The Wright Stuff
Opening architect’s portfolio of prairie-inspired designs
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s birth, which is a fine occasion for the Milwaukee Art Museum to show off a jewel in its Wright trove. A complete collection of lithographs known as the Wasmuth Portfolio was gifted to MAM in 2014, and is the centerpiece of “Frank Lloyd Wright: Buildings for the Prairie,” on view through Oct. 15.
Lavishly produced and packaged, the portfolio was conceived as a way to promote Wright’s brand at a time when it needed a kick-start. It documented the first 20 years of his career when he developed his low-slung, deep-eaved, open-space approach to architecture.
This is the Wright of the Robie House, the Unity Temple, the Larkin Company Administration Building, and the many Oak Park, Ill., residences. It’s the era when the Wisconsin-born architect evolved a groundbreaking style inspired by “the level prairies” and natural beauty of his birthplace, calling it “the New School of the Middle West.”
In the Wasmuth Portfolio, we see iconic designs meticulously drawn by Wright and his assistants in a way that both glorified them and articulated their telling details. Curator Brandon Ruud has hung a selection of the portfolio’s lithographs among sketches, drawings, documents, furnishings and artifacts that have been drawn from MAM’s own collection and lent from others, lending context and color to the Wasmuth material. In particular, Ruud has spotlighted the contributions of Milwaukee native George Mann Niedecken, one of Wright’s collaborators in those years.
The portfolio is somewhat notorious in that it went way over budget, thus limiting
the press run, and because of the circumstances under which it was created: Wright was in the middle of a scandal after leaving his wife and six children to pursue a relationship with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, an Oak Park neighbor and former client. Business wasn’t exactly brisk.
So In 1909 Wright and Cheney journeyed to Europe to escape the heat of gossip and work on a collection of drawings he could market to new American clients. Wright remained abroad a year. The portfolio, which included an essay expressing his design philosophy, was published in 1911 by Ernst Wasmuth, a Berlin publisher of art and architecture books. (Though it came to be known as “The Wasmuth Portfolio,” its formal title is “Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwurfe von Frank Lloyd Wright.”)
Wright wanted to influence the American market, but the portfolio is famous for the impact it had on European architects who would go on to make their own profound marks. It’s often noted that Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were all working in Berlin at the time the portfolio came off the presses there.
Meanwhile, Wright’s associates remained behind to complete and execute plans for a number of the commissions depicted in the portfolio. This exhibit reminds us that Wright wasn’t exactly a solo act.
I’ve always been drawn to Wright’s interiors, and not just for their then-revolutionary treatment of scale, openness and light. The studies here for carpet designs, stained glass, lighting fixtures, furnishings and other touches remind me how holistic Wright’s vision was. As much as he preached minimal ornamentation, he seemed to put painstaking effort into the decorative details.
In significant commissions from this era, Niedecken was responsible for making those details work, and he gets a welldeserved spotlight in this show. Don’t miss the stained glass, furnishings and images detailing the Avery Coonley residence, which Niedecken had a strong hand in. His fern-and-birch mural is a telling example of the yin he brought to some of Wright’s yang.
The Wasmuth lithographs are lovely works of art, making a graceful case for themselves and integrating nature and structure as artfully as the architect rendered them in real life. The site plans, floor plans and cross-sections offered the necessary details, while drawings of interiors and exteriors were declarations of a very American aesthetic where the natural and the man-made blended into a confident and spacious whole.
I’m glad the museum added iPad stations that let visitors explore a digitized version of the entire portfolio. Likewise, projections that greet visitors as they enter the galleries help offset the thrill-dimming low light that is necessary when exhibiting works on paper.
“Buildings for the Prairie” presents a beautifully executed marketing tool – that’s essentially what the portfolio is – and embellishes it with a little reality. You won’t find new insights into the architect’s legacy, but you will get the benefit of looking at it more closely.