Frank Lloyd Wright: Spoiled by Success?

April 2nd, 2010

 

Frank Lloyd Wright:  A Golden Anniversary?

Anthony Alofsin © 2010

            “…Wright still stands alone as the American modern Architect in relation to the achievements of his own generation abroad, and even of most of the next except for Le Corbusier. A hundred years after his birth, however, we may most properly see him as belonging now to the past, if in a rank to which only the greatest have ever attained. No longer is he a contemporary figure, no longer the subject of controversy as he was as regards the Guggenheim Museum down to the day of his death, but an architect for the ages.” 

 

 

So concluded Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the eminent historian of modern architecture, in 1967 at the centennial of Wright’s birth and eight years after the architect’s death.[1] While Hitchcock was correct in suggesting that history will determine if Wright is an architect for the ages, he was wrong in other respects: in the decades since this appraisal, Wright has become not only more famous than at any time during his career, but the images of his work are features of global culture, and his life is as controversial as ever. [2]  The route of this acclaim has been complex, contradictory, and worth examining in detail. 

2 comments

Anonymous wrote 39 weeks 2 days ago

CAn we read more?

CAn we read more?

Anonymous wrote 39 weeks 2 days ago

A wonderful piece!

A wonderful piece!

Anthony Alofsin, Ph.D., AIA

Award-winning artist and architect, author and art historian, Anthony Alofsin is internationally recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and as an expert on modern architecture.

Architecture

Latest Fiction

Halflife is a fictive memoir, hovering between fiction and biography. Recalling the measure of decay that describes how radioactive isotopes die even as they live, a young man who, in his search for love and meaning, discovers loss and hopelessness as atoms in the same physical universe.  From the perspective of age 35, which he assumes is the mid-point in his own life, the narrator reflects on the friends, women, neighbors, places, plants, and animals he has encountered.

His journey has taken him to the mountains of New Mexico, the desert of Arizona, the urban heart of San Francisco, a contemplative family island retreat in Rhode Island, the rotting and mysterious Villa Trice in Austin, with a final look back at a childhood in Memphis.This book gives us the exuberance and creativity of youth and love yet it adds with unusual honesty the sense that experience does not simply exist in the present, but carries at the same time the weight of its past and the foreshadowing of its future, that the fullness of life contains many opposite particles.

"...a pure pleasure... written with such delicacy, such a lightness of touch. I could not have enjoyed it more."

- Anne Engel

Order your copy from Amazon or Book Surge

Latest book: Frank Lloyd Wright, Art Collector

  

            In Frank Lloyd Wright, Art Collector, Anthony Alofsin presents the first catalogue raisonné of the thirty-two prints and one original drawing that constitute Wright’s Secessionist print collection.  Alofsin explores Wright’s encounters with German and Austrian art before his travels to Europe; the fluid definition of modern art around 1909; and the complex context for Wright’s acquiring his collection while in Europe. This book, with its original research, puts into a new light a range of artists, some famous, others unknown, who sought to express, like Wright, their own rebellion against academic traditions.

 

            A unique contribution to the history of modern art, Frank Lloyd Wright, Art Collector offers stunningly original insights into the master’s artistic taste, as well as to a group of progressive artists whose work has been undeservedly overlooked in conventional histories of modernism.

 

Order your copy at University of Texas Press http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/alofra.html