The Frederick C. Bogk House, the only single-family residence Frank Lloyd Wright built in Milwaukee, has remained something of a mystery from its design in 1916 until now. Now that the house is for sale for the first time in nearly seventy years, the public can appreciate its state of preservation, fine original furniture, and glowing internal light. But its most salient feature is a series of sculptures under the streetside eaves. These sculptures turn out to be a key to understanding Wright’s turn to Primitivism, a surprising and often neglected development for the famous architect most associated with the Prairie Style.
Accounts of Wright’s career typically point to the Robie House (1908–10) in Chicago as the culmination of his Prairie period and a major development in modern architecture. The decade that follows is usually seen as a maelstrom around the tragedy in 1914, when his lover and her children were murdered. Wright’s work in the 1910s tends to be dismissed as retardataire for its use of ornament. But there is more to it than that: after returning in 1910 from a year in Europe, Wright began exploring non-Western aesthetic sources supposedly uncorrupted by materialism and the tyranny of style He initially focused his experimentation on abstracting the human figure and composing dynamic ornament through primary geometric shapes found across cultures and time. His goal was to revive his organic designs with a fresh language of modernism that resonated with timeless, primal qualities.
Wright, who was often oblivious or antagonistic toward the European avant-garde, had no clue that he was pursuing a track parallel to the interests of Picasso, Braque, and others. He made his own way to abstraction—calling it “conventionalization”—and theorized his own version of Primitivism. Instead of African and Polynesian, his stylistic sources were Japanese, Mayan, and Native American. He considered the prototypical Japanese artist the “interpreter” of “the right conventionalization of life” in making “native forms the most humanly significant and the most humanly joy-giving.” As a child he had been fascinated with pre-Columbian architecture: “I wished I might someday have money enough to go to Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru to join in excavating those long slumbering remains of lost cultures; mighty, primitive abstractions of man’s nature—ancient arts of the Mayan, the Inca, the Toltec.” He thought common influences on ancient Egyptian and Mayan architecture were “coming in from the mysterious Pacific,” the early architecture of China. “Altogether these architectures seem to acknowledge kinship to each other.”
After making an initial series of abstracted sculptures for the Midway Gardens (1913–14), an entertainment complex in Chicago, Wright selected the Bogk House for his next experiments in universalized figuration. While making a series of façade studies, he produced a beautiful and revelatory drawing showing two figures with outstretched wings, body details resembling breastplates, and facial features evocative of American Indians. These disparate details combine to make a kind of composite priest. Between these priests is an abstracted Japanese figure clad in a kimono. These figures are polychromed with saturated reds and blues and accents of gold and silver—though ultimately only the priests were installed and were never themselves painted. Presented side by side, the priests and Japanese figure illustrate the universal “kinship” found in archetypes that Wright sought.
The rigor and expense of casting all the figures in concrete limited the series to four priests, but they nonetheless convey an integrated essence. There’s no indication that Bogk and his wife requested these figures, or that they approved or even understood them. As he often did, Wright had used a client’s project to expand the palette of his art.
Wright further pursued his Primitivist language at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1916–22). Here, the abstracted figure receded and a new pattern of primal geometry emerged, much of which was carved in Oya, a soft volcanic stone. Viewers not attuned to Wright’s Primitivist intentions often considered the results strange. Around the same time, Wright was designing the Hollyhock House in Los Angeles (1919–21) in an idiom popularly dubbed “Mayan.” But he wasn’t interested in literal quotations. He wanted to explore concrete—the modern material par excellence—for the house (not stucco as built), and he designed the roof shapes not to be prototypically Mayan but rather similar to the type he and his colleagues had designed in Japan—another example of the Far East meeting Mesoamerica.
By the early 1920s Wright exited his Primitivist phase as he confronted his next big challenge: combating the International Style brewing in Europe before it washed over American architecture in the early 1930s. Though his work evolved, Wright believed in archetypes for the rest of his life. It is no wonder he described the Bogk project as “a good house of a good period for a good client.”