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Frank Lloyd Wright Prints and Drawings
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Lake Tahoe "Fir Tree"
Frank Lloyd Wright - Architect |
September 6, 2013 – December 21, 2013 Frank Lloyd Wright was arguably the most important American architect in history. His buildings are saved as important civic monuments and his drawings are shown in museums. ArchiTech Gallery has devoted its entire Fall schedule to an exhibit and sale of early Wright drawings and prints from his legendary studio. Also, the private collection of photographs from his favorite photographer, Pedro Guerrero, will also be showcased on the walls, showing the interiors and exteriors of both Taliesins in Wisconsin and Arizona.
As the Prairie House designs are also the rarest, these drawings from his own hand and those of his draftsmen serve as the earliest creations from the mind of America’s "Leonardo da Vinci.” ArchiTech Gallery exhibits these design and architecture works in a special show and sale of original material opening September 6th and continuing through December 21st, 2013. ArchiTech Gallery is Chicago’s only commercial gallery of architectural art. Located in the heart of the River North art gallery district, ArchiTech specializes in original works and sells to museums and private collectors. But anyone with an interest in seeing museum level works up close is welcome to come in.
Notes on the Exhibition: Frank Lloyd Wright always looks good on my walls. And Fall is usually the season my regular clients and visitors to Chicago get serious about seeing him there. I didn’t realize I hadn’t done a dedicated exhibition of Wright works for several years and the last time he figured prominently in a show here was in the Fall of 2011 where his drawings shared wallspace with Bertrand Goldberg. That would have to be fixed. This one does it. Some of the works on the walls have been there before, others haven’t been hanging at all. Two of the Wright drawings for the Lake Tahoe project of 1922-1923 were made as "presentation" renderings for either Wright, himself, or for the earliest meetings with the landowner, Jessie Armstrong. The date of "1922" is earlier than the generally accepted date of "1923" for the Tahoe project.
Not to get too technical, but because the renderings are from another hand and the red square "chop" Wright initialled and where he clearly wrote "1922" in the lower right-hand corner of both drawings indicates he may have thought up the idea of using ridge line and floating cabins while railroading the Western U.S. to Taliesin in Spring Green. The drawings in this show are from several periods of Wright’s remarkable career. They range from a 1915 pencil perspective of a Prairie house in Wright’s own hand to the Lake Tahoe renderings to colored pencil plan and perspective designs from 1926 for an un-built playhouse to a wrinkled tissue sketched by both Wright and a young renderer who obviously couldn’t spell. The developmental tissue sketch of 1940 misspells the final word in the bottom title as "architct." I also put rare Wasmuth Portfolio lithographs from 1910 next to those drawings. Some are from a private collector who framed them identically in walnut frames, linen mats, and gold fillets. Those are to be sold as small group collections of Wright’s best Prairie houses and Unity Temple in Oak Park. The rest of the individual plates to sell are hidden away in drawers and alcoves. Rounding out the exhibition are Pedro Guerrero’s own photographs from the 1940s of both Taliesins in Scottsdale and Spring Green. Pedro was the only photographer Wright allowed to hang around him for twenty years and was a great artist who captured another’s work like no one else. He just died about a year ago. I miss him terribly. Frank Lloyd Wright was probably the most important architect America has ever had. Yes, there was Thomas Jefferson, Louis Sullivan, and Henry Hobson Richardson. But few Twentieth Century American names can ever be as influential. When people have asked me why Wright is so important, I answer, "Well, there’s Frank Lloyd Wright" in this hand…and…all the other architects in history in the other one. Does that answer your question?” |
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