Bibliographical Note

Dal Co, Francesco

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Bibliographical Note

Francesco Dal Co

The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Iconoclastic Masterpiece

~Since in the pages of this book images have partially taken the place of footnotes, I feel that I owe the reader some explanations. I hope that the most demanding readers, interested in delving deeper into the study of Wright’s work, will welcome this information as friendly suggestions.

Author

Francesco Dal Co

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-21466

Bibliographical Note

Since in the pages of this book images have partially taken the place of footnotes, I feel that I owe the reader some explanations. I hope that the most demanding readers, interested in delving deeper into the study of Wright’s work, will welcome this information as friendly suggestions.

The first version of this book was published in Italian in 2004. What you hold in your hands has more or less the same structure, with some inevitable modifications and clarifications. Between 2003 and 2016 the literature dedicated to the matters I discussed grew significantly, and in the pages that follow I have included the references to the publications I consulted in the definitive writing of the book.

The archives I consulted are those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona (the archives from the latter are now in New York City, held at the Museum of Modern Art and the Avery Library of Columbia University). In the early 2000s, I made the visit to the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives in Taliesin West that could not be avoided by any researcher interested in Wright’s architecture; in addition to a tremendous number of documents conserved there, 859 drawings related to the Guggenheim project are in the collection. Margo Stipe and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer facilitated the work I carried out in Scottsdale, and I owe them particular gratitude. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has a first-rate photograph library and an excellent archive, which I was able to access thanks to the kindness of Kimberly Bush. I am much indebted to her, as well as to Erica Stoller, who generously let me view and use the photographs held in the Esto archives.

To understand what was held in these and other archives relating to Wright’s activities, I let myself be guided by the book edited by P. J. Meehan, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Research Guide to Archival Sources (1983). Among the bibliographic instruments, repertories, and works of a general nature from which I took my cue, notable are: R. L. Sweeney, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Annotated Bibliography (1978); A. A. Storrer, The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion (1993); the monumental indices of the correspondence conserved at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Index to the Taliesin Correspondence (1988), published by A. Alofsin; the vast photographic documentation of Wright’s works contained in the twelve volumes of Frank Lloyd Wright (1984–88), edited by B. B. Pfeiffer and Y. Futagawa; and the collection of Wright’s texts, also edited by Pfeiffer, Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings (1992–95).

Among the several biographies of Wright, those by N. Kelly Smith (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Study in Architectural Content, 1979), R. C. Twombly (Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture, 1979), and B. Gill (Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, 1987) were the first ones I visited in preparing the lectures I gave, so many years ago, at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia. Later, I drew further biographic information from E. Tafel, About Wright: An Album of Recollections by Those Who Knew Frank Lloyd Wright (1993), and R. McCarter, Frank Lloyd Wright (2006).

For those who wish to become acquainted with Wright’s work in general, and the ways in which authoritative scholars have studied it, I recommend four books in particular; published a few decades apart, they also make it possible to gauge the evolution of studies devoted to Wright over the course of more than fifty years. The first is H.-R. Hitchcock’s In the Nature of Materials: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, 1887–1941 (1942); the second is V. Scully’s Frank Lloyd Wright (1960); the last two are The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (1996) and The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright (2016), both by N. Levine. These last two volumes were the most useful to me and naturally are the most up-to-date. Moreover, as I hope will be clear from what I have written, I have for many years found it essential in dealing with Wright and his works to read closely, among his many writings, his own book The Japanese Print: An Interpretation, first published in 1912.

Concerning the study of how the Guggenheim was designed and built, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Guggenheim Correspondence (1986), edited by Pfeiffer, is essential reading; nearly all the quotations I have used from the letters written by Wright and his clients and other correspondents over the seventeen years he worked on the Guggenheim come from this book, which contains documentation of a sort that one does not often have access to during research, and which compels a stimulating exercise of interpretation. Correspondence is without doubt an indispensible resource for studying Wright’s work. In the three volumes edited by Pfeiffer, F. Ll. Wright, Letters to Apprentices, Letters to Architects, Letters to Clients (1982, 1984, 1986, respectively), there are numerous passages devoted to the Guggenheim project; Letters to Clients, for example, contains some of his correspondence with Hibbard Johnson, while in Letters to Architects there are also those addressed to H. Th. Wijdeveld and Hitchcock that I have quoted.

