Category: General

Looking at the east facade of Taliesin at dusk.

Exhibiting Patience

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Taken in Taliesin’s Garden Court on September 10, 2008 looking toward Taliesin’s east façade.

I recall that, around the year 2007, a discussion began: stage an exhibition for the 50th anniversary of the completion of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. 2009 was also the 50th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s death; concentrating on his architecture was a bonus. You know: two birds, one stone (and one piece of living architecture).

This idea resulted in the exhibit Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, May 15-August 23, 2009. I was surprisingly involved in it, although I was not, strictly, involved at all. I was not asked to contribute anything, but we worked with those writing and researching for it. If you look at the acknowledgements in the exhibition catalog, you get a sense of those actually involved. And of course I was really happy to give my knowledge to others. A real exhibit in a big museum!

In 2008 I remember working with two people:

Richard Cleary:

Professor Richard Cleary came to Taliesin while researching what would become “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Romance of the Builder”, his essay in the exhibition catalog for From Within Outward. Cleary, the Professor and Page Southerland Page Fellow at the School of Architecture of the University of Texas at Austin, traced Wright’s interest in building techniques, and with specific builders at Taliesin and other projects.

I remember walking around with him, and pointing toward specific mortar work. He found the names and resources I came up with interesting, but unfortunately I can’t remember it all.1 I was thanked, though. My name is in footnote 18 of his essay, and it’s spelled correctly! (That’s a problem for a woman named Keiran.)

David Heald:

That September I assisted photographer, David Heald. He has worked for the Guggenheim since 1981 and came to Taliesin with his assistant to get photographs at Taliesin and Hillside.

Actually, I wrote that “I” assisted Heald, but that’s not really true. A woman in our organization (who worked with the press) had the most interaction with him. She started her day with him at maybe 6:30 a.m. I tagged along starting at around 7. It turned into a 12+ hour day (just for me). Heald, his assistant, and Becky and I went into spaces and moved things around for him (particularly important artifacts). When he took the photos he would invite us look at his work.

Near the end of the day, Heald and his assistant set out lights strategically. At dusk, they lit Taliesin up so he could take more photographs. While he took more photos, I clicked away on an “aim-and-shoot” camera while I sat on the ground. One of those photographs is what you see at the top of this page.

Heald’s work informs me when I’ve told people not to bother taking photos on a tour: I watched him—a man with (now) over 40 years in professional photography—spend over an hour getting each photograph.

The last part of the work for the exhibit includes my Taliesin knowledge:

Lastly, I consulted with the firm constructing models for the exhibit. One model showed the Taliesin estate, and its changes in ownership over time. The people in the firm worked really hard & fast. Their model had a map projected over it, showing the change over time on the 600-acre2 estate. That model is shown on this video (the model is at 2:22 min. and 3:01-3:13 min.).

Like I said, they were working really hard, starting in January (for an exhibit that opened in May). I threw information at them (photographs, Plat maps, etc.) and came to expect long emails with lots of questions from them at the end of my week. At one point, I almost wrote in an email: “Oh, dear: you’ve never worked in a non-profit organization, have you?”

The last, large interaction came when one of the staff members sent what he thought was a pretty good floor plan of Taliesin II. That was forwarded to me and I started figuring out its problems.

How I spent my night with this:

After receiving the drawing, I spent most of that evening carefully laying out what, in his Taliesin II drawing, was simply wrong. I saved my copy of that plan, below. And it’s color-coded!:

Drawing of Taliesin II with my notes on what didn't exist.

This drawing was based on drawing Taliesin II, #1403.018 (seen at ARTSTOR, here). Wright’s living quarters in this drawing are on the right hand side.

My color-coded analysis of the drawing must have done something right: I never heard from the man again. Nor did the floor plan make it into the exhibit. Of course, he had sent this out on, like, April 20 (with an exhibit opening on May 15) so that might have been his shot in the dark.

I regret to say that I didn’t make it to the exhibit. Even though I was told there was an invitation for me on opening night (and I had a friend agree to let me stay at his apartment in Manhattan), information or something got dropped somewhere along the line and I couldn’t nail down whether my name was on a list of those formally invited. This confusion stacked up to make me decide not to go (too much money, etc. etc.). The rest of my memories on this though, are fun!

Originally published on July 14, 2021.
I took the photograph at the top of this page on September 10, 2008.

1 I believe I helped, but a snafu in 2015 sent my email records from the previous decade down a dark hole so I can’t find them.

2 The historic Taliesin estate—what Wright owned—is 600 acres. The estate today, however, is 800 acres, because the site owners, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, purchased roughly 200 acres to the west of the historic estate in the late 1990s. Wright never owned those 200 acres.

Looking (plan) northwest, Taliesin's living room

“I’m just a tour guide”

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A photograph looking (plan) northwest in Taliesin’s Living Room. Wright’s Bechstein piano is in the background. There’s a photo of him at this piano, here, at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation website.

In 1994, when I was 26, I started giving tours at Taliesin. But, “I’m just a tour guide” is something I usually never said to people. I didn’t want them to feel obligated to say, “Oh, no! You’re much more than that!”

On the other hand, I was worried they wouldn’t say that at all.

Although, early on in my employment, I absorbed huge chunks of Frank Lloyd Wright information. This was definitely related to the fact that I was nearing graduation for my MA and primed for ingestion of data.

And yet, while I settled on telling people that I was “solely a tour guide”, for years this wasn’t really true.1

My years in the tour program:

1994-2002, in addition to being able to do many of the types of tours at Taliesin (sometimes all), I:

  • Worked as a clerk in the bookstore,
  • Was a Taliesin House Steward,
  • Did deep cleaning at Hillside (on Wednesdays), and,
  • In a pinch, drove the guides in a small shuttle bus holding 14 tour guests (ok, well I only did one whole day that one time).

You can read my thoughts on that first year, here. But, really, I was mostly in tours until the end of 2002. And usually one-day-a-week from 2004-2019.

Tour guiding is a long, complicated thing which I don’t feel I have the wherewithal to address (and how I became “the Historian” is another story, here).

In fact,

Over the years I periodically started writing / adding to an unpublished book about being a tour guide. But I have not completed it. In part this is due to my “voice”. While trying to be funny, I sometimes unintentionally sound misanthropic. The title of my proposed book is an example: What Time Does the 1:30 Tour Leave?

See? Funny, but can be interpreted negatively.

Still, over and again I (and other staff) have marveled at those who wonder why someone would “only” be a tour guide. This statement implies that those asking / wondering can’t figure out “why” you would do something “that doesn’t pay that much”. No, it doesn’t pay much in money (moolah, cheddar, greenbacks).

What Taliesin tour guiding pays is ineffable

The Taliesin estate in Wisconsin is one of the most complex works of art in the world which was designed / worked on / advanced by someone who is, by most counts, one of the greatest architects in human history.

Not that Wright is the best architect who’s ever lived

I’m just saying that, if you came up with a list of 25 people throughout the entire globe in all of human, built history (at least 6,000 years), Frank Lloyd Wright’s name is on the list. And yet Taliesin Preservation pays people to bring visitors through these spaces.1 It’s puzzling to me that anyone wouldn’t see that as something incredible.

Although I’ve got to think that the reason others feel that way is that they never experienced someone in their 70’s or 80’s telling them after their tour, that they’ve been waiting their entire lives to come to Taliesin. And some other things below.

Still, to get back to this post on tour guiding, I wanted to write about things I learned about Taliesin’s history while giving people tours (my current state of not giving tours, and not being the hired historian, is not my choice, by the way; Covid-19 and all). While nothing jumped out at me, what has risen, instead, are the memories of unique moments with guests. Small things that have stayed with me for years. I mentioned one above: the elderly woman who told me that coming to Taliesin was something she’d waited for her whole life. But there are others.

