The Formation of the Japanese Print Collection at the Art Institute: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School

Art Institute of Chicago

Through Nov. 4

Frank Lloyd Wright wasn’t merely an admirer of Japanese art, said Kyle MacMillan in The Wall Street Journal. Beginning in 1905, when the great American architect made his first trip to the island nation that he called “the most romantic, artistic country on earth,” he became “a pioneering collector” of Japanese woodblock prints. In this “compact” new show featuring 12 of Wright’s purchases, the school that eventually benefited most from his hobby lays out the story behind its current standing as a major repository of prints by Hiroshige, Hokusai, and other Japanese masters. Wright eventually sold hundreds of prints to friends who later donated the works to the Art Institute. Indeed, Wright at times was “actually making more money dealing in art than pursuing architecture.” But more intriguing than such institutional history are the ways these prints influenced “Wright’s own brand of organic architecture.”

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The most obvious changes occurred in Wright’s architectural drawings, said Franck Mercurio in Time Out Chicago. His “most gifted drafter,” Marion Mahony Griffin, emerges as this show’s “unexpected star.” Shortly after Wright brought home his first cache of Japanese prints, Mahony’s renderings began taking on new characteristics—“off-center compositions, flattened forms of trees and other landscape features, and the use of large areas of empty space.” Her Perspective View of Rock Crest/Rock Glen, Mason City, Iowa (1912) borrows from the Japanese master Hokusai, though not slavishly. Instead, it “synthesizes Japanese pictorial conventions with Western drawing techniques to create something new.” Wright and his drafting team had entered “a conversation between East and West” that produced remarkab