Flower in the Crannied Wall at Taliesin
I posted today because I want to talk about the “Flower in the Crannied Wall” statue at Taliesin.
She was originally designed for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Susan Lawrence Dana residence in Springfield, IL (1902-04).
Sculptor Richard Bock make her in terra cotta for Wright and she was placed inside, near the front door of the Dana house, like you see in the photo below:
There she is looking really tiny.
I got this screengrab from their site.
Bock later told architectural historian Donald Hoffmann that Wright told him what he envisioned for the sculpture. Bock worked until he “eventually felt very sure” he got a statue that Wright had imagined.
In the sculpture, Bock created a nude woman “issuing from a structure of crystals” that are based on the abstraction of Wright’s motif for the Dana House: the sumac tree.1 You can see this in the tower in the pic below:
I took this photo from page 72 of the book of essays about Taliesin edited by Narciso Menocal: Taliesin 1911-1914, Wright Studies, Volume One.
“Flower in the Crannied Wall” is the name of a poem by Alfred Tennyson that’s on her back. Someone is contemplating a flower they’ve taken out of a wall and using it as a way to understand God, nature, and man.
I put a link to the poem, here.
When Bock showed the architect this sculpture, Wright
“beamed and said,
‘You have done it, Dicky; you have done it. This is going to make you famous!”2
Wright had a plaster cast made of the original, then brought her out to Taliesin really early. In fact, you can see her at Taliesin even before they put steps up to the Tea Circle:
She later showed up in some postcards, like the one below:
Published with permission from Patrick Mahoney. This photo is on p. 41 of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin: Illustrated by Vintage Postcards, by Randolph C. Henning.
“Flower” stayed there until at least 1921, when a photographer from Henry Fuermann and Sons took Taliesin photos for an article about Wright in a magazine.
Photo from my copy of the book, The Life-Work of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1965; Santpoort, Holland: C. A. Mees, 1925).
I don’t know why, but Wright apparently moved her from the Tea Circle by the time of Taliesin’s second fire.
So, where did she go?
From photos it looks like he kept her, at least sometimes, near Taliesin’s entry gates on County Road C (the same gates seen on tours today going up to the house).
Wright also sent the photographer from Fuermann and Sons down there to photograph her in the late 1920s. I put one of those photos from one of my books, below:
This photo comes from Frank Lloyd Wright: Selected Houses, v. 2, Taliesin, p. 46.3
However, if you want to see a better version of it, check out the Journal of the Organic Architecture + Design Archives with Fuermann Photographs from 2018.
Plus,
Wright put her a couple of times on the dam at Taliesin’s pond.
Yes, there WILL be a pond and waterfall at Taliesin again.
I’ve been told that the work was done and approved and they’re just waiting for the written permission from the Wisconsin DNR.
Here’s a photo from the early 1920s when she was on Taliesin’s dam:
Luckily, she survived.
coz, man!, the guy could be brutal with his artifacts.
When I started giving tours she was down by Taliesin’s Root Cellar. Fellowship member, Wes Peters, told the Administrator of Historic Studies for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation that she had arms when he became an apprentice in ’32. He thought that “Flower” ended up by the Root Cellar by the 1950s. At some point she also lost her arms and the top of her tower.
I took a photo of her at that spot in 1994, below:
When she was there, we often stopped on the House tour, talked about the statue and sometimes told people our nickname for her: “Crannie de Milo”.
And,
yes,
I might have subjected more than a few people to my complete recital of “Flower in the Crannied Wall”.
It’s not a really long poem, but… still.
in my defense it took me a while to shed my overt remnants of Graduate School.
…. At least I stopped bringing in Narciso Menocal’s interpretation of the statue after the first season… or two.
Also in the 1990s, they did a preservation assessment of her:
It says in part:
The sculpture has extensive cracks, breaks, and old repairs. The old glue is smeared with dirt, and has discolored, disturbing the visual integrity of the surface…. The head is sagging forward and could fall.
The plaster … is cracking on the brow and arms….
A photograph of where “Flower” used to stand was taken in 2018 on a tour by a photographer named Stilhefler. The photo is posted on Wikimedia Commons and gives you a good view, including the walkway to the Root Cellar beyond the stone archway:
“Flower” was restored and returned in 2014. And for the first time in its existence, that original plaster cast was placed inside to protect her from the elements. She now stands in Taliesin’s Drafting Studio on the box near the vault.
What the hell, Keiran – are you trying to make me crazy?! I was at Taliesin this summer and SHE’S OUTSIDE BY THE TEA CIRCLE!!
JUST SO YOU KNOW: When you go to Taliesin today, what you’re seeing outside is a concrete copy of her.
If they’d listened to me, I’d probably want her back near the Root Cellar. But I think she’d get kind of janky down there.
Originally published September 5, 2024.
In 2021, I took the photo of her in Taliesin’s Drafting Studio at the top of this post.
Notes:
1. “Taliesin, the Gilmore House, and the Flower in the Crannied Wall,” by Narcisco G. Menocal. In Taliesin 1911-1914, Wright Studies, Volume One, ed. Narciso Menocal (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1992), 70.
2. From Hoffmann’s dissertation, “Chicago Sculptor Richard W. Bock: Social and Artistic Demands at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”, 208. This is quoted in “Taliesin, the Gilmore House, and the Flower in the Crannied Wall,” by Menocal in “Wright Studies, Volume One”, 74.
3. Text by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, edited and photographed by Yukio Futagawa (A.D.A. Edita, Tokyo, 1990).
