Hot Glass

If you've followed the auction market for Frank Lloyd Wright-designed art glass in recent years, it will come as no surprise that another piece from the Martin House (Buffalo, NY, 1903-05) sold this week at Sotheby's for $149,000 - nearly twice what it fetched in a Western New York sale this August. Essentially, it was "flipped" for a cool profit of nearly $70,000.

Martin House skylight panel. Sotheby's

After nine years on the trail of such fragments of Wright's Prairie masterpiece, it's clear to me that no outpouring of heartfelt community support or good publicity will wrest many of these pieces away from an art market that never seems to lose its lust for Wright. A small handful of individuals and institutions are to be applauded for championing design integrity over profit: The Grey Art Gallery of NYU deaccessioned its "Tree of Life" window (an anomaly in its collection) and sold it to the Martin House Restoration Corporation for a favorable price, the first and only institution to do so. Another win came when Buffalo collectors Will and Nan Clarkson generously returned their Martin carriage house window to the historic site. 

But, all things considered, one has to wonder if it makes sense to prioritize original architectural fabric in every case. Eric Lloyd Wright, Frank's grandson and keeper of the "organic" architecture flame, once commented that public Wright sites like the Martin House might as well sell all of their original furnishings and art glass and put the profits toward perfect reproductions of everything. It's a strangely metaphysical proposal to be sure, but one that has its merits from a financial as well as a conservation standpoint. The problem is that it raises all sorts of thorny questions of authenticity, the "aura" of the original object and the public trust. Still, when precise reproductions can be made of the art glass for a fraction of the cost of acquiring originals, fiscal responsibility wins the day. The younger Wright's argument hinged on the point that Wright's designs executed by contractors were already a step removed from the master's hand, so an exacting reproduction made today is just as much a Wright product as the first-run originals.

Reproduction doors in Martin conservatory.

But to the extent that vintage Wright art glass has an inherent value and historic cache that can't be quantified - much less reproduced - there's attendant anxiety about where it ends up. Like the threatened masterpieces from the Detroit Institute of Arts' collection, there's certainly no guarantee that Wright art glass won't wander far afield if acquired by overseas collectors with little interest in making such items available for the edification of the American public. One surreal example of this came in 2008 following the sale of an exceedingly rare door panel from the Martin conservatory (removed decades earlier). The conservatory had been completely reconstructed, and a generous donor already had funded reproductions of the doors in memory of his late wife. Just days after the reproductions were unveiled, I received an email out of the blue from an anonymous collector in Japan with an image of the original door panel attached. He had just acquired it at auction, he explained, and wanted to know if he had it "right side up."  He did, and in the interest of knowing that it wasn't hanging upside-down in some Tokyo penthouse, I did my duty in verifying its proper orientation.