Illinois Issues Summer Book Section

By DONALD P. HALLMARK

Donald Johnson. Frank Lloyd Wright Versus America: The 1930s. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. Pp. 436 with illustrations, appendices, notes and references. $39.95 (cloth).

Randolph C. Henning, ed. At Taliesin: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. Pp. 323 with illustrations, appendices and index. $39.95 (cloth).

Narcisco G. Menocal, ed. Taliesin 1911-1914, Wright Studies, Volume One. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. Pp. 141 with illustrations. $39.95 (paper).

Photo courtesy of The Dana-Thomas House, Illinois Historic Preservation Agency Richard W. Bock's sculpture in terra cotta, The Flower in the Crannied Wall, 1903. The original is still in situ in the entry of Springfield's Dana-Thomas House. A collaborative effort with Bock, the work so appealed to Frank Lloyd Wright that he had a plaster cast made and installed at his home Taliesin in Wisconsin. A detailed discussion occurs in Wright Studies: Taliesin 1911-1914.

Perhaps no other architect's name is as familiar as that of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959). Within the past two years, a survey by the American Institute of Architects named Wright as "the Greatest American Architect" and placed two of his designs among the top 10 best American buildings: Fallingwater, 1936, and Chicago's Robie House, 1907-1909. Two other Wright structures also considered among the country's most dynamic and influential designs are the recently restored Guggenheim Museum, 1949-1959, and the Johnson Wax Administration Building at Racine, 1937.

Wright was not a native Illinoisan (he was born at Richland Center, Wis.) but more of his buildings stand in Illinois than in any other state; almost 100 are here compared to the presently-known 44 in Wisconsin, 31 in Michigan and 25 in California. Two of the three most visited Wright house museums also are located in Illinois: Springfield's Dana-Thomas House and the architect's Oak Park Home and Studio.

As the interest in Frank Lloyd Wright continues, the scholarship surrounding the architect intensifies and deepens. New volumes are appearing regularly, some still general in approach, but many now beginning to deal with previously neglected topics and time periods. Three of these recent books are treated here.

Johnson's study is the most ambitious of these and attempts to analyze a very problematic and difficult period in Wright's long career. It was, after all, in the 1930s that Wright emerged from almost 20 years of being a theorist and commentator to begin designing and building structures of great merit and stunning originality. As the Depression economy improved, this architect, whose legendary private life had scandalized polite American society for years, was commissioned for new works. Wright and his new wife Olgivanna carefully orchestrated his publications and lectures to the architectural world. Furthermore, as Donald Johnson contends, the Wrights skillfully worked the international press, who frequently quoted the architect because of his bravura and outspoken opinions on politics and art, on the crisis of the modern architectural movement of the 1930s and on art theory and aesthetics in general.

Johnson's writings are full of newly gleaned materials and factual reconstructions of events that shaped Wright's destiny in this period. There are numerous opinions by the author, as well as extended quotations from Wright's writings of the time. This can make for ponderous and difficult reading, but his thesis is significant to gaining an understanding of this middle period of Wright's career. Deeply rooted in discussions of architectural philosophy and views of Wright by the world community, particularly in the Soviet Union and in Britain, it is a book dealing more with the development of Wright's ideas than with his buildings and architectural accomplishments. The casual reader will find the volume theoretically complex.

20/July 1992/Illinois Issues

Photo courtesy of the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation Frank Lloyd Wright, circa 1906 in the middle of the Prairie House design years

A more narrowly focused volume is At Taliesin, a compendium and commentary on newspaper columns from 1934 to 1937, published mostly in southern Wisconsin newspapers like the Madison-based Capital Times. Of almost 300 columns, Wright was responsible for only about 10 percent. Most were the work of his students and co-workers at Taliesin, the school Wright founded at Spring Green, Wis., in 1932. Taliesin occupied the grounds where Wright's aunts had developed the Hill side Home School of progressive education in the late 1880s. Wright had designed a variety of buildings for the site, as well as his own home further up the hill. Now known as Taliesin East, the buildings and land became Wright's sacred ancestral grounds, serving as a retreat from the world that often "misunderstood" him, his family life and his architectural experiments.

What strikes one in reading these period documents is that they effectively capture the pastoral attempt to combine work, culture and art as a way of life. Taliesin was an idyllic, if impossible, attempt to integrate art and life in a disciplined setting established by Wright and his wife Olgivanna. In his paternal way, Wright edited all of the articles, but it is still unknown what specific role Mrs. Wright played in the formulation of the topics. The brief essays provide "slice of life" episodes in the quiet days of the 1930s just before Wright's career exploded into a new frenzy of building activity and world acclaim. The rolling prose reminds this reviewer of the same nostalgia one feels in viewing Wright's early silent home movies of the apprentices in the fields and buildings at Taliesin: pitching hay, using the quaint farm machinery, building the Taliesin structures and having tea on the terrace.

More scholarly and less anecdotal are the five extended essays in the first issue of the journal Wright Studies. Several well-known Wright scholars offer opinions on how the Taliesin (Wisconsin) home developed, both physically and philosophically. Typical of presenters at art and architectural history conferences, the writers use different methodologies and approaches, sometimes disagreeing about particular influences on Wright.

The five essays deal with the beginnings of the Taliesin home and include narratives of its history, photographic documentation and the more intangible theories of Wright's mind-set during this period. One might question why and how these particular essays were chosen (two were by one individual, another by the editor himself), but they represent diverse perspectives about Wright's early attempt to seek refuge in the Wisconsin countryside. He moved there after the turbulent but brilliant Oak Park years and his subsequent trip to Europe with Mrs. Cheney. Their developing relationship could not flourish in Chicago, and they went to Taliesin. The essays are limited to the formulative developments of Taliesin before the murder there of Mrs. Cheney and six other persons by a deranged servant and before fire partially destroyed the site in 1914.

Future volumes of the Wright Studies journal will be devoted to Fallingwater and to Wright's connections with the European architectural community. Interest in Frank Lloyd Wright is unflagging, with several international exhibitions of his work either underway or planned. Many future publications will likely contribute to greater appreciation of the work of America's best known architect.

Donald P. Hallmark currently serves as director of Frank Lloyd Wright's Dana- Thomas House, a state historic site in Springfield. He formerly taught art and architectural history at Greenville College in Greenville, Ill.