Among Wright’s many declarations concerning the Guggenheim, those published in the articles and essays “The Modern Gallery” (Architectural Forum, January 1946), “The Modern Gallery for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation” (Magazine of Art, January 1946), and “An Experiment in the Third-Dimension” (in The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: Frank Lloyd Wright, 1960) are easily accessible and useful. (See also Pfeiffer, Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, vol. 5 [1994], as well as the typewritten manuscript, to be read with a dose of circumspection, “The Story of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Memorial-Museum,” once held at the archives of Taliesin West [MS 2401.389].)

The Solomon Guggenheim Museum (1994) contains an incisive and well-illustrated essay by Pfeiffer. He reconstructs the building phases of the museum and evolution of the project, regarding which there remain some questions that neither the designs nor the records from the various restoration projects can answer. Moreover, Pfeiffer’s essay has a passage concerning the “superpositions,” so to speak, of the research carried out by Wright and Le Corbusier on the theme of spiral-form constructions, a subject I have dwelt on and which I consider noteworthy. In this book I have dealt on two occasions with the reasons and circumstances, different but not independent if one looks closely, regarding Le Corbusier’s role in the history of the Guggenheim. J. Siry drew my attention to an essay by F. Kiesler, “Art and Architecture: Notes on the Spiral Theme in Recent Architecture,” in Partisan Review (Winter 1946), now in Frederick J. Kiesler: Selected Writings, ed. S. Gohr and G. Luyken (1996). This text compares for the first time, as far as I am aware, the projects for the Modern Gallery and the Musée Mondial. N. Levine, in The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright, wrote a particularly intelligent discussion of how the project for Wright’s Broadacre City was also the result of engaging with Le Corbusier’s planning ideas. Read in the light of the Kahn Lectures Wright gave at Princeton University in 1930, later published in the book Modern Architecture (1931, re-edited and with an introduction by N. Levine, 2008) and his review of the English edition of Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture (Wright, “Towards a New Architecture,” World Unity 2, no. 6 [1928], now in The Collected Writings of Frank Lloyd Wright, vol. 1), Levine’s comments played an important role in guiding my interpretation of the Guggenheim. Among the letters written by Le Corbusier, the one he sent to his mother from London on June 3, 1939, which I cited, can be found in Le Corbusier Correspondance: Lettres à la famille, edited by R. Baudoui and A. Dercelles, vol. 2 (2013). On that occasion, Le Corbusier spoke of his imminent meeting with Solomon Guggenheim, providing insight the implications of which are yet to be clarified.

In tracing the history of the museum, I turned to the Guggenheim’s official “catalogue”: Art of This Century: The Guggenheim Museum and Its Collection (1993). This volume is well researched and comprehensively illustrated, and it includes contributions by C. Bell, J. Brown, L. Dennison, A. Feeser, N. Spector, as well as those which served me the most, in different ways: T. Krens, “The Genesis of a Museum”; M. Gowan, “Technology and the Spirit,” dedicated to the origin of the idea of non-objective painting; J. Blessing, “Peggy’s Surreal Playground”; and D. Waldman, “Art of This Century and the New York School.” Important updates concerning the museum’s history can be found in The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum (2009), with essays of varying depth by H. Ballon, L. E. Carranza, Pfeiffer, P. Kirkham and S. W. Perkins, Levine, Siry, N. Spector, A. Starita, G. Zuaznabar, and a well-constructed chronology. In addition to these, the publications I drew information and suggestions from were: chapter 10, in particular, of Levine’s monograph The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (noted above); the essay by K. Frampton published in the volume edited by T. Riley and P. Reed, Frank Lloyd Wright Architect (1994); chapter 5 of the volume by W. H. Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects: The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century (1972).