Some stories from tours:

One time, I had taken my group to the room next to Taliesin’s Drafting Studio and directed them toward Taliesin’s front door. We were in the area of the photograph below:

"Front Office" at Taliesin, March 2004

Photographer: Keiran Murphy
Looking west in Taliesin’s “Front Office”, which is next to Taliesin’s drafting studio.

While speaking, I suddenly noticed a woman crying at the back of the line. As a guide, I wanted to make sure that nothing was wrong, but I also didn’t want to stop everything and single her out, saying, “Excuse me: I see that you are crying. Are YOU OK?”

I kept my eye on her and it turned out that she was fine; smiling moments later when she walked by on the way to Taliesin’s front door. I understood immediately that she cried. . . well, because of the beauty of Taliesin. Its enormity had made her burst into tears.

Here are a few other moments:

  • One time I was in Frank Lloyd Wright’s bedroom when someone, with a tone of amazement and discovery, said that Taliesin was as much of an idea as it was a reality (Wright using the building as an experiment). I could hear in her voice that she was coming to this conclusion while articulating that (I tried to tell people but I can’t be sure if it always came across). A photograph of the room is through this link (she was talking to me at the desk in the background).
  • I had a boy who had just turned 12 walk confidently telling me everything about the house and all about Wright’s philosophy (it should come as no surprise that the boy’s 12th birthday present was taking a tour at Taliesin).
  • I also had another 12-year-old on a “tour-as-birthday-present”, a girl with a friend, asking me if I studied under Frank Lloyd Wright. Out of the corner of my eyes I could see the bemused looks on people’s faces around me as I told her (I hope) politely that, no, he was a lot older than me and died before I was born.

Then there were outdoor experiences:

Looking across the Taliesin valley, with the building at Mid-ground
Photographer: Keiran Murphy

The photograph above is one of the distant views that would be seen on the Taliesin Walking Tours that were given through the 2005 tour year (there’s a “Driftless Landscape tour” at Taliesin that they have now). I had my own unique experiences on these tours. Some memories of these experiences are below:

  • being chased by mosquitoes (including one hitting my lower eyelid under the frame of my glasses!);
  • being chased by Canada geese; and
  • smelling cow manure while the farmer was fertilizing the fields. Sorry: it IS Wisconsin so sometimes you gotta smell our Dairy air, y’know.

Other interesting moments on the Walking tour:

  • Seeing a Red Tailed hawk that lived on the estate one summer: it would take off when you walked close to it (I don’t know where it spent its time otherwise);
  • Spotting a fox that lived on the Taliesin estate for a few years;
  • The afternoon I went with my group on a drizzly day to an island on the Taliesin pond. We stood outside as a rain shower came, and the pond looked like diamonds as the water droplets hit its surface;
  • And finally, there was a Blue Heron that stayed by Taliesin’s waterfall that was scared up every time our shuttle drivers went past it
    • hopefully it will be there again when the pond is refilled (work started on the dam in late 2019)
      • A Facebook Live event took place in 2020 that explains the work.

Lastly, another impression from someone on a tour:

One time an Italian gentleman and his partner went through Hillside (Was she his wife? She was a woman around his age.) They didn’t speak a lot of English, which is my major language. I remember the gentleman really well because, as we sat in the Theater at Hillside he said, “there is so much geometry here. . . . But it is so free.”

I looked around the Hillside theater room with his eyes. I could see the “geometry” he mentioned, with round seats (constructed in metal) sitting at an angle, and the a boxed-design on the north and south window walls. And I agreed with him wholeheartedly.

Hillside Theater Foyer, September 2005.
Photographer: Keiran Murphy

I took the photograph above in the Hillside Theater Foyer. The Hillside Theater is in the background.
Originally posted July 5, 2021

1. After 2002,

I began to work more as the historian for Taliesin Preservation, doing research in projects (this preservation work now done by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation).

#1403.011 The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Post-It Notes on Taliesin Drawings

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This is a roundabout story that comes to a simple conclusion: I found a Taliesin drawing.

Over 12 years ago I worked on a Comprehensive Chronology of the Hillside Structure on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin estate with Anne Biebel, the principal of Cornerstone Preservation (she was the person who suggested I read the local newspapers, 1910s-early 1930s, which introduced me to their weirdness).

This project led me down to Wright’s archives to do research. While now at the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library in New York, until the fall of 2012, Wright’s archives  were at his winter home, Taliesin West, in Arizona.

Looking at drawings:

In particular I looked at his drawings that weren’t assigned to any of his commissions.

Or, actually I looked at photographs of the drawings, not the actual, physical drawings (natch).

I thought it might help the chronology if I found drawings for furniture at Hillside.

Reading what I just wrote sounds silly. In 2009 Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (former apprentice) was the director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives. He, in large part, created it and ran it starting in the early 1960s. He would probably know a drawing showing a detail from Hillside, wouldn’t he?

But I also know that, while “Bruce” knew so many things in the archives, I know one site very well: Taliesin and the Taliesin estate. So I thought it possible that there were drawings of chairs or tables that Bruce hadn’t recognized as belonging to Hillside.

So, what happened?

In the end, I was correct, if only in part. Yes, I came across a drawing that showed furniture in a building on the Taliesin estate. No, the furniture wasn’t for Hillside. The drawing showed furniture for Taliesin.

Why Bruce hadn’t caught the drawing:

I can understand why Bruce hadn’t known this drawing came from Taliesin. Bruce didn’t know the furniture in the drawing when he the archives and the arranged its drawings. That changed because of “The Album” that surfaced on the online auction site, Ebay, in 2005.

Ebay and The Album:

The Album was a beautiful, handmade photo album with 33 photographs. Most show Taliesin in 1911-1912. Its appearance on Ebay caused a flurry of excitement in the Wrightworld. The seller sent scans of many of the images to interested parties (including me). That whole week had the intensity of being on the social media site Facebook during the Superbowl.

It was all anyone could talk about

People called and emailed all week long: had I seen the images, did I want scans of the images, could I donate money to help buy the images (I didn’t have the money, then or now). That Friday, after an exciting night spent watching the auction online (and hitting the “refresh” button on my web browser over and over again), the Wisconsin Historical Society won it with their highest (and only) bid: $22,100.

This money was raised through donations

The money I couldn’t afford to donate went into the pot that allowed the Wisconsin Historical Society to win the album.

The story on the album can be seen at the Wisconsin Historical Society here. If you’ve got a subscription to The New York Times, you can read the story in the February 13, 2005 issue. Or you can read about it in an archived page of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel here.1

All of the photographs from The Album are available at the WHS here.

What this has to do with this post:

Two of the photos in The Album show bunk beds in a room at Taliesin. They totally tweaked my brain and are here and here.2 I can almost guarantee that when I first saw these photos I took out our copies of Taliesin drawings to see what I’d previously missed. What I missed is what’s in the drawing at the top of this page.3

That drawing above shows several rooms, with two fireplaces. The fireplace on the left has a rectangular room to its left. The outline of the 2 bunk beds is drawn in pencil on the far left side of the rectangular room.

So, this brings us back to my trip to the Archives:

Four + years after The Album, I was studying photos of unidentified Wright drawings, looking for possible Hillside furniture. Flipping through the photos I came across the drawing that I have reproduced below (in two parts). This drawing shows those bunk beds. Its ID number is 7803.001. While many of Wright’s drawings can be found online (through JSTOR), this one isn’t on there. That’s because it wasn’t known which building it was connected to when these things were put online. I received permission to reproduce my scan here. It, and the drawing at the top of this page (as it says so in the embedded text), is the property of The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

The scan below:

has the footprint of the bunk beds.

