms that Key reserved for working-class women in need of a vacation. During that meeting, she told Key that all the publishers they had contacted had declined the sex books. “Since they had refused the translations, Frank took them to America with him,” she recalled having said.