"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.
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."
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.