Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 1910-22 - A Study of Influence

Had Frank Lloyd Wright's career ended in 1909, he still would be considered the preeminent early American modernist. But, despite the fact that a critical rupture occurred in his personal life in that year, Wright's career did not end. By 1909, with his Prairie period over, Wright left his wife and six children and travelled to Europe, initially with Mamah Cheney, the wife of one of his clients. While the scandal of Mrs. Cheney's murder in 1914 attracted the public eye, the impact of Wright's travels abroad and the dramatic directions his work subsequently took have been ignored. "Frank Lloyd Wright - The Lost Years, 1910-1922" lays out the facts about Wright's lost decade. With the first complete access to Wright's archives by any scholar in over forty years, Anthony Alofsin reconstructs the a history of Wright's travels in Europe. In recovering this elusive period in Wright's development, he restores a chapter to the history of modern architecture. Along with the discovery of a second trip to Berlin in 1911, Alofsin reveals that Wright learned far more from Europe than has been thought. He traces the history of Wright's two Wasmuth publications in Berlin in 1910-1911 as well as their critical reception. The story of their influence on modern architecture in Europe is widely accepted and often repeated. It is perhaps, as Alofsin demonstrates, wrong. Alofsin's investigations also introduce a new definition to the little known work Wright produced during this period, which he describes as Wright's primitivist phase. He traces this influence in his art through Wright's explorations of primitivist sources, innovations in sculpture, and intensification of the use of ornament. Less tangible, but as important, was Wright's view of himself, his art, and society, and Alofsin uncovers the European impact on the architect's image of himself as a crusader and an educator, bound to improve society through his art.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction 1: Points of Departure: Wright Before 1909 2: Wright in Europe 3: Squaring the Self with Life: Return from Europe 4: The Lessons of Europe 5: A Lesson in Primitivism 6: A Lesson in Figural Sculpture: "Conventionalizing the Flesh" 7: A Lesson in Primary Forms 8: A Lesson in Iconography 9: A Lesson in Diagonality 10: Continuities and Discontinuities Appendix A: Chronology Appendix B: Documents Notes Bibliography Index Photo Credits

About the Author :
Anthony Alofsin is the Roland Gommel Roessner Centennial Professor of Architecture and professor of art and art history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of When Buildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Habsburg Empire and Its Aftermath, 1867-1933, and The Struggle for Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at Harvard. He is also editor of Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond.