John Lautner: Portrait of an Architect

Lautner • Art & Iconography

John Lautner in front of his portrait by Kira Od

The first time I heard about this painting, it wasn't from a book. Duncan Nicholson — Lautner's last hire, and the man I trained under — described the portrait that hung behind John's desk as nearly life-size, so lifelike that it was as if Lautner was always in the office, even when he wasn't. For the people who worked at the Hollywood studio, the painting wasn't decoration. It was a presence.

I'd seen the photographs for years — Lautner at his desk, shoulder to shoulder with a larger-than-life version of himself — and always wondered about the story behind it. The answer turns out to be as unconventional as the man in the frame.

The Real Thing

The artist is Kira Od, who was only 22 or 23 when Lautner encountered her work. She had invented her own painting technique entirely on her own, and Lautner — a man with no patience for imitation in any medium — recognized it immediately. By her account, his reaction was: "Jesus Christ, kid, you're the Real Thing!" She soon learned that "the Real Thing" was the highest compliment Lautner gave anyone.

He commissioned a portrait, and she spent 1983 and 1984 painting it inside his Hollywood office — a full year of work on a panel measuring 42 by 66 inches. She considers it the finest thing she has ever made. It hung behind Lautner's desk until his passing in 1994.

"John Lautner: Portrait of an Architect," oil on panel, 1984, by Kira Od

An Organic Way of Seeing

What reads as wood grain in the painting is nothing of the sort. Od rakes a disciplined texture into the wet oil paint with a stiff brush, so that every color sits inside a precisely bounded shape while a single continuous texture flows through all of them. The effect barely survives photography — but in person, she explains, the surface catches and releases light as you move, and the painting comes alive.

More remarkable still is where the technique comes from. Od describes it as a record of how she actually sees — a pattern that flows across every surface in her field of vision, closely resembling the opposing spirals of seeds in a sunflower head. She has written a paper on it, and it's worth reading.

It's hard to imagine a painter better matched to her subject. Lautner spent his career pursuing structure that grows from nature rather than being imposed on it — the thread running from Louis Sullivan through Frank Lloyd Wright to the concrete shells of the Sheats-Goldstein Residence. Od's sunflower-spiral vision is the same idea arriving through a different medium: pattern found in nature, made structural, made alive. Of course Lautner called her the Real Thing. He recognized his own lineage when he saw it.

Detail of the face, showing Od's raked texture technique

The Homecoming

The story now has an ending the office photographs couldn't predict. In 2014, Lautner's daughter, Karol Lautner Peterson, donated the portrait to the DeVos Art Museum at Northern Michigan University in Marquette — Lautner's alma mater, in the town where he grew up and where the family built Midgaard on the shore of Lake Superior. The painting that presided over the Hollywood office for a decade is now part of the museum's permanent collection.

There's something fitting in that arc. The portrait kept Lautner present in his office when he was away; now it keeps him present in the place his architecture began. If Duncan was right that the painting made you feel John was always in the room — then he's home.

ARCHITECTOID