The most precise studies devoted to the building solutions and construction techniques implemented in making the museum, the analysis of which has critically influenced the structure of my book, were those by T. Trombetti, “Il funzionamento strutturale del Guggenheim Museum di Frank Lloyd Wright,” Casabella (November 2007); the chapter “The Guggenheim Refigured” in S. Allen’s Practice: Architecture, Technique + Representation (2009); and the following essays by Siry: “Wright’s Guggenheim Museum and Late Modernist Architecture,” in the 2009 collaborative book The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum; “The Spiral Ramped Floor in Wright’s Guggenheim Museum,” in R. Gargiani (ed.), L’architrave, le plancher, la plate-forme: Nouvelle histoire de la construction (2012); and, above all, “Seamless Continuity versus the Nature of Materials,” which appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (March 2012). This last essay contains not only a meticulous analysis of the building system used by Wright but also an exhaustive series of bibliographic references. Among these references, I devote a special attention to G. N. Cohen, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum,” Concrete Construction (March 1958); C. W. Spero, “Forms Mold Sculptured Concrete Museum,” Construction Methods and Equipment (April 1958), and “Spiral Museum Is Built Like Work of Art,” Engineering News-Record (December 5, 1957). Moreover, I was able to find information regarding the engineers who worked with Wright in J. Quinan’s essay, “L’ingegneria e gli ingegneri di Frank Lloyd Wright,” Casabella (April 1958).

Many articles published in the New York Times in the 1950s help give an idea of New Yorkers’ opinions of Wright’s project, a theme that surfaces a few times in these pages. Among these articles, I would like to highlight: “21 Artists Assail Museum Interior” (December 12, 1956); A. Saarinen, “Tour with Mr. Wright” (September 22, 1957); J. Canaday, “Wright vs. Painting” (October 21, 1959); and A. L. Huxtable, “That Museum: Wright or Wrong?” (October 25, 1959).

The October 1, 1945, issue of Time magazine contains an article titled “Optimistic Ziggurat” that attributes a sense of optimism (credited to Wright), on the one hand, and pessimism on the other (N. Levine has also discussed the matter) to which the opposing developments of the Guggenheim’s spiral is probably due. It is a subject that seems useful to note, but that I have avoided. Among the articles that appeared in the international press following the inauguration of the museum, it is worth mentioning (though little can be learned from reading them): E. Kaufmann Jr., “The Form of Space for Art: Guggenheim Museum,” Art in America (Winter 1959–60); P. Blake, “The Guggenheim Museum: Museum or Monument?” Architectural Forum (December 1959); H.-R. Hitchcock, “Notes of a Traveller: Wright and Kahn,” Zodiac, no. 6 (1960). W. J. Hennessey’s article “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Guggenheim Museum,” Arts (April 1978), unlike those just noted, was the result of original archival research.

To research the relations between Wright and New York, as well as with New York’s intellectual, artistic, and high society, I turned to H. Muschamp’s book Man about Town: Frank Lloyd Wright in New York City (1983) and that of J. Hession and D. Pickrel, Frank Lloyd Wright in New York (2007); these were useful, in particular, for evaluating the significant energy expended by Wright during the 1950s in order to engage the support of public opinion and among the city’s elite.

In discussing the development of the museum project, I availed myself of M. Reinberger’s “The Sugarloaf Mountain Project and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Vision of a New World,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (March 1984); D. De Long’s Frank Lloyd Wright Designs for an American Landscape (1996); and J. Lipman’s Frank Lloyd Wright and the Johnson Wax Building (1986). These publications provided what I find to be the best contributions for knowledge of the projects and works that represent the two most pertinent antecedents for the Guggenheim Museum. M. Hertzenberg’s book Wright in Racine (2004) is a compilation but is well illustrated. Although not driven by analytical intent, P. V. Turner’s pages on San Francisco’s Morris Shop in Frank Lloyd Wright and San Francisco (2016) deserve attention, especially because they contain reproductions of some remarkable drawings.

I believe that Lewis Mumford and Frank Lloyd Wright—as others would concur—were two intellectual protagonists, and not solely for the history of twentieth-century American architecture. For this reason, I preferred to include Mumford’s stances with regard to Wright’s work, putting them before those of other historians and critics. Among the different articles by Mumford that I have referred to, I find the most significant to be “What Wright Hath Wrought,” published in the New Yorker (December 5, 1959; included in Mumford, The Highway and the City [1963]). To understand the complexity of the relations between Wright and Mumford, their correspondence, published in a book edited by Pfeiffer and R. Wojtowicz, Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Mumford: Thirty Years of Correspondence (2001), is essential. I would recommend to those interested in this correspondence reading it in the light of Wojtowicz’s Lewis Mumford and American Modernism (1998) and the collected writings, also edited by Wojtowicz, Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York (1998). What Mumford himself told me when I met him in 1971, when I was in the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship, goes well beyond the subjects in these books; I took notes from our meetings that I rely on to this day.