Drawing 7803.001 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (Musum of Modern Art|The Avery Architectural & FIne Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

You can see the part of drawing 7803.001 above is the floor plan showing the two bunk beds with the chest between them. I don’t think the chest (that horizontal rectangle) was for clothes: the drawers you see in the photographs at the Wisconsin Historical Society weren’t deep enough.

This scan has their elevation:

Drawing 7803.001 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (Musum of Modern Art|The Avery Architectural & FIne Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

At the top of the photo above, you see “Bed Room off Studio” in Wright’s handwriting.

Since I had seen the bunk beds in the photographs, I knew exactly what Wright meant about “Bed Room off Studio”. The “Bed Room” was for the draftsman that would be living and working with him at Taliesin. The “Studio” (Wright’s studio) was the room at the fireplace on the right.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to tell Bruce when I found this drawing. It was likely that he wasn’t in the office that day. Wish I’d thought of it while we smoked cigarettes outside, though (I smoked then). After all, he told me Herb Fritz likely asked for Wright’s tractor because of gasoline rationing.

Drawings & post-it notes:

When I found the drawing, I didn’t know what to do. I scanned the photo of it, but since I was always on a time schedule for the Taliesin West trips, I could only stick a post-it note on it. Probably noting that it was from Taliesin I, and including my name.

I did make an effort to contact staff at the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library (which has had the archive since 2012-13) when it occurred to me that they probably didn’t save the Post-It note. Hopefully what I wrote here serves the story as well.

First published on June 29, 2021.
The drawing at the top of this page is the property of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York) and can be found online here.

Notes:

1 The photographer wasn’t known when the Journal Sentinel did the story, but his identity is known now: Taylor Woolley. The Utah Historical Society has the negatives for most of the images; I’ve shown them a couple of times on these pages.

2 although, really, since these are known I’m surprised that no one has started making Wright-designed bunk beds yet.

3 Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer misidentified this drawing as Taliesin II instead of Taliesin I; the drawing was published in 1913 in Western Architect magazine. That was identified by scholar & architect, Anthony Alofsin, in his essay, “Taliesin I: A Catalogue of Drawings and Photographs,” Taliesin 1911-1914, Wright Studies, v. 1, ed. Narciso Menocal (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1992), 114.

Two women at The Whitney Museum of Art looking at Untitled (Hujar Dead) by David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz

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Looking at Untitled (Hujar Dead), 1987-88. “Hujar” was Wojnarowicz’s mentor & dear friend. The piece has writing silk screened over photographs of Peter Hujar (who had just died from an AIDS-related illness).
The writing, in part, says, “I’m a thirty seven foot tall one thousand one hundred and seventy-two pound man inside this six foot frame      and all I can feel is the pressure      all I can feel is the pressure and the need for release.”

My husband and I were driving in the car and “It’s Been a Minute” with Sam Sanders came on. Sanders interviewed Sarah Schulman, co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project and the author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 (“ACT UP” comes from AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). It’s a great interview that I encourage you to listen to.
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510317/its-been-a-minute-with-sam-sanders

Listening on the radio, and the fact that it’s Pride Month, pulled me to write this post. It’s about another long-term interest of mine: the artist David Wojnarowicz [VOY-nə-ROH-vitch].

Who was Wojnarowicz?

Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was an American multi-media artist who died of an AIDS-related illness and was the subject of my Master’s Thesis in Art History in 1994.1

If you’ve not heard of him, you know at least one of his pieces: it’s Untitled (Falling Buffalos).2 I’ve noticed it a lot online and it was also the cover of the CD single, “One” by U2. The piece also graced the cover of his book of essays, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, which I took a photo of, and that’s below:

Cover of the book, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, by David Wojnarowicz. The book is sitting on a small table with my notes in the background (as apparent decoration?).

This post will not be a biography on the artist. That was expertly done by Cynthia Carr in her book, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz.

Talking about why I can’t really talk about him

I’m not certain I can properly write about him at all. This sense of inadequacy also explains why I didn’t go to NYC 1990-92 to find him. I kept imagining walking up to him (myself a white, suburban girl with combat boots as my ONLY hard-ass protective badge) and saying. . . what? “Um. . .  I like your work”?

This was a man who, according to Close to the Knives, lived mostly on the street when he was a teenager (you’ll have to read Carr’s biography to understand more), and (among other things) created art in a falling-apart pier on the Hudson River by spray painting on the crumbling walls and, one time, throwing grass seed on the rotting floors (you can see the grass in the 6th photograph from the Hyperallergic page linked to in this sentence).

My encounter with his work came at a good time:

His time at the forefront of art began in the 1980s while he participated in the art scene in the East Village of New York City. The energy and dynamism of his work drew me when I first encountered him in an article in The Village Voice3 in 1990. He didn’t seem to apologize for being gay, or for being angry at the rampant homophobia surrounding the AIDS crisis.

And while some see him as “an angry artist”, I never did. It seemed to me that his anger was completely justified. If you watch him on YouTube you can see him explain reasons to be angry.

And if you don’t remember the unchecked, cruel, homophobia surrounding AIDS in the 1980s – mid-’90s, then you either never knew of it, or you don’t remember (not that homophobia wasn’t there before, but [expletive expletive expletive deleted] people were dying).

And, while he was not explicit, Wojnarowicz wrote at times about erotic homosexual situations. Due to this my advisor told me to switch 2 of the professors on my thesis defense team. He said that, while they wouldn’t admit it, they’d never accept the thesis because of their problems with Wojnarowicz’s sexuality.

Now, here are links to a small bit of his art:

While I was first drawn to his painting, my thesis concentrated on his photography, which he began exploring in the late 1970s in a series called “Arthur Rimbaud in New York”.

He made a mask from a photograph of artist Rimbaud’s face and took photographs of the model with the mask all over New York City in a variety of different situations. I find it interesting that he explored a similar subject as Cindy Sherman, with her Film Still series of the same time period. It was the wearing of a mask. Plus, using Rimbaud automatically throws in “The Flaneur“: the withdrawn man watching society around him.

Another series of black & white photography (and photo collage) comes about a decade later, and I think it should be mentioned. It’s “The Sex Series”. It’s fascinating, intricate, includes his writing, and can be interpreted a variety of ways. The piece I’ve linked to is what I started my thesis talking about (I won’t put in my text; it’s 10 pages long). But just these two things (Arthur Rimbaud & “Sex Series”) give you a hint of how wide ranging his work could be.

Here’s what I took at a retrospective:

I took this in 2018 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art in NYC (“History Keeps Me Awake At Night“):13 art works on the wall in the Whitney Museum of Art during "History Keeps Me Up at Night"

Wojnarowicz was put into the category of “Graffiti artists” in the early 1980s (like artist Keith Haring) because he painted on the tops of trashcans and used stencils, among doing other things. The photograph above has one of his stencils, “Falling Man” in a piece on the left.

My Major Professor (advisor) was generous in encouraging me to pursue the artist for my thesis, even though Wojnarowicz had passed away only two years before. I didn’t majorly screw up on it, and am mostly proud of my writing. And still proud of my thesis title: “The Inscrutable Imagination and the Politics of Visibility in the Art of David Wojnarowicz”. It’s earnest, complex and, like the thesis text, has the hard, serious chunkiness of homemade artisan bread.

