On books

Magazine Antiques, June, 2008 by Barrymore Laurence Scherer

Having been moved by Nancy Horan's beautiful historical novel Loving Frank (Ballantine Books, 2007), about the tragic love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney, I gladly received a pair of important new republications of Wright's own writing. The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright is a splendid anthology of the architect's essays and lectures. Carefully selected by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, director of the Wright Archives at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, it provides a wide array of material for anyone who wants to understand Wright in his own words. Though Wright's autobiography is not included, because it has recently been published elsewhere, what is here is choice: Wright's English text for his seminal monograph, Ausgefiihrte Baut en und Entwurfe. (Studies and Executed Buildings), published by Ernst Wasmuth in 1910; his 1924 tribute to his teacher Louis Sullivan; the series of articles "In the Cause of Architecture" published between 1925 and 1928, in which Wright covers a variety of essential subjects from "The Architect and the Machine" to separate, illuminating discussions of architectural materials--wood, glass, concrete, sheet metal, and so forth. Other discussions include the complete text of his Kahn Lectures at Princeton, published as Modern Architecture in 1931; "The Natural House" (1954); and his 1912 essay "The Japanese Print," which reminds us of his hands-on expertise in this area, not to mention the influence of Japanese prints on his work.

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Modern Architecture: Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930 is not so much redundant as it is a bibliophile's companion to this anthology, being a reproduction of the original publication of Modern Architecture, handsome to hold and read, and additionally valuable for its enlightening new introduction by Wright scholar Neil Levine of Harvard University.

Wright's engaging prose style blends the polemics of George Bernard Shaw and H.L. Mencken with the sheer literary vivacity of Walt Whitman. However, some of his eloquently presented ideas may set teeth on edge amongst today's Victorian preservationists. Needless to say, he loathed the historical revivals of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, The Essential Wright is essential reading.

Published to accompany an exhibition at the University of Virginia Art Museum in Charlottesville, the Gibbes Museum of Art at Charleston, South Carolina, and the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia, Landscape of Slavery is a richly illustrated volume of essays that explore the perception of the southern American plantation and plantation life as seen by artists from the early nineteenth century through the present day. Not surprisingly, that perception changed radically over the ensuing generations. We see how early painted views of plantations concentrate purely on the picturesque aspect of the whole antebellum agrarian culture symbolic of white landowners and their prosperity--the elegant manse and the outbuildings set in a beautiful rolling landscape. In these views the backbone of this genteel prosperity--the slaves and their labor--is nowhere in sight. Other works add considerably to the story, however. Among these are John Antrobus's 1860 Plantation Burial, showing a slave funeral with all the dramatic panoply of contemporaneous romantic theater, while Hale Woodruffs brutal linocuts of the 1930s reveal the lynchings and other atrocities visited upon blacks by whites.

The panorama created by this legacy of visual art inspired the probing essays that form the book's text. The final essay is especially so--Michael D. Harris's "Blind Memory and Old Resentments: The Plantation Imagination." Harris, an associate professor of art history and African American studies at Emory University, explores the reality behind the sentimental myth of plantation life and how "artwork offers an interesting way to look at the interpretive responses to the plantation in American society, from both sides of what W.E.B. Du Bois called the 'veil of color.' "

The illustrations cover more than a century of social change. At one end is a moving work by Winslow Homer. A Visit from the Old Mistress of 1876 captures the awkward moment when three former slave women receive an impromptu visit from their former-master's wife, depicting the unobsequious candor of their gaze and the stiff, tongue-tied stare of the black-and-lace garbed old lady. A century and a half later we have Foundation with Beam I (2004), a tablelike structure in which the American sculptor Juan Logan (b. 1946) graphically abstracts the sore legacy of slavery into physical terms: the brown ductile iron foundation of the structure is cast with a relief of a nude male figure of on all fours. It supports a heavy rectangular beam of pine, painted white and marked with symbols that evoke the marks often branded on slaves by their owners. To judge by this volume, the exhibition is simultaneously beautiful and unflinching.

The companion volume to a recent exhibition of the work of Charles Ethan Porter (1847-1923) at the New Britain Museum of Art is the first study of a greatly overshadowed master and reflects three decades of research by Hildegard Cummings. Born into a poor working-class Connecticut family, Porter took classes at the National Academy of Design in New York City" and exhibited there. He also studied at the Academie Julian in Paris and painted at Fleury near Barbizon, possibly coming into contact with a variety of leading academics and impressionists, among them William Adolph Bouguereau and Henri Fantin-Latour. Moreover he enjoyed the support--however tenuous--of the author and Hartford resident Samuel Clemens, who owned one of his paintings.