The history of the Guggenheim is intimately entwined with that of the Museum of Modern Art. Wright, as I hope emerges clearly from the pages of this book, perceived with particular lucidity the difficult implications of this intertwinedness. To understand the reasons for it, beyond what can commonly be learned through consulting the literature listed below, the book edited by P. Reed and W. Kaizen, which also contains an essay by K. Smith and rich documentary support, The Show to End All Shows: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Museum of Modern Art, 1940 (2004), is highly recommended. For my regular references to MoMA, no stranger to me, there are of course the studies devoted to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. In particular, I made use of these: H. S. Bee and M. Elligot (eds.), Art of Our Time: A Chronicle of the Museum of Modern Art (2006); A. H. Barr Jr., I. Sandler, and E. Newman (eds.), Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings by Alfred H. Barr Jr. (1986); M. Scolari Barr, “Our Campaigns”: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the Museum of Modern Art: A Biographical Chronicle of the Years 1930–1944 (1987); and R. Roob, “Alfred H. Barr Jr.: A Chronicle of the Years 1902–1929,” in The New Criterion (special issue, 1987); J. Elderfield (ed.), The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: Continuity and Change (1995); J. S. Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (2002); D. A. Hanks (ed.), Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson (2015). This last publication contains two essays, D. Albrecht’s “The High Bohemia of 1930’s Manhattan” and B. Bergdoll’s “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition,” that I used in a direct and indirect manner each time I spoke of MoMA, as also N. F. Weber’s Patron Saints: Five Rebels Who Opened America to a New Art, 1928–1943 (1992) with reference to the environment in which those who promoted the creation of the museum developed. The literature dedicated to MoMA exhibitions in the field of architecture is not as broad as might be expected. Beyond the essay by Bergdoll just noted are J. Elderfield (ed.), Philip Johnson and the Museum of Modern Art (1998); T. Riley, The International Style: Exhibition 15 and the Museum of Modern Art (1992); and H. Matthew’s essay “The Promotion of Modern Architecture by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s,” Journal of Design History, no. 1 (1994). And critical resources that cannot be left out are: the MoMA catalogues Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (1932), Bauhaus 1919–1928 (1938), and A New House by Frank Lloyd Wright on Bear Run, Pennsylvania (1938); the exhibitions Le Corbusier (1935), Frank Lloyd Wright American Architect (1940), Mies van der Rohe (1947, accompanied by the eponymous, famous catalogue by Philip Johnson), and the book by H.-R. Hitchcock and Johnson, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 (1932). On Abby Rockefeller, I consulted B. Kert’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family (1993).

Regarding the figures who receive the most insistent attention in this book, information about Solomon R. Guggenheim and his family was drawn from M. Lomask’s Seed Money: The Guggenheim Story (1964), S. Birmingham’s “Our Crowd”: The Great Jewish Families of New York (1967), and J. H. Davis’s The Guggenheims, 1848–1988: An American Epic (1988).

J. Lukach carried out the most meticulous research on the figure of Baroness von Ehrenwiesen, Hilla Rebay; her study, Hilla Rebay: In Search of the Spirit in Art (1983), is exhaustive and well researched. The information it provides derives from Rebay’s copious correspondence (letters sent by the baroness to Rudolf Bauer, and those she received from Kandinsky, which I cited, are transcribed in this book). To get to know Rebay, beyond the biography by Lukach I consulted R. Scarlett’s The Baroness, the Mogul, and the Forgotten History of the First Guggenheim Museum as Told by One Who Was There (2003), and S. Faltin’s Die Baroness und das Guggenheim (2005). Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim (2005) was the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name held at the Guggenheim Museum. It includes essays by V. Endicott Barnett, J.-A. Birnie Darzker, R. Rosenblum, K. Vail, and R. von Rebay that are useful in various ways for understanding the figures of Rebay and Guggenheim and for bringing into focus the events at the origin of the creation of the Guggenheim Museum. Similarly fruitful reading is the volume edited by K. Vail and published on the fiftieth anniversary of the museum’s inauguration, The Museum of Non-Objective Painting: Hilla Rebay and the Origins of the Solomon Guggenheim Museum (2009), which includes essays by Vail, T. Bashkoff, J. G. Hanhardt, and D. Quaintance.