A list of books and articles about the artist:

Since I really cannot write about the man the way he should be written about (I’m the Taliesin Historian, not the Wojnarowicz historian), I’ll add some of the books/articles on him/by him/from exhibits on his work:

David Breslin and David Kiehl, ed. David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night  (New York, NY: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018). Exhibition catalogue

Cameron, Dan, Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz (Rizzoli, New York, 1998). Exhibition catalogue

Carr, C., “Portrait of the Artist in the Age of AIDS,” Village Voice, February 13, 1990, 31-36

Kuby, Adam, “The Art of David Wojnarowicz,” Out/Look, vol. 4, no. 4   (Spring, 1992), 53-62

Lippard, Lucy, ed., David Wojnarowicz: Brush Fires in the Social Landscape  (1995, Aperture, 2015)

———-, “Out of the Safety Zone,” Art in America, vol. 78. no. 12 (December, 1990), 130-139+

Wojnarowicz, David, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York: Vintage Books, 1991)

———-, David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame. Works 1979-1989, Barry Blinderman, ed. (Normal, Ill: University Galleries, Illinois State University, 1990). Exhibition catalogue

———-, Memories That Smell Like Gasoline (Artspace Books, San Francisco, 1992)

Some URLs:

Talk about “full circle”: it’s the reproduction of the piece (owned by the Chazen) that I first saw in the now-Chazen Museum of Art at UW-Madison less than six months after I started Grad school. A person’s bandaged hands (in B&W silver nitrate) are in the background, while the text is in the foreground.

What struck me:

Instead of the energetic, intense man I first saw, the words on the piece (a lot of his art includes writing) showed a 36-37-year-old-man discussing the reality of his oncoming death:

“I can’t abstract my own dying any longer. I am a stranger to others and to myself and I refuse to pretend that I am familiar or that I have history attached to my heels. . . .” Ending with, “I am disappearing. I am disappearing but not fast enough.” The pain and exhaustion struck me and I stood looking at it for an unknown amount of time. I ended my thesis talking about this work. It wasn’t until I read Carr’s biography that I found out this piece was the last he ever produced.

The “Pre-invented Existence” is what Wojnarowicz felt we all lived in.

First published June 20, 2021.
I took this photograph at the Whitney Museum of Art in NYC during its retrospective in 2018, “History Keeps Me Awake at Night”.
As I often do, when I take photos, I’m doing it mostly for documentary proof that I was there. And I wanted people in the photo so I could remember the actual size of the piece. You can see Untitled (Hujar Dead) at the Whitney: https://whitney.org/collection/works/48140

Notes:

1 My thesis defense in November 1994 came just under 4 years after my first encounter with Wojnarowicz. December 1, 1994 was “The Day Without Art” on World AIDS Day. I and other Grad students created a series of presentations on it, the first time that had been done at the university museum. Organizing that with other Grad students is something I’m still proud of.

2 I love Wojnarowicz’s work, but the number of artworks that he left untitled is incredibly frustrating.

3 Cynthia Carr mentioned that she wrote that piece in her introduction to Fire in the Belly, her biography on Wojnarowicz. Not to be melodramatic, but I can’t remember how long I stopped breathing when I read that. The piece had an undeniable effect on my life. 

Exterior photograph looking south at Taliesin's Garden Court with Curtis Besinger working on stone

In Return for the Use of the Tractor

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Photograph taken in 1943. From Taliesin’s Breezeway looking (plan) south at Wright’s apprentice, Curtis Besinger. He’s in Taliesin’s Garden Court, sorting through flagstones that would later be put on the ground in the courtyard.

In my goal of researching Taliesin’s history, I examined Wright’s correspondence looking for anything that might give information about changes Wright made to the building. This research uncovered something about materials at Taliesin, and that is below.

Wright didn’t write out most changes he wanted at Taliesin:

If Wright built Taliesin for a client, he would have written things in detail. But he didn’t, since this was his own home. So, despite the fact that Wright lived at Taliesin for almost 48 years, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of correspondence between Wright and construction personnel, or between him and those in his office where he told them what he wanted done. I couldn’t even find things for when he was out of the country.

In contrast, when he was at Taliesin, things weren’t written down because he was there to give directions.

Some of what I did to figure things out:

Once I realized I couldn’t get information that way, I started poking around in any other direction I could. I read letters between Wright and visitors, workers, apprentices… basically, anyone I could think of who worked for Wright, or visited him at his home. Newspaper and magazine articles are good, and photographs are great, too.

For anything written, I hoped someone would mention something in a letter, like when they came this or that was being constructed or expanded. Ideally this would include a detailed description of everything in the room, along with measurements, please.

My find:

Through this method, I discovered a piece of correspondence written in April 1942, from Herbert Fritz, Jr. to Frank Lloyd Wright.

“Herb” Fritz (whose father was a former draftsman for Wright1) was born in 1915, became Wright’s apprentice for 3 years (1938-41), followed by a purchase of land near Wright’s home. Fritz became an architect and practiced almost until he died in 1998.2

Herb wrote to Wright several months after he bought that land (which he later named “Hilltop”). He was designing his home there, and the land had stone that he could work, but he needed to be able to move it.

So, Fritz offered a trade:

“In return for the use of the tractor,” Fritz wrote, “I would like to give you a cord or two of rock for each hour”3 that he needed the vehicle.

I was totally jazzed. First, this was exactly what I was hoping for. Secondly, this answered a question I’d had about Taliesin for years. I had noticed, in archival photographs, stonework changing at Taliesin in the early 1940s. So much work, that when I noticed a change I could almost count on it having occurred some time during World War II.

But I’d never come across anything that explained it.

Herb’s letter arrived when Wright was out of town, so there’s no written reply. But there must have been a verbal agreement between the two men. Nothing else explains that amount of stone and when all those changes were made.

Fritz offered a “cord”; that’s a lot

In volume, that is. It’s: 4 ft x 4 ft x 8 ft; or 128 cubic feet / 3.62 cubic meters (here’s a link showing a cord).

I don’t know exactly how much stone Wright acquired through this, but it must have been quite a bit. The photograph at the top of this page shows an apprentice while making a change: Wright added a level of stone in the Garden Court on top of the existing one.

The apprentice in the photograph above, Curtis Besinger, also wrote about changes in 1943 at Taliesin that were done in stone. He related these in his book, Working With Mr. Wright: What It Was Like.

And in 1945, photographer Ezra Stoller took photographs at Taliesin for a Fortune magazine article on the two Taliesins that came out the next year. The easiest way for me to figure out changes is by using dated photographs. One of those photographs Stoller took is below from a book I own4:

Exterior photograph looking northeast at Taliesin. Taken by Ezra Stoller
Photograph in the book, Masters of Modern Architecture, by John Peter (Bonanza Books, New York, 1958), 47.

The photograph shows one of the changes at Wright’s drafting studio. The south wall of the studio is to the right of the bell. It has the vertical, glass, doors. Wright had his apprentices build a new stone patio in front of those glass doors.

Why Fritz agreed to this:

While this find totally excited me, I couldn’t figure out why Fritz did it. He had to have known that Wright would take full advantage of such an offer in exchange for the use of Taliesin’s farming tractor. So, since I was at Taliesin West after this find, I asked “Bruce” Brooks Pfeiffer for ideas about it.

Bruce, former Wright apprentice who was born in 1930, noted that the request made sense because of World War II. The United States’ entry into the war began a period of gasoline and rubber rationing. Yet, because Wright’s tractor was a farm vehicle, it wouldn’t have been subject to it.

This stone from Fritz helped Wright transform Taliesin from a year-round Wisconsin residence into a home occupied mostly during the state’s warmer months. This way, Taliesin could fully convert into his summer home, while Taliesin West in Arizona could truly become his winter home (I wrote about this before, in “Did Wright Ever Live in Wisconsin in the Winter?”).

