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\n\tSometimes, we find out that our aesthetic heroes had dramatic moral failings\u2014or just deeply strange quirks. In the latter category, we can place the fact that Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the twentieth century\u2019s most revered architects, went in for outdated and downright bizarre medical treatments. Also surprising, he got some of his ideas from the artist and curator who commissioned him to build New York\u2019s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tHilla Rebay commissioned Wright to design a museum for her patron, writing to him in 1943, \u201cI need a fighter, a lover of space, an originator, a tester and a wise man. I want a temple of spirit, a monument! And your help to make it possible.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBruce Pfeiffer relates in his book Frank Lloyd Wright: The Guggenheim Correspondence<\/em> that at their first New York meeting, Rebay and Wright \u201cliked one another instantly\u2026 Very soon they were on a first-name basis.\u201d Just two weeks after that letter, an agreement had been inked. Wright pledged to Guggenheim that his avant-garde museum would \u201cmake the Metropolitan Museum look like a Protestant barn.\u201d The museum that resulted, throwing open the doors to its trademark spiral rotunda in 1959, is one of the world\u2019s most recognizable arts institutions, if not one of the most recognizable works of architecture.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe child of a Prussian military officer, Rebay was born in Strasbourg in 1890 as Hildegard Anna Augusta Elizabeth Freiin Rebay von Ehrenwiesen, Baroness Hilla von Rebay. She was an artist who had painted Guggenheim\u2019s portrait in 1928 and took the opportunity to talk him up on \u201cnon-objective\u201d art (which she distinguished from abstract art, which, as she put it, was \u201cabstracted\u201d from nature), being made by figures like Wassily Kandinsky. She swiftly became his advisor and curator.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cHer vigorous personality was such,\u201d Pfeiffer writes, \u201cthat she got not only Mr. Wright but Mrs. Wright to share in her medical idiosyncrasies.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThose idiosyncracies were no joke. Writing in the New Yorker <\/em>in 1987, Brendan Gill memorably characterized Rebay as \u201ca demonic amateur physician.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tFor one thing, Rebay believed in using leeches for bloodletting, an ancient medical practice that had fallen into decline\u2014though only, it might surprise you to read, as recently as a century before that initial letter she wrote to Wright. Gill notes that several times, the Wrights submitted to having leeches \u201capplied to their throats, in order to drain poisonous \u2018old\u2019 blood from their bodies and prompt the manufacture of pure \u2018new\u2019 blood.\u201d Physicians had historically drained blood to balance the \u201chumors,\u201d the mystical materials that supposedly governed human health.<\/p>\n
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