Among Rebay’s own writings, in addition to the transcript of the interview she gave to B. Hooten, now in the Archives of American Art (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), I consulted “The Definition of Non-Objective Painting,” in Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Paintings (1936); “The Beauty of Non-Objectivity,” in Second Enlarged Catalogue of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Paintings (1937); and Art of Tomorrow: Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Paintings (1939). Lastly, I was able to reconstruct the evolution of the museum’s collection of artworks thanks to the two volumes by A. Z. Rudenstine, The Guggenheim Museum Collections: Paintings, 1880–1945 (1976).

Concerning Rudolf Bauer and his work, in addition to what Rebay wrote in various texts, I drew information from two catalogues: Rudolf Bauer: Centennial Exhibition (1989), with the essay by S. Neuburger, “From ‘Sturm’ to ‘Geistreich’: Rudolf Bauer in Berlin,” and that of S. Lowy, “Rudolf Bauer: A Non-Objective Point of View,” in Rudolf Bauer (2007). The essays contained in J. Gross, The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America (2006), helped me understand the role of the Société Anonyme Inc., founded by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Katherine S. Dreier, in the diffusion of knowledge of avant-garde art in the United States, and thus, also, in making Bauer a well-known figure among New York collectors.

The theme of “non-objective” art obliges us to continually return to Kandinsky’s texts, which I consulted in the versions that can be found in the volumes edited by P. Sers, Wassily Kandinsky: Tutti gli scritti (1973 and 1974). While reading Kandinsky’s writings, I constantly referred to the essay by A. Kojève, “Les Peintures concrètes de Kandinsky” (1936), and the correspondence published in A. Schönberg, Wassily Kandinsky: Briefe, Bilder und Dokumente einer außergewöhnlichen Begegnung (1980), and Schönberg–Busoni, Schönberg–Kandinsky: Correspondances, textes (1995). Various exhibitions, accompanied by their catalogues, held in Vienna, Paris, and New York have dealt with the relations between Kandinsky and Schönberg; the last I had the chance to visit, Arnold Schönberg: Peindre l’âme, at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaisme in Paris in 2016, was accompanied by a rather well-constructed catalogue, with excellent illustrations.

Among Rebay’s many associates, I devoted particular attention to Frederick Kiesler. Reading some of his numerous articles and brief essays published between 1923 and 1945, on the design of theatrical sets and museums, I found to be as valuable as the article noted above, “Notes on the Spiral Theme in Recent Architecture.” A good source of information, including further bibliography and interesting essays devoted to Kiesler, can be found in M. Bottero, Frederick Kiesler: Arte, architettura, ambiente (1996), and in the catalogues Frederick Kiesler Architekt, 1890–1965 (1975), Friedrick Kiesler (ed. L. Phillips, 1989), and Frederick Kiesler: Artiste-architecte (1996). In studying the figure of Kiesler and his relations with Rebay, it was inevitable that I would come to deal with his links with Peggy Guggenheim. In this, I relied on the catalogue edited by S. Davidson and P. Rylands, Peggy Guggenheim and Frederick Kiesler: The Story of Art of This Century (2004). Published on the occasion of the exhibition Peggy and Kiesler: The Collector and the Visionary held at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, this volume contains essays, in addition to those by the curators, by D. Bogner, F. V. O’Connor, D. Quaintance, V. V. Sanzogni, and J. Sharp, as well as a helpful chronology. Another instructive text is the book by Peggy Guggenheim herself, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (1979).

There are few publications dedicated to James Johnson Sweeney, and information on him comes from the thesis by T. R. Beauchamp, “James Johnson Sweeney and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston” (University of Texas at Austin, 1983). What Sweeney wrote following the opening of the Guggenheim Museum, in the article “Chambered Nautilus on Fifth Avenue,” appeared in the January 1960 issue of Museum News; the same number includes further authoritative contributions, among which those by Mumford, P. Blake, and P. Johnson deserve our attention, as well as his introduction to the book edited by P. Nierendorf, Paul Klee: Paintings, Watercolors, 1913–1939 (1941), and the book he wrote with J. L. Sert, Antoni Gaudí (1960), which is useful in understanding his architectural interests.

