THE FELLOWSHIP

Sprawling portrait of Wright’s Depression-era Wisconsin arts colony shows the genius at work amid a dizzying succession of admirers.

Cultural sociologist Friedland (Religious Studies/UC Santa Barbara) and Los Angeles–based architect Zellman fashion a crowded look at the bold, unorthodox workers’ collective created in 1932 by Wright and his Montenegrin third wife. Taliesin, named after a legendary Welsh bard, already had a complicated, tragic history. Wright’s mother purchased the land in 1911; her son constructed a house there intended as his latest contribution to distinctively American architecture, as well as a home for the architect and Mamah Cheney, the married woman for whom he had left his first wife and their children in 1909. Briefly installed at the newly built compound, Mamah and her children were axe-murdered by a disgruntled Wright employee in 1914 while escaping from the fire he had started. Wright rebuilt Taliesin, married and divorced again before meeting 27-year-old Olgivanna Hinzenberg, 30 years his junior, in 1924. A disciple of mystic Georgi Gurdjieff, who had worked in Wright’s commune outside Paris, Olgivanna thought that a similar setup at Taliesin could provide the architect with paying students and a pool of available draftsmen. The prospectus, promising an “authentic American culture,” attracted young, brilliant minds willing to pay tuition and eager to work both as apprentices and farm laborers. Notable among them were Wes Peters, who became Wright’s son-in-law and successor, and several gay men prized as “loyal sons.” (They didn’t marry, and they rebuffed the advances of the seductive Olgivanna.) From this period until his death in 1959, Wright and his Taliesin disciples created his most famous works: Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax building and the Guggenheim Museum. Their collective experiment also planted the seed for utopian communities Usonia and Broadacre City. The authors lavish pages on Gurdjieff’s ideas about “organic life,” which Wright shared, as well as portraits of all the personalities and their shenanigans.

Compelling, but often gets lost in its myriad details.