Fallingwater Collections : Living With and In Art

Famously designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright over the falls of Bear Run river in the forests of Western Pennsylvania as a weekend home for the Pittsburgh department store magnate and philanthropost Edgar Kaufmann Sr.

and his wife, Liliane Kaufmann, Fallingwater is lauded for its architectural daring, innovativeness, and drama. But above all, for the Kaufmanns, the house served as a home in which the family sought to live in harmony with the natural world and with their immediate surrounds, including most significantly the rooms of the house. Far from being some precious thing, the Kaufmanns meant for their home to be comfortable while retaining a sense of relaxed elegance.

This atmosphere is everywhere in evidence, in part as a consequence of the collection built by the Kaufmanns, a unique assemblage of objects, paintings, textiles, sculpture, and many other items acquired through retailing, travel, professional associations, and personal friendships. The collection contains objects from countries around the world, both rustic and high-style, spanning centuries, and features such wide ranging works as Jacques Lipchitz s statue Mother and Child and Rene Lalique glassware to furniture by Mies van der Rohe, Tiffany lamps and vases,and Diego Rivera s Portrait of a Man; as well as woodblock prints by the Japanese masters, including Night Snow at Kanbara by Hiroshige, to point out only a few highlights. And yet Fallingwater, beyond what it contains, its startling form, or the site upon which it stands, is so much more than the sum of its parts here on brilliant display it is a total and sublime work of art.