Robert Moses, who appears several times in this book, and sometimes as a key figure in the events, has been the object of a sizable amount of literature, which I consulted, favoring the books: R. Moses, Public Works: A Dangerous Trade (1970), in which a few pages are devoted to the relations between the author and Wright; R. A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974, a tome of over a thousand pages that earned its author a Pulitzer Prize); and the excellent volume of essays by various authors edited by H. Ballon and K. T. Jackson, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (2007).

In forming the hypotheses I put forward in this book, other texts dedicated to subjects that are not necessarily germane to that of the book contributed to developing the interpretive instruments I used in setting a course for these pages. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (1992) by R. Sennett is recommended for its acute analyses of the mechanisms of urban development in New York City. To interpret the meaning and conception of the spatial layout of the Guggenheim, the transcripts of the lectures given by Pavel Florenskij at VkHUTEMAS in 1923–24 were invaluable; they are translated into English in the volume Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art (2002). In dealing with the meaning of the museum’s domed space and speaking of ornament in relation to its configuration, I relied on what A. K. Coomaraswamy wrote in his fundamental essays “Ornament” and “The Symbolism of the Dome,” now in Coomaraswamy: Selected Papers (ed. R. E. Lipsey, vol. 1, 1977). Taking the essays of Coomaraswamy as a starting point, and having reconsidered what Levine wrote in note 9 of his chapter on the Guggenheim in his book The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, I came, tangentially, to speak of the “reversibility” of the edifice Wright built, with a strong memory in my mind of the pages titled “La yaksi y la Virgen,” in O. Paz’s Conjunciones y disyunciones (1991). Through this path, however, the idea of defining the Guggenheim as an iconoclastic building grew clear. This is not the place to dwell on the question of iconoclasm, which runs through our history from the pre-Socratics onward, and it would be presumptuous to draw any bibliographic reference from such an immense body of literature. However, I think I must mention two sources: on the modern cult of museums, I had before me the pages of In Praise of Folly (1511), in which Erasmus writes of “superstitions” (also in relationship to his peculiar attitude toward iconoclasm this great book is enlightening). While I pondered how to explain the Guggenheim’s aniconism, I was pleased to reread D. Freedberg’s wonderful book, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (1989).

What is the meaning that museums have taken on in our time, and to what extent can what these institutions represent help in understanding a work so exceptional as that which Wright built for Solomon Guggenheim in New York? While this may not have been the question that I asked myself when I began to write this book, I know for certain that it accompanied me constantly, and continues to do so. The terms in which it originally appeared to me can be summed up in this passage from Ernst Jünger: “The world we live in displays on the one hand positive similarities to a workshop and on the other to a museum. The distinction between these two landscapes, from the point of view of the demands they imply, is that no one is forced to see in a workshop more than simply a workshop whereas over the museum landscape there reigns a grotesquely proportioned spirit of edification. We have risen to a level of historical fetishism that stands in a direct relation to our deficiency in productive energy. Therefore the dismal thought occurs that some sort of secret correspondence causes the pace of our accumulation and preservation of so-called cultural goods to be matched only by the grandiose scale on which we simultaneously create instruments of destruction.” This passage can be found in Der Arbeiter (1932); it explains the significance of the inscriptions by Paul Valéry on the façade of the Palais de Chaillot in Paris: “Ami, n’entre pas sans désir” (Friend, enter not without desire) and introduces one of the great essays Jünger dedicated to the phenomenology of the Modern, An der Zeitmauer (1959), to which I often turn.

The way in which I dealt with the role assumed by the museum in the contemporary world owes much to M. Fumaroli’s L’État culturel (1991) and J. Clair’s Considérations sur l’état des beaux arts: Critique de la modernité (1983). Lastly, I will make a few, succinct notes on what I have read while considering the theme of collectors and patrons, an association that is at the origin of many American museums. There is a vast field of literature on this subject, from which I selected A Market for Merchant Princes (2015), edited by I. Reist, and W. Craven’s Stanford White: Decorator in Opulence and Dealer in Antiquities (2005). As usual, when I study subjects or matters relating to the United States of America, and this was no exception, Jean Baudrillard’s America (1986) was always at my side.

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