Originally published June 13, 2021.
The photograph at the top of the page was taken by Priscilla or David Henken and was published in Taliesin Diary: A Year with Frank Lloyd Wright, by Priscilla Henken (W.W. Norton & Company, New York City, London, 2012), 170.

1 Herb’s father was Herb Fritz, Sr., a draftsman and one of the two survivors of the 1914 fire/murders at Taliesin.

2 He shows up a few times in the Meryle Secrest biography on Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, he described how he saw Wright in dreams sometimes, and it’s with his memory that Secrest ended the biography.

3 April 1942 Herbert Fritz letter to Frank Lloyd Wright. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), Microfiche ID #F055C01.

4 Masters of Modern Architecture, by John Peter (Bonanza Books, New York, 1958), 47.

Cover of the Wisconsin magazine of History, Volume 50, Number 2, Winter, 1967

“Keiran: don’t try to correct the Internet”

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That’s what a former boyfriend once told me. I believe that came after I’d spent feverish, anxious hours trying to change every incorrect utterance online to Frank Lloyd Wright’s birth date: June 8, 1867. What was wrong? People wrote (and still sometimes write) incorrectly that he was born on June 8, 1869.

What can I say? It was the 1990s and the World Wide Web was this new, awesome wonder. I thought I could send out the correct information, leading to an avalanche of facts, truth, and scintillating, heartfelt dialog.

Or something like that.

Regardless—what’s this deal about 1869?

While Frank Lloyd Wright is responsible for a number of things in the world—

like, did you know he invented the wall-hung toilet? Ok, that knowledge isn’t up there in trivia contests like, “Who was the father of the man who invented Lincoln Logs?”, but knowledge about who invented the wall-hung-toilet might be good for something one day.

—he’s also responsible for people believing he was two years younger than he actually was. He wrote about it and mentioned it in interviews so that, by the time he died in 1959, everyone thought he’d been born in 1869. Wright’s obituary from The New York Times (linked to in the last sentence), stated the architect died on April 10, 1959 at age 89; in reality, he was 91. That’s some deep stuff when the Paper of Record has it wrong.

This got in the paper even though his sister, Jane Porter (he designed her and her husband’s home), was born—when?—1869. She was born in late April. Catholic twins aren’t even born that closely together.1

Wright’s lie/falsehood/untruth was not dispensed with until 1967, 8 years after his death.

That’s why his birth year is incorrect if you see his original grave site at Unity Chapel in Wisconsin. The marker was made before they figured out the truth.

One scholar and finding the truth:

In honor of Wright’s birthday, I’ll relate the info from an article by scholar Thomas Hines, who uncovered the truth. Hines wrote the article on his findings in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, in Volume 50, number 2, Winter 1967, 109-119. 

The article is “Frank Lloyd Wright—The Madison Years: Records versus Recollections”. In it, Hines detailed how we all got things wrong about Wright’s education, age, and his parents’ divorce. And that’s because,

“[t]he chief source of such misinformation has been Frank Lloyd Wright, himself.“
Thomas Hines. “Frank Lloyd Wright—The Madison Years: Records versus Recollections,” 109.

Hines gave three pieces of evidence for Wright’s birth year being 1867:

1. The 1880 United States Census, which,

lists the names and ages of the family of William C. Wright and his wife Anna, giving the age of a son, Frank, as being thirteen. If Frank was thirteen in 1880, he would, therefore, have been born in 1867, not 1869.
Hines, 110.

2. One of the schools that Wright attended (the “old” Madison High School, now Central High School):

Wright’s name appears… once in the surviving records of his high school. In the oldest volume… in the school’s collection… Wright’s name appears near the end of the book, with his father’s name, his address, 804 E. Gorham and his birth date, ‘June 8, 1867.’
Hines, 110.

3. His parents divorce records. The records state that:

the parties hereto have three children… whose names and ages are as followed: Frank L. Wright, 17 years old, June 8, 1884; Mary Jane Wright [Jane Porter], 15 years old, April 26, 1884; Margaret Ellen Wright [Maginel Wright Enright Barney], 7 years old, June 19, 1884.” Listed by his father, under oath, as being seventeen on June 8, 1884, Frank Lloyd Wright would, therefore, have been born on June 8, 1867.
Hines, 111.

Why did the architect lie?

We don’t know.

Biographer Meryle Secrest posited that,

the new birth year of 1869 did not come into use until November 1925.2  Conceivably, the immanent arrival of his seventh child3 and the fact that Olgivanna was so much younger were the precipitating factors. However, a year later, when the idea of incorporating himself came to him, it would have occurred to the prudent side of his nature that it was far easier to sell shares on the future of a man still in his fifties than on one who is almost sixty.
Meryl Secrest. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (1992; HarperPerennial, HarperCollins, New York City, 1993), 334.

Hines on Wright’s “embellishments”:

The piece by Hines addresses not just Wright’s lie about his age, but also the architect’s lies about his education, and his parents’ divorce. In sum: Wright’s recollections did not match the factual records.

In the end, Hines speculated on why Wright altered the facts:

[S]lowly over the years, Wright’s unique creative nature demanded and conceived for himself a persona, a mythic personality surrounded by a partially mythic world; that indeed he had no conception of objective “truth” as most people define it, but that he determined the truth of all things by the degree to which such things supported or contradicted the “truths” of his own world. A family situation and an education as he described them seemed, therefore, more appropriate and acceptable as an introduction to his life than the real situations had been.
Hines, 119.

So, 8 years after his death, people began to realize what Wright meant when saying, “The truth is more important than the facts.”

Addendum: Update on the date:

After publishing this blog, one of my subscribers, who is the Administrator for Historic Studies at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, gave me information on their understanding of Wright’s change of his birth year. Indira wrote that:

Mrs. Wright told people that Mr. Wright had always given that date as the date HIS mother gave him, and she took it as truth.
On June 21,1967 Mrs. Wright responded to a letter from Catherine Baxter4 who was annoyed by the false birth day given for Mr. Wright:

“Dear Catherine, I fulfilled my promise to you and spoke of your father’s mixed dates as you will find in these articles…”

Originally published on June 1, 2021.
Updated June 4, 2021.

Notes:

1 I knew two brothers in my class in grade school who were born 10 months apart. Until I heard about their birthdays, I’d assumed they were fraternal twins. I hadn’t learned the term “Catholic twins” until much later, but it was Catholic school. Hence, I also had two classmates with at least 7 siblings a piece.

2 In an article in the Madison newspaper, The Capital Times, on November 17, 1925.

3 Iovanna Lloyd Wright, December 2, 1925-September 7, 2015.

4 Catherine Baxter (1894-1979) was third child and first girl born in the marriage of Frank and Catherine Lloyd Wright (Wright’s first wife).

Floor plan of Taliesin. Drawing #1104.003. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art|Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

“This will be a nice addition…”

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A drawing of Taliesin, executed in June 1911. This drawing is accessible from
https://library.artstor.org/#/asset/28509365;prevRouteTS=1621879846896

110 years ago, on May 25, 1911, the Weekly Home News (the newspaper of Spring Green, Wisconsin), noted on page 4 that:

“Mrs. Hannah Wright is building her home in Hillside valley, adjoining the old homestead, a little north and west of the old millsite. This will be a nice addition to the neat home in the valley.”

“Hannah” was her legal name, but she was known as Anna, and she was Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother.

“Hillside” was the name of the small town south across the Wisconsin river. The valley was lived in by Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother’s side of the family, the Lloyd Joneses (which is why, when Wright’s sister, Maginel, wrote about the family, she named her book, The Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses).

Why did Wright build this home?

The public perception was that Wright was building this home for his mother. He was actually building it for himself and his partner, Mamah Borthwick (she was still in Europe awaiting a divorce from Edwin Cheney, which she would do on August 5). By August1 he referred to the home as Taliesin.

Did Anna ever live there?

I have never figured out if, when, or where, Anna lived at Taliesin.

In December 2021,

I went to Taliesin West in Arizona looked at the text of some of Anna’s letters.

I wrote about looking at some of them it in my post “Anna to her son“.

She was definitely staying at Taliesin while she wrote them. Wright was in Japan working on the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. But there still no hard proof that she was there for the long-term. That she had also spent time with her other children, Jane Porter and Maginel Wright Enright.

Regardless of whether she ever lived at Taliesin, Anna did originally purchase the land where her son would start his home (or possibly she bought the land because her son persuaded client, Darwin Martin, to purchase her home so that she had the money to buy the land).

The purchase of the land:

She had purchased 31.561 acres of land on April 10, 1911 from Joseph Reider, a Lloyd-Jones neighbor.2 Frank Lloyd Wright would move to the “Hillside valley” (the Lloyd Jones valley) with Borthwick once she divorced. Thus, she’d be free to live with him.

Obviously, construction had started by late May 1911, thanks to the note in the Weekly Home News. When Wright first drew the building in April, it was labelled Cottage for Anna Lloyd Wright. It had three bedrooms (including one for a servant), a kitchen, a living room, and a “work room” across an open “loggia”.

Taliesin as constructed

By June 1911 (when someone executed the drawing above), Anna’s name no longer appeared on the drawing’s title block. However, the building was still being labelled as a cottage. Nice cottage: its living quarters had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen and a living room. At a right angle, it had a workroom and office space. Beyond that were spaces for carriages and animals. Whether or not you’d call it a cottage, the drawing in June is fairly close to what was built.

Wright about Taliesin in his 1932 autobiography:

I wished to be part of my beloved southern Wisconsin and not put my small part of it out of countenance. Architecture, after all, I have learned, or before all, I should say, is no less a weaving a fabric than the trees….

The world had appropriate buildings before–why not more appropriate buildings now than ever before. There must be some kind of house that would belong to that hill, as trees and the ledges of rock did; as Grandfather and Mother had belonged to it, in their sense of it all.

Yes, there must be a natural house, not natural as caves and log-cabins were natural but native in spirit and making, with all that architecture had meant whenever it was alive in times past. Nothing at all that I had ever seen would do…. But there was a house that hill might marry and live happily ever after. I fully intended to find it. I even saw, for myself, what it might be like and begin to build it as the “brow” of the hill.

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, in Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings: 1930-32, volume 2. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction by Kenneth Frampton (1992; Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1992), 224-225

About the “brow” of the hill:

Frankophiles know this, but the word “Taliesin”, in the Welsh language, translates as “Shining Brow”. Wright’s family on his mother’s side, the Lloyd Joneses, came from Wales.

Construction photograph of Taliesin

Draftsman Taylor Woolley, who worked at Taliesin in 1911-12, took photographs all around the building. Those photos are now at the Utah Historical Society. I showed one of the photos months ago in my first blog post. Woolley printed some of these photos out. Someone put them into an album now owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society. The link to those photos is here.

So the Weekly Home News said the building was being built for “Mrs. Hannah Wright” in late May. Woolley took the photograph over three months later:

The photo above is taken from the “Hill Tower” at Taliesin, with Wright’s living quarters in the background.

Woolley’s construction photographs

The Ebay auction of an album of Woolley’s photographs (which I wrote about in The Album) were one of the most interesting things in Spring Green, Wisconsin during the winter of 2004-2005. But after that hullabaloo, writer/journalist Ron McCrea found negatives of more at the Utah Historical Society. He sent me chapters of the book he was working on, Building Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home of Love and Loss. If you read the book you can find out how McCrea found them, and where more photos by Woolley can be located.3

Woolley took the photograph above shortly after he came to work for Wright. Personally, I have never found photographs of Taliesin dating before that, or of construction earlier in the summer of 1911.

Also, I checked the issues of Weekly Home News newspaper published during the summer of 1911. But unfortunately, I haven’t found anything yet in the “Home News” about “Mrs. Hanna Wright” building in the “Hillside valley”.

Finally, and since I was asked this while working at Taliesin Preservation, there is no photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright “breaking ground” for his home.

Wright didn’t want people to know what he was up to in Wisconsin—so there’s no photo of Wright smiling happily while holding a gold shovel.

Regardless, that small note in the Weekly Home News touched on something that altered Spring Green, and southwestern Wisconsin, permanently.

Originally published, May 24, 2021.

The drawing above is drawing #1104.003, from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art |Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

Notes

1  On August 26, 1911, architect John Moore sent Wright a telegram, wanting to visit his home. Wright scrawled at the bottom of the telegram (in preparation for the reply), that Moore and his friends “Will be welcome to Taliesin.” As I was transcribing it, I thought that this might have been the first time that Wright referred in writing to his house by that name.
The telegram is identification #K017E01, The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (Museum of Modern Art|Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). 

2 People often think that the Lloyd Jones family owned the land where Wright built Taliesin. I think that’s what Wright wanted people to believe. The land title shows that it had not been owned at any time by a Lloyd Jones family member before Wright bought it. Until 1911, neighbor Joseph Reider owned it. There’s no bad reason why Wright didn’t tell people the truth; maybe he felt it made a better story.

3 I wrote the captions for many of Woolley’s photos in McCrea’s book, in part because I knew the photographs well (and, as I noted in another blog post: this stuff is fun for me). Unfortunately I lost most of the the emails between McCrea and myself due to something that happened with email at work (most were fubarred←if you don’t know the definition of “fubar”, look it up). Doesn’t matter so much, but it bums me out a bit.

Mies van der Rohe Farnsworth House on top and part of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin on bottom.

“Treat him well and love him as I do”—Frank Lloyd Wright on Mies van der Rohe

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Two pictures of the Midwest in Spring: the top shows the Farnsworth House, by Mies van der Rohe, in Plano, IL in early April. The bottom shows Taliesin, and was taken in early June. Taliesin, in Wisconsin, is 3 hours north of the Farnsworth House.

I looked into architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) and Taliesin/Wright after May 12. That was the day I saw the talk about Mies’ Farnsworth House: “Past, Present, and Future of Farnsworth House” on-line through the Vernon Area Public Library (Illinois).

Mies van der Rohe in the U.S.:

German-born “Mies” came to the United States in 1937. The next year he became the head of architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago, which later became the Illinois Institute of Technology. He was at IIT until 1958, and remained in Chicago for the rest of his life (he became a United States citizen in 1944).

Mies visited Taliesin around the time that he started to teach at IIT in 1938. Mies was visiting with two young architects (Bertrand Goldberg and Bill Priestley) in his new home of Chicago, when the two men decided to call Frank Lloyd Wright on the telephone and see if they could bring Mies to visit Taliesin (three and a half hours away).

That must have been exciting for all of them. Even at that time, Mies and Wright were major figures in world architecture. I hope it was worth their while because, while not planning to, Mies and Goldberg spent four days at Taliesin (Priestley left after one day). All the while, Goldberg acted as a translator, since Mies did not yet speak English.

Mies at Taliesin:

Taliesin Fellowship member, Edgar Tafel, wrote about this four-day excursion in Apprentice to Genius (I wrote about the book when I recommended it in March). Wright, Tafel wrote,

… had a great deal of respect for Mies’ work. He’d seen the Tugendhat house and the Barcelona pavilion in publications, and he viewed Mies as an individualist, not as part of a foreign school or movement.

Edgar Tafel. Years with Frank Lloyd Wright: Apprentice to Genius (1985; Dover Publications, Inc.; McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1979), 69.

Tafel went on to say that during the trip from Mies, Wright, “felt Mies’ warmth and was happy to have his work viewed with understanding.” [Apprentice to Genius, 71] Tafel also wrote that while,

Mies didn’t ask questions or make any comments, … he kept smiling and nodding his head in understanding. For a man of stolid, Germanic character, he was positively radiating.… We could see Mies sorting out each explanation and filing each experience away in the proper mental drawer.

Edgar Tafel. Years with Frank Lloyd Wright: Apprentice to Genius (1985; Dover Publications, Inc.; McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1979), 79.

Despite this spontaneous sojourn (with no toothpaste or clean clothes), Mies must have done ok. Aside from being an important guest (and probably getting to sleep in Taliesin’s “Big Guest Room” that tours walk through), he got to wander all over the Taliesin estate for days.

Be grateful it’s here

Bertrand Goldberg, however, had become the full-time translator with no way to leave. By the third day, Goldberg was complaining to Mies, in German, about Taliesin.

[Goldberg said later that he thought Wright’s home was “romantic kitsch”.]

Mies apparently got tired of listening to Goldberg’s complaints and finally said to him, “Shut up, Goldberg. Just be grateful it’s here.”

[Look at the table of contents in Bertrand’s oral history linked to above after Goldberg’s name to find where he discussed Taliesin]

Yet, while Mies appreciated Taliesin, Wright was unable to persuade the German architect to visit again.

This wasn’t for lack of trying

Mies took advantage of Taliesin’s proximity and, on five different occasions, asked Wright to entertain visitors.1 Every time Mies asked, Wright said yes, often including an invitation. But Mies never took him up on it. In 1944, Wright even invited Mies to celebrate Thanksgiving at Taliesin.2 Mies didn’t reply to that letter.

The most surprising exchange between the two came in 1947. That year there was an exhibition on Mies’ work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Both men were at its opening and Wright, while there, (famously) said that the exhibit was “much ado about your next to nothing” (Mies was famous as saying, “Less is more”). Wright wrote to Mies3 soon afterwards, making sure that he hadn’t hurt Mies’ feelings with the remark.

I transcribed this letter on one of my trips to Wright’s archives. When I got to Wright’s words that

“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings,”

I had to stop and read them again. Because I wasn’t sure I was seeing it correctly. Biographer Finis Farr wrote that the “twinkle” in Wright’s eyes when he said things didn’t translate. But still, I never thought I’d see Wright actually say he didn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings.

Regardless, there was nothing for Wright to worry about. In his reply,4 Mies wrote that he hadn’t remembered Wright’s crack, but if he had, he would have laughed with him. Mies ended the letter by saying that he would enjoy coming back to Taliesin (where Wright had again invited him). However, as far as I know, Mies never returned.

First published May 17, 2021.

“… Love Him As I Do”: Wright said that was his introduction for Mies van der Rohe at a dinner at the Armour Institute. The story is in An Autobiography, by Frank Lloyd Wright, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 429.

I took the two photographs at the top of this post: the photograph of the Edith Farnsworth house (the structure of glass and steel) on April 6, 2006; and the photograph of Taliesin (the yellow/beige structure surrounded by greenery with a blue sky) on June 6, 2005.

 

Notes:

1 The letters, with dates and the microfiche identification numbers:

From Mies to Wright arranging trips for friends or students to Taliesin:
10/12/1940 (ID #M108A01);
10/24/40 (ID #M108C09);
11/26/40 (ID #M110A09);
10/17/41 (ID #M120B04);
ID #M120D06 (I forgot the date, but it’s after Wright’s 10/22/1941 letter);
1/29/43 (ID #M127A09);
2/1/46 (ID #M152E03);
10/11/46 (ID #M155E03);
10/15/47 (ID #M167B07)

Wright’s replies to Mies’ requests:
10/14/1940 (ID #M108A04);
4/14/41 (ID #M116D07—this was a thank you letter from Wright in which he invited Mies to Taliesin, maybe that summer?);
10/22/41 (ID #M120B10);
10/13/46 (ID #M155E04).

2 Invitation for Thanksgiving at Taliesin, from Frank Lloyd Wright to Mies van der Rohe, 11/15/1944 (ID #M135E04)

3  Letter written 10/25/47 from Wright to Mies (ID #M167D09) in which Wright was making sure that Mies van der Rohe wasn’t hurt by his own statements at the opening of the Museum of Modern Art exhibit.

4 Reply written 11/25/1947 from Mies to Wright (ID #M168D08), telling Wright that he didn’t remember Wright making a “crack”, and that is would be pleasurable to see him “sometime in Wisconsin”.

This is an interesting page about Mies.

Taliesin interior. On left: by Raymond Trowbridge, 1930. On right, by Keiran Murphy 2019.

Why Did You Have to do That, Mr. Wright?!1

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Two views of the same space, 89 years apart.

Frank Lloyd Wright began his home, Taliesin (south of Spring Green, Wisconsin), in 1911 and worked on it almost continuously until he died in 1959. As researcher and historian I easily documented over 100 changes he made just to his home (that number doesn’t include the necessary construction after Taliesin’s first or second fires).

And this doesn’t count his work on the other buildings on the Taliesin estate; about which you can read at Wikipedia. If you go to the Taliesin (studio) page, there are links to the four other buildings on the estate. Yes, I did start all of the Wikipedia entries on those Taliesin estate buildings, why do you ask?

And the changes I numbered were just those that could be documented through photographs.

Taliesin is very important, yes

That’s why we call Taliesin a sketchbook. In addition, it was an experiment for the artist/architect/genius-extraordinaire [that looks like I’m being snotty, but I’m not].

I was told by someone who worked in the Wisconsin State Historic Preservation Office that when they began talking about Taliesin restoration, they didn’t want to create the Taliesin “zoo”. As they restored/preserved the building, they didn’t want to pick out what they thought were the “best” changes done there by Wright.

Their conclusion: restore Taliesin back to the last decade of the architect’s life, 1950-59. And as close to 1959 as possible/doable, combined with new technologies that wouldn’t screw up the building in the future. So that’s how, for example, Taliesin got geothermal heating and cooling.

And I agree. I fiercely want Taliesin to be as it was in Wright’s lifetime—as long as the “building envelope” is “sealed” to help the building survive long past my death.

YET

I wrote all of this because I have a confession: there are changes I really wish that guy hadn’t made to his home.

Some things that used to be at Taliesin just seem so cool. Their rarity is part of the attraction. And, yes, I love what is there today… but  sometimes I really wish he’d left well enough alone.

Look below for an example.

The first photo, taken 1926-33, shows the entry to his living quarters. The part you see under the roof is what I’m talking about. Between those three stone piers were French doors. They opened to the exterior balcony that ended at a parapet behind where that teenage boy is sitting (he’s sitting on a little bit of roofing). He added the balcony in Taliesin III (so, after the second fire). It stood one floor above today’s “front door” at Taliesin.

Postcard of Taliesin, 1926-30. Unknown photographer
Postcard property of Patrick Mahoney. Used with permission. The photograph is published in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin: Illustrated by Vintage Postcards, by Randolph C. Henning, p. 61.

Then in 1942 (approximately), Wright constructed a roof over that balcony, making it into a storage room. Former Wright apprentice / longtime Taliesin Fellowship member John DeKoven Hill called the room “the hell hole”.

The same view in the 1950s:

The next photograph shows the same part of the building, with a roof where the balcony used to be. It’s the configuration one sees today:

Photo of Taliesin 1955 taken by Maynard Parker

Maynard Parker took the photograph above in 1955 by for House Beautiful magazine. Then you click on the photo above, at the website of its owners (the Huntington Library) it’s backwards from its correct orientation.

