University Place

What Taliesin Looked Like: 1911-1912

We’re all so excited tonight to have someone who is really an institution at our institution. (laughing) I just met Jack for the first time, and it’s remarkable to meet somebody who spent 36 years at the Wisconsin Historical Society. I never worked anywhere for more than a few years. So, I’m always amazed. But when you find the thing you love, that’s the key to being happy. And he certainly did a lot through his career with the Society, too much to mention in an introduction, but I was quite amazed at the amount of work he did as a researcher and editor. I don’t know if any of you’ve ever looked at the six-volume history of the State of Wisconsin that was produced over a number of years using a lot of different authors. It’s truly– It was an amazing accomplishment and serves a resource for our whole staff here and for everybody across Wisconsin. Anytime you have a question, you go to it.

Well, this fellow next to me was both a researcher and an editor on that six-volume history, among the many other things he does. But he’s also a musician of quite significant accomplishment from my understanding. He can restore historic buildings. He knows something about railroads. He’s what you’d find as a Renaissance man. So even if he wasn’t going to talk about Frank Lloyd Wright tonight, he’d probably be interesting on any subject we put to him. So… But, we’ll limit him, we’ll limit him to Frank Lloyd Wright tonight. He’s going to talk about what Taliesin looked like in 1911-1912, and I’m going to let him talk about it, but I will say that for those of you that’ve gone to see our exhibit and seen the small photographic album that sits in that enclosed case, safely ensconced and regularly with pages turned so that they don’t get too much exposure to light.

Oftentimes you don’t know the backstory behind the acquisition and those types of things, and Jack has a little history on that. It’s much more than someone just handed it to us and said, “Keep this for safekeeping.” It was quite an achievement to acquire it. So, I think he’ll touch upon that and whatever else suits his fancy. But, we’re happy to have you here. Thank you, Jack, and good luck. (applause) It’s good to be here. Who’s to say when Frank Lloyd Wright first began to think about building a house on the brow of the hill overlooking the Wisconsin River on his maternal family’s ancestral property in Iowa County, Wisconsin? It certainly was not in the year or so leading up to construction in 1911 of the house he called Taliesin, a Welsh word meaning “shining brow.” Cogitation about something so grand and important took much more than a year and involved much more thought about a building, than took place in a single year. Wright’s published thoughts about Taliesin, too, are far more grand than that and take into consideration site, purpose, materials, an overarching contextual statement regarding architecture and its place in American society, plus his changing personal circumstances that could not have been predicted at all in 1900. Wright’s thought processes for this site had only just begun to percolate back in 1900 or so, when he himself took this photograph of the hill on which he built Taliesin eleven and twelve years later.

He included this image in a packet of collotypes he assembled to promote Hillside Home School which was a coeducational preparatory school that two of his mother’s sisters ran just south of the site of Taliesin from the middle 1880s until 1915. Wright sent some of his own children there, and I believe he may have helped pay their tuition by producing this collotype folder. Today, hardly anyone is familiar with the word collotype. It refers to one of several related photographic reproductive processes by which are made many high-quality prints from a single plate before a new plate has to be made. Single collotypes of Wright’s Hillside photographs were offered for sale at $10,000 apiece back in 1994 in a New York City gallery. The photo of the hillside was not one of them; at that time the location was not even identified. A few years later, Ann Whitson Spirn identified all of the landscapes in the series and wrote a distinguished article about them for a catalog that accompanied an exhibition about Wright and the landscape at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Here is another of the collotypes. It depicts Wright’s Aunt Nell’s room in Hillside Home School, one of the first buildings Wright designed and built.

The Taliesin site and its potential for building had been evolving in Wright’s conscious and subconscious for about ten years when the opportunity, and perhaps necessity, arose for him to create a something for it: a combination dwelling, studio, and farmstead. This coalescence began in 1909 when Wright’s private life erupted into public scandal. He had been conducting a fairly open affair with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of Edwin Cheney, a couple for whom he had designed a house in Oak Park, Illinois. That year he and Mamah fled together to Europe. While there, Wright produced his famed portfolio of 100 lithographs known as the Wasmuth Portfolio, named for its Berlin publisher. The most famous and familiar print in it is probably that of the Hardy House in Racine, drawn by Marion Mahony Griffin. I think it’s pronounced “Ma-nee.” Many architecture historians consider this portfolio the most important architectural publication of the twentieth century. It also includes a print of a new Hillside Home School building, a 1902 creation by Wright, and a building long used as part of the Taliesin complex, particularly for the Wright’s architectural practice and for the school of architecture and public events at Taliesin. Given Wright’s long personal and architectural connection to his family’s properties along the Wisconsin River near Spring Green, it is no wonder, then, that he turned to it in 1910 and 1911 as a source of refuge for himself and Mamah Borthwick.

