I'm glad that a visit to the Gugenheim's Wright show had such a profound impact on Mr. Kaplan that he decided to write about it. It is, indeed, a fantastic show. I'm not sure, however, that enthusiasm necessarily qualifies one to write a professional piece on a topic. While Mr. Kaplan got the facts right, and even a stray aesthetic judgement or two, he does not handle the broader art historical context very well, nor is his formal analysis particularly sharp.

The trouble begins when Mr. Kaplan takes Hilla Rebay's art taxonomy seriously. The category "non-objective art" is not a very good one. It bascially means abstraction, and the spiritual imperative Rebay read into many of the disparate artworks she classified as "non-objective" would have surprised the artists themselves (with the exception of a few like Kandinsky). Klee, Kandinsky, Chagall, Leger, Moholy-Nagy, none of these guys were doing the same thing in their art, and to see a common spiritual content is a rather broad and shallow misreading.

Having accepted that there actually is a coherent category of "non-objective art" Kaplan goes on to dismiss it as old hat by the time that Wright's Guggenheim was built. This is part of Kaplan's rather strange thesis that the reason that the museum overwhelmed its art is that the art was not good enough for the museum. According to Kaplan, had Guggenheim owned post-war American abstraction, rather than pre-war European abstraction, the art would not have been overwhelmed. But why would Kandinsky have been good enough in 1942 and not good enough in 1959? In making this argument, Kaplan priveleges novelty as the highest aesthetic criterion. Only the latest art could surprise and titillate as much as the building. In doing so, he also treats the jolt of novelty as if it is a formal property. Thus, the old non-objective paintings are described as "quaint and static" when displayed amongst "ramps and curves." But just because an art object is old does not mean that it is static formally. Take a look at the Kandinsky that accompanies this bit of text and try to tell me that it is a static painting with a straight face. Meanwhile, we are supposed to believe that ultra-serene Rothko could somehow compete with the dynamism of Wright's Guggenheim?

Finally we get to the piece's conclusion, in which Mr. Kaplan sketches the building's legacy. Here Mr. Kaplan is at his loosest, bizarrely citing the Guggenheim as an influence on Mies' Neunationalgalerie and Pei's East-Wing. Mies' is a glass box on a plinth and Pei's is a set of marble sheathed shards derived from the geometry of the block held together by an expansive atrium. I really don't see the connection, and Mr. Kaplan's only hint is that they are somehow "spiraling," although for the life of me, I cannot find a spiral in either. He then lists a number of fashionable current practitioners, saying they were all inspired by Wright. I will grant that no architect can escape a confrontation with Wright's legacy at some point in their career, but if I were to cite major influences on these architects' thinking, Wright would not be the first to leap to mind. A lot happened in the profession between Wright's death and the rise of these superstars.