What you see in the 1955 photo by Parker/for House Beautiful, is great, of course. But I look at archival photos, or scan what’s in my memory, comparing it to what he had before 1942 and I want to whine: “oh man – why did you do that?”

Then, here’s what I’m thinking: “grumble, grumble – sketchbook — grumble grumble… architectural genius… grumble grumble… HIS gorram house… grumble…”

But what right do I have, given the mistakes from the past?

… you can’t deny all those times in which people, with the best of intentions, completely destroyed something.

Like so many buildings by architect Louis Sullivan in Chicago

And Wright’s Larkin Building in Buffalo

Check out this from the Buffalo City Gazette shows newspaper articles talking about the building’s decline

You get the point.

FINALLY

There’s also the fact that the National Park Service, which confers “National Historic Landmark” status, is firmly against people “creating a false sense of history.” That is a hard-and-fast rule.

Besides, if Taliesin had all the things in it that I really like it would end up being a Taliesin that never actually existed.

But I can still yell at him in my head, though.

 

 

Initially published on May 4, 2021

At the top of this page are two photos. The one on the left was taken in 1930 by Raymond Trowbridge (who I’ve written about) and is at the Chicago History Museum (and online here). I took the photo on the right a couple of years ago, showing the same room. You can tell it’s the same because what remains the same in the two photographs are the ceramics in the fireplace on the left and, against the wall, the built-in bench and the radiator cover. He lowered the ceiling in 1933-34 when a bedroom/sitting room was built one floor above for his youngest daughter, Iovanna Lloyd Wright.

1 accompanied by lots of words for him that I cannot repeat in polite company.

Photograph of nurses and wounded soldiers during World War 1

The Worst Mistake We’ve Ever Made as a Species

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Caption: “Moreuil, France, 30 July 1916. Nurses Coloimbet, Louis, Egot and Flageollet pose with solders at a French military hospital in Moreuil, in the départment of the Somme. This picture was taken a month after the start of the Battle of the Somme…” A7794. Stéphane Passet.

That was my assessment about World War I after taking a class on the Dada art movement.

Dada, begun in Zurich in 1916, was, in part, an artistic, mental, and visceral reaction to World War I, a mechanized war with roughly 40 million military and civilian casualties.

Years later, I realized that, while I’d had classes on that war in grade school and high school, I barely knew enough about it to say why it was “the worst mistake” the human race had ever made. So, in 2012, I started to try to educate myself.1

My Autodidactism

I began by reading The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman. “Guns of August” detailed the lead up to the war and its first month of combat. The book made me realize that there were even bigger screw-ups surrounding the war than I’d ever known.

Tuchman traced all of the military preparations in the preceding 15-to-20 years before the war. France and Germany had plans that, in theory, got their forces to their destinations (the French to Berlin, or the Germans to Paris) in 3 weeks or so. The spasm would happen, and everyone would return home in a month or so, “before the leaves fall.” Not quite. As the character of John F. Kennedy says in The Missiles of October, Europe sleepwalked into the war.

A war with horrendous killing by machine guns, tanks, barbed wire, gas, and more.

Tuchman comes to the end of the section on the Western Front of the war, with the Battle of the Frontiers (Aug. 20-24, 1914):

How far reduced, how distant the end, no one yet knew. No one could realize that for numbers engaged and for rate and number of losses suffered over a comparable period of combat, the greatest battle of the war had already been fought. No one could yet see its consequences: how the ultimate occupation of all Belgium and northern France would put the Germans in possession of the industrial power of both countries,… feeding the German ambition and fastening on France the fixed resolve to fight to the last drop of recovery and reparation, would block all later attempts at compromise peace or “peace without victory” and would prolong the war for four more years.

The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman (1962; Ballantine Books, 1994), 262.

The French casualties at the Battle of the Frontiers were 140,000 on the first day alone. That’s shocking to read, but then you find out those staggering numbers happened a lot.

An overview of the First World War

My next book was A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918, by G.J. Meyer (note: I recommend getting the hardcover version as the binding on my paperback was not good). A World Undone is about the whole war in both eastern and western Europe, and explains underlying currents and new technologies (and just how bad those trenches were).

Reading about the lasting effects of the war

Then I tackled the large picture of what happened after November 11, 1918. On the advice of a friend I read Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret MacMillan. This book dealt with the Treaty of Versailles.

After that I read books about art from World War I: Nothing but the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War I and Art From the First World War, by Charman, Terry; Alter, Jesse; Tolson, Roger (eds.). Someday, I’ll get the Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage catalog that started me on this, which I stupidly let go after my junior year of college.

My rush of reading ended with the book, The Long Shadow: Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century, by David Reynolds. The author is from Great Britain and so his focus was more on Great Britain and the Continent.

And two three movies

My last intentional dive was watching the original 1930 movie, All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s wonderful to see, in part because you know that those involved had recently experienced the war. If you click on the link to “All Quiet…” you come Variety’s review of the movie in 1930, which shows how the audience saw it.

Unfortunately, I have not seen the film 1917 (which was filmed to look like it was done in one take). I didn’t catch it when it came through my town one weekend in March, 2020. And then Covid-19 slapped us the next day or week, and there you go.

Later:

After this post, someone wrote in and suggested that I see They Shall Not Grow Old, the colorized documentary with footage and remembrances by World War I combat veterans done for the Imperial War Museum. An interesting perspective on it is in The New Yorker. I’ve yet to watch it.

Much later:

And, much later note: I did watch the movie, 1917. I watched it alone because I had the feeling I’d cry like a baby. And I did.

and I don’t want to make fun of “ugly crying” but, yes, that’s what I did.

Here are some things from the internet related to World War I:

To increase my grief over WWI

I go to Google so that I can find and play the song “Third Light“, from the 1984 album, “Declaration” by the rock band, The Alarm. “Third Light” taught me where the “lighting three cigarettes off of one match is bad luck”2 folklore comes from. Listening to this song is not recommended after drinking alcohol, or within the depths of winter.

Lastly:

I believe that my original assessment on the war is correct.

Addendum:

I explored above how I researched and read about World War I, but I didn’t explain why I thought it was “the worst mistake we’ve ever made as a species.” The reason I didn’t is that I feel the need to keep these posts a reasonable size.

But, on reflection, I’ll add in shorthand why I feel that way about WWI: I am not the first to realize that it set the stage for everything that has followed in world history.

  • It was the first war in which machine guns and bombs were used en masse. Your infantrymen don’t last long when they’re walking down a hill in formed lines while the enemy with machine guns mows them down.
  • The Russian Revolution began three years after the war commenced, which led to the U.S.S.R.
  • It affected infantryman Adolph Hitler, who was influenced by/took advantage of the “Stabbed in the back” conspiracy theory.
  • It led to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, in which the United Kingdom and France divvied up the Arabian peninsula in agreed “spheres of influence” for the anticipated fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Originally published April 28, 2021.
The photograph at the top of this post is from p. 171 of a book on the color photograph process of Autochrome. The book is Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet, by David Okuefuna.

1 If I’ve not said it before I’ll write it here: I am sure that I am mostly ignorant of the best assessment out there, and the books and web pages/websites I’ve noted or listed go nowhere near the heart of World War I. I hope that these noted books, and linked to webpages, give you information you haven’t found before.

2 FIRST LIGHT
The sniper saw you.
SECOND LIGHT
Took careful aim
THIRD LIGHT
He pulled the trigger on the gun
Dead dead dead

I used to smoke. I was a kid. Or younger, anyway.