Sometimes, we find out that our aesthetic heroes had dramatic moral failings—or just deeply strange quirks. In the latter category, we can place the fact that Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the twentieth century’s most revered architects, went in for outdated and downright bizarre medical treatments.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’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Hilla Rebay commissioned Wright to design a museum for her patron, writing to him in 1943, “I 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.”
Bruce Pfeiffer relates in his book Frank Lloyd Wright: The Guggenheim Correspondence that at their first New York meeting, Rebay and Wright “liked one another instantly… Very soon they were on a first-name basis.” Just two weeks after that letter, an agreement had been inked. Wright pledged to Guggenheim that his avant-garde museum would “make the Metropolitan Museum look like a Protestant barn.” The museum that resulted, throwing open the doors to its trademark spiral rotunda in 1959, is one of the world’s most recognizable arts institutions, if not one of the most recognizable works of architecture.
The 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’s portrait in 1928 and took the opportunity to talk him up on “non-objective” art (which she distinguished from abstract art, which, as she put it, was “abstracted” from nature), being made by figures like Wassily Kandinsky. She swiftly became his advisor and curator.
“Her vigorous personality was such,” Pfeiffer writes, “that she got not only Mr. Wright but Mrs. Wright to share in her medical idiosyncrasies.”
Those idiosyncracies were no joke. Writing in the New Yorker in 1987, Brendan Gill memorably characterized Rebay as “a demonic amateur physician.”
For one thing, Rebay believed in using leeches for bloodletting, an ancient medical practice that had fallen into decline—though 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 “applied to their throats, in order to drain poisonous ‘old’ blood from their bodies and prompt the manufacture of pure ‘new’ blood.” Physicians had historically drained blood to balance the “humors,” the mystical materials that supposedly governed human health.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Getty Images.
Perhaps even more bizarre, the architect also, at Rebay’s urging, had all his teeth pulled and replaced with dentures—“within six weeks of their acquaintance,” writes Pfeiffer. The Hilla Rebay papers at the Guggenheim, the foundation discreetly notes, include information on “her interest in new and alternative medical treatments including teeth and skull x-rays.”
But the architect and his wife had their limits, Gill noted: “When the Wrights noticed one day that Rebay appeared to be casting clinical glances at the healthy teeth of their young daughter, Iovanna, they ceased to pay serious attention to her medical advice.”
It might be possible to look back on the medical ideas of people from eight decades ago and pass them off, with some charity, as merely outdated. Those were different times. In the 1940s, the medical establishment took very seriously issues that are no longer considered grave, like flat feet, crooked teeth, and heart murmurs. Antibiotics were just coming into widespread use. Only in 1946 was histamine discovered, leading to treatments for allergies.
But bizarre ideas about medicine have slightly more sinister associations today, when president Donald Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (whose slogan is Make America Healthy Again) regularly put out dangerous disinformation. Trump, let’s recall, suggested at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic that we could somehow fight the disease by injecting disinfectants or exposing ourselves to bright light. More recently, he has insisted, in the absence of all evidence, that Tylenol has a link to autism. Kennedy has inexplicably claimed that “There is no vaccine that is safe and effective,” though it was a vaccine developed under his boss that saved untold numbers of lives from Covid-19. In light of unfounded but widespread fears about vaccines, preventable diseases like measles, previously nearly eradicated, are surging.
Of course, Rebay wasn’t the president. She wasn’t even secretary of health and human services. (The department Kennedy leads didn’t even exist under that name yet in Rebay’s time.) Millions weren’t likely to subscribe to her ideas, so she wasn’t much of a threat to public health.
But it all does make you wonder—if Wright were alive today, would he go full MAHA?