There they could both see their children regularly in a neutral environment; there they could work relatively undisturbed, Mamah at her translations of Swedish feminist Ellen Key’s writings as well as at her own writing, and Wright at his architectural work with the help of resident draftsmen; there they could have a farm to sustain themselves and some resident workers, plus grow some crops for sale; there they could live out an American ideal of independence and freedom; there they could escape much of the public glare and opprobrium; and there, through the example of their lives as lived amidst many fewer people, they could hope to achieve relative acceptance and respect. Wright acquired title from his family to the hillside on whose brow he could meld hill and home, a structure “of” the hill, not “on” the hill. His design combined the functions of farmstead, homestead, studio, and dormitory for his draftsmen. It bore no relationship whatever to the dwellings or buildings of Wright’s Welsh ancestors, the Lloyd-Joneses or Joneses on whose land he was building and which had been in the family since the 1860s. He spoke their language, loved their oatmeal and other dietary elements, and he chose the name of a legendary Welsh poet for his home as well as its being a descriptive noun for the site. But for an architectural precedent, he seemingly turned to something from a more recent experience: the hill farms and villas of Tuscany near Florence where he had created the Wasmuth Portfolio. The lovely stone assemblages of the Tuscan countryside evidently had impressed Wright favorably with their oneness with the landscape, the materials drawn from the immediate region, and the melding of spaces for living and work. I say “evidently” because he never said so. But he also had never said that his moves toward abstraction in his design were affected by his trip to Japan in 1905, but after his return he quickly designed both Unity Temple and the Yahara Boat House Project, completing a breakthrough in that direction that had been in the budding stage for several years.

Construction of Taliesin seems to have moved swiftly, taking probably eighteen months from groundbreaking in 1911 to completion in time for gardening in 1912. Formal photography of the house seems not to have occurred until the summer of 1912 when Wright hired the firm of Clarence Fuermann of Chicago to make images of Taliesin; seventeen or so are known to survive. Proofsheets of these were among twenty-five Fuermann proofsheets of the first and second versions of Taliesin acquired for the Wisconsin Historical Society in 2012. Besides the Fuermann prints there is the album of thirty-three images on exhibition here; again, there are seventeen Taliesin images and these were taken by a single individual, one of Wright’s draftsmen, a man named Taylor Woolley who lived the rest of his life in Utah and whose negatives are divided between two archives there. Now I am going to interrupt and say that it says “probably” in the captions, just down the hall. There’s no “probably” about it! He took these pictures. [laughter] The negatives don’t lie! They are his. Woolley, the man on the right is wearing a vest, likely assembled the photo album whose images are on view here, and he probably made the prints in the album– some of the rarest Wright-related images in existence. We do not know for whom the album was made, but I conclude this presentation with some speculations.

You’ll have to wait. [laughter] Why Wright did not immediately have more professional images made of Taliesin is a puzzle and a frustration. He reveled in imagery. He had just spent nearly two years assembling and producing a monumental print portfolio of his work, plus a smaller photographic portfolio that served as a less expensive adjunct to the costly print portfolio. The image is of the large portfolio cover. The one-hundred prints came in two such protective folders. Although, between Woolley and Fuermann, fewer than fifty interior and exterior images of the first version of Taliesin and its surroundings are known– a very slight record for one of the world’s most important architectural landmarks of the twentieth century. What was Wright waiting for? Probably for more cash from his largest client-the builder of Midway Gardens in Chicago, his largest work to date. Then he could have Fuermann pull out all the stops.

Unfortunately, the well-known arson fire and murders of August, 1914, occurred at Taliesin before further truly professional photography could take place. Meanwhile, Woolley had done yeoman’s work and filled the photographic gaps for later generations’ good. The photographic record for the subsequent two versions of Taliesin is vastly more abundant. The second, erected after the 1914 fire, stood until 1925, when fire again destroyed the dwelling but spared the studio. Unfortunately, Wright’s half-million-dollar cache of Asian antiquities-his retirement nest egg– in the basement under the Taliesin living room was ruined in the fire as well, condemning him to a lifetime of architectural work, not a lifetime as an antiques dealer, much to the architectural benefit of mankind. There are hundreds if not thousands of pictures of Taliesin II. Taliesin III followed immediately and stands today, the subject of literally millions of images, taken by professionals and mostly by eager tourists. Those few images of Taliesin I are the ones that concern us. They are original prints, and as such are the most desirable for scholars, institutions, and collectors.

And they fetch the highest prices. At this point I should unmask myself and tell a story about values. The album whose images grace the walls here was acquired in 2005 by the Historical Society largely through my efforts. On a Monday night in January that year I attended a meeting of the group that was planning the restoration of Wright’s Model B1 American System Built dwelling at 2714 West Burnham Street on Milwaukee’s south side. At the end of the meeting Mike Lilek, who headed the committee and who is an enthusiastic Wright collector, showed me a printout of an eBay offering this album. It was only a partial print of the album, but it stunned me. I said something like, “Holy crap, that’s Taliesin I!” Mike said, “Yup.” And I said, “We’ve got to do something.” We hatched the fund-raising idea through the