Reflections from the Shining Brow
My Years with Frank Lloyd Wright and Olgivanna Lazovich
by Kamal Amin
Fithian Press, 264 pp.
"While Wright surpassed my expectations, the true revelation was Olgivanna, the imperious, powerful, controlling third wife of the great architect.... Over the following year or two, I came to realize that she was the originator and organizer behind the Taliesin community. I began to see that without her neither I, nor anyone else, would have had the closeness to Mr. Wright that we all enjoyed.... I realized that she was, in fact, duplicating the community in which she had lived with Gurdjieff. With a few devoted followers, she developed a shadow organization, which became centered on her and her private program. Young people who were attracted to an architectural apprenticeship under the master were individuals who, potentially, could become pupils to Olgivanna and the Gurdjieff teachings."
In 1925, 26-year-old Olga Ivanovna Lazovich Hinzenberg arrived in America to begin a new life, having been directed by Mr. Gurdjieff to leave him and the Prieuré because he had taught her all that he could. She had thought to return to Russia where she had friends and family, but Gurdjieff was insistent on America. He may have had several intersecting reasons. "America" and Americans represented a soil, fertile, untilled in a way that Europe was not, ripe for the implanting of the Work. Expert in the sacred dances, she could teach them to Orage's groups. Russia was closed, a past venue that was caught in a downward octave. Olgivanna's young daughter, Svetlana, from whom Gurdjieff had instructed Olgivanna to separate herself for a time, lived in America with her brother and his wife. That Olgivanna could leave first her daughter, then Gurdjieff, is an indicator of her strength of will, which would avail her in her wish to disseminate Gurdjieff's teaching. But Olgivanna did not remain in New York to assist Orage. Her reasons are not known, although a wish to establish herself as a teacher would become clear in later years.
A Powerful Attraction
How, then, to attract people to the Work? Ouspensky, Orage, Toomer—they were all captivating speakers, capable of arousing interest in their contemporaries, all visible to contemporary society, with established reputations and circles of acquaintances. Olgivanna was unknown. If she were to gather a nucleus of students for the Work, she would need to hitch her wagon to a "star." Leaving New York for Chicago, she met by chance at a ballet the talented, much-publicized iconoclast American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, then 57 years old. The attraction between them was immediate, powerful, and reciprocal. From that moment on they were together until his death in 1959. Part of her attraction was the possibility for his vision and talent to serve as a magnet for building an organization devoted to carrying on the Work. As she told Amin, "When I married Mr. Wright one of the attractions was that he had a farm and a home to go to."
Within a year of their meeting their daughter Iovanna was born. Both were married to other people and their liaison was the subject of vitriolic public gossip and condemnation in the press; they were even arrested and jailed for violation of the Mann Act. It wasn't until 1938 that they were free to marry.
Wright took her to Taliesin—Welsh for "Shining Brow"—his home-studio-compound in Spring Green, Wisconsin, not far from Madison, the state capital, and about a half-day's drive from Chicago. At the time she moved in, Amin tells us, Wright
hired draftsmen to produce the work on his projects. They kept regular hours and then went home. As Olgivanna told me on many occasions, she frequently spoke with Mr. Wright and eventually persuaded him to replace that group of draftsmen, whose job descriptions did not necessarily include inherent loyalty, with a group of young people who believed in Mr. Wright's work. They would become disciples, or apprentices, as they were to be called, learning about architecture directly by working with the master. He then would have an environment of admiring hero worshippers—as I was and still am. The apprentices would have an unparalleled opportunity to experience genius at a close range and Olgivanna would have an inexhaustible supply of young people who could become candidates for Gurdjieff's teachings.
The Taliesin Fellowship was formed in 1932. Wright's disinterest in the personal lives of the apprentices left a void into which Olgivanna stepped, bit by bit consolidating her power through her involvement in their personal lives to create an organization which could become a long-lived institution. An apprentice who would become CEO of the organization told Amin, "I know that God is in heaven. But for me, now at this stage of my development, Mrs. Wright is my God."
Mr. Wright Has a Wife
Kamal Amin came to Taliesin from Egypt in 1951 and remained until 1977. Initially, his interest was solely in Wright and his work; it had never crossed his mind that Wright had a wife nor had he heard of Gurdjieff. As soon as he arrived, however, he became aware of her influence as he was asked repeatedly, "Have you seen Mrs. Wright yet?" At their first meeting, Amin felt an instant bond, tempered by a discomfort at being the subject of her focused gaze, which took in "the disparity between what one was feeling and what one was saying." This bond, and the discomfort, complementary themes throughout their relationship, are the subject of Amin's book, which is a meditation on power, its use and abuse, on respect and loyalty, on the reconciliation of opposites. Amin has the rare ability to discern strengths and weaknesses without judging and condemning the person. His love and admiration of Wright and Olgivanna shine through the narrative of his experience of them.
In fascinating detail, he describes Olgivanna's responses to the challenges of supporting both Wright's vision and his egocentricity, enduring personal tragedies such as the accidental deaths of her daughter Svetlana and Svetlana's child, publicizing and financing the architectural and spiritual faces of the endeavor, creating and sustaining her vision of a Work organization despite Wright's lack of interest, and the powerful centrifugal forces innate in the wedding of an outer with an inner effort.
Wright resented any time taken from architectural activities. Olgivanna "had sometimes prevailed on Mr. Wright to include in his regular Sunday morning talks a mention of Gurdjieff, his Work, and the Work of my intelligent wife, as he often called her. The purpose was to give legitimacy to that activity conducted by Olgivanna on the peripheries of the architectural practice." As long as Wright was alive, she had to carry on Work activities out of Wright's view unless they fit into his notion of what was creative, such as performances of dances, pageants, or plays. Olgivanna had to schedule talks with students for those times when Wright was napping so as not to have him feel she was competing with him. It becomes apparent that his occasional praise of Gurdjieff was due to Olgivanna's urging and the buttressing of his own sense of superiority through the judging of Gurdjieff as worthy of merit.
From the beginning of the Fellowship, Olgivanna, who had been a principal performer of Gurdjieff's sacred dances in demonstrations in France and America, had wanted to have the students learn them. But Wright was too jealous of her contact with anyone but him and she had to wait until their daughter Iovanna was old enough to learn the dances and then teach them. Small, generally well-received performances were given in the pavilion theater at Taliesin West in Arizona. Eventually, a public performance was given in Chicago in 1953. The reviews were unfavorable: "Taliesin dances stiff and grim," warned one headline. Another performance was given in Dallas, Texas, in 1961 where the reviews were more favorable. But by then Gurdjieff's sacred dances had been removed from the program and "replaced by dances representing epics choreographed by Iovanna." Others also choreographed dances, and Olgivanna composed all the music.
A Decisive Turning Point
By the middle of the 1950s Olgivanna controlled everything but the architectural work at Taliesin. Wright had come to be completely dependent on her for the day to day running of the organization, on the admiration and hero-worship of the students she had assembled, on the freedom to engage himself entirely in architectural work without distraction. Olgivanna then moved to separate herself from Gurdjieff—her book about the Work, The Struggle Within, for instance, never mentions his name. Amin reports that:
she sought to recruit a whole new class of pupils who would come to Taliesin to be her pupils and to receive her teaching.... Many of the new recruits were not clear about what their new adventure really meant. Most of them had the impression that they would receive instructions on Gurdjieff's teachings. But in one of Olgivanna's first talks one Sunday morning when Mr. Wright was in New York working on the Guggenheim Museum, she said sternly, in no uncertain terms: "This is not a Gurdjieff group. What you will receive here will be my instructions on how to lead a worthy life."
Can her denial of Gurdjieff represent what she may have wished for, in part, regarding Wright? Or was it more likely a manifestation of self-will?
After Wright's death in 1959, a central question of Olgivanna's became, "How can we keep Taliesin at the heart of controversy and hence the focus of attention?" Wright seldom had guests and for the most part had dinner with Olgivanna alone every evening. Her answer was to expand the social life at Taliesin with dinners, performances, festive occasions. Attending were people such as Allen Dulles, Margaret Truman, John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Cronkite, Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, Bettina Rubicam of Young and Rubicam, Buckminster Fuller, Adlai Stevenson, Charles Laughton, Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, Ann Baxter (Wright's granddaughter), Anthony Quinn, Mike Todd, Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret Sanger, and a host of others from nearly every shade of the spectrum of public life.
As outreach, Olgivanna also initiated programs with Arizona State University, which would lead eventually to a state-sanctioned, degree-granting architecture school, with the inevitable intensification of the clash between practices suited to spiritual work and the requirements of state accreditation agencies such as the Higher Learning Commission. In the spring of 2005 these conflicts reached critical mass with fractious disputes between the older Taliesin Fellows, who had been taught by Olgivanna, and newly hired faculty and members of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation who had not. Enrollment dwindled from 23 to 11. The outcome is not yet clear.
Serving Two Masters
Olgivanna's experiment raises questions about whether a student can serve two masters with different aims, whether so intimate a relationship between a secular institution and a spiritual work benefits either. Regarding the teacher, Gurdjieff said:
... groups may be connected with some aim of which those who are beginning work in them have no idea whatever and which cannot even be explained to them until they understand the essence and the principles of the work and the ideas connected with it. But this aim towards which without knowing it they are going, and which they are serving, is the necessary balancing principle in their own work. Their first task is to understand this aim, that is, the aim of the teacher. When they have understood this aim, although at first not fully, their own work becomes more conscious and consequently can give better results.
And regarding the work:
The fourth way is never without some work of a definite significance, is never without some undertaking around which and in connection with which it can alone exist. When this work is finished, that is to say, when the aim set before it has been accomplished, the fourth way disappears, that is, it disappears from the given place, disappears in its given form, continuing perhaps in another place in another form. Schools of the fourth way exist for the needs of the work which is being carried out in connection with the proposed undertaking. They never exist by themselves as schools for the purpose of education and instruction.
It seems clear that Olgivanna took the architectural work and Wright's professed aim of instituting an "organic" architecture as the undertaking of which Gurdjieff speaks. A basic problem, however, as we have seen, was Wright's disdain for the Work, so that his aim could never have a right relationship to the Work. Another is the question of what Gurdjieff meant by "work of a definite significance" and "undertaking." Gurdjieff, himself, after the initial experiment of the Prieuré, never again seriously tried to set up such an institution, although he spoke of it to students. But he did have undertakings that were at least partly visible to students and toward which they could connect their work. There was the writing of
All and Everything, its translation, publication and dissemination. There was the composing and transcription of his music. There was the creation, transcription and teaching of the sacred dances. There were a series of public and private events for which various roles had to be taken, money needed to be raised, venues found and contracted, publicity arranged, and so forth. And there may have been others known only to the students involved.
For many Taliesin students, the aim of an organic architecture remained paramount and Olgivanna was seen as an intruder. For others, such as Amin, an uneasy truce existed. It became clear to him as he learned of the Work and of Gurdjieff, that for the most part Olgivanna used her position to manipulate individuals and activities with the aim of creating opportunities for gaining self-knowledge. Amin writes:
Olgivanna would at will give comfort, inflame anger, cause confusion, and induce jealousy at moments of her choosing with the intent of exposing the true quality of a person. No one looked forward to those moments. Those who thought she had saintly dimensions accepted this manipulation as a part of their learning experience. Being subjected to this manipulation enraged those who were inclined to see the devil residing within her frame. The latter were always the majority.
The Uses of Power
Amin writes movingly of what he learned from Olgivanna, without ever having considered her infallible or a saint. But eventually he came to believe that her "personal predilections often overlapped the declared objectives upon which the community was constructed. The seduction of power leads one to excess." Olgivanna had two sources of power, personal and positional. Her personal power was based on what she learned from Gurdjieff, such as her expertise in assessing people and knowing how to reveal them to themselves. What she learned about students, however, increasingly came to be used not just for their benefit, but to support her position with regard to the Taliesin Fellowship. Using her position, she created a network of informants who reported to her on every aspect of life at Taliesin. As her positional power was exercised and increased, the situations for abuse of that power also increased. When asked why he left Taliesin after 27 years, Amin answered, "For many years, the sense of mission which had developed in me during my years with Mr. Wright remained prominent in motivating my life and endeavors. The work with Olgivanna was also worthwhile. But a moment came when it became clear to me that the desire for power and control overrode the expressed purpose of the community."
Interestingly, Olgivanna's first husband, Vladimir Hinzenberg, was also an architect, as conventional as Wright was unconventional, but as an architect he was also an expresser of power in form, the power of money and resources, of influence and position, of shaping the environment to support or alter the behavior of others. Identifying with an idea such as organic architecture or self-transformation, the idea becomes an ideal, and the ability to use power in pursuit and expression of the ideal is lost. Instead, as the ideal remains out of reach on a forever receding horizon, power can become an end in itself.
Most of us have faults as great as Olgivanna's. Who among us could have done half so well?
—Henry Korman
Notes
While Wright surpassed my expectations. Kamal Amin, Reflections from the Shining Brow (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Fithian Press, 2004), pp. 14, 15.
When I married Mr. Wright. Amin, p. 63.
The disparity. Amin, p. 39.
Had sometimes prevailed on Mr. Wright. Amin, p. 69.
Olgivanna had to schedule talks. Amin, p. 102.
Replaced by dances. Amin, p. 90.
This is not a Gurdjieff group. Amin, p. 107.
A central question. Amin, p. 139.
These conflicts reached critical mass. Kate Nolan, "Taliesin West isn't what it seems: New CEO, power play cause turmoil," The Arizona Republic, March 7, 2005, and "Architect's dream crumbling: Financial woes, internal strife threaten school," The Arizona Republic, March 8, 2005.
Groups may be connected. P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, p. 222.
The fourth way. Ouspensky, p. 312.
Personal predilections. Amin, p. 260.
For many years. Amin, p. 238.
This review is from The Gurdjieff Journal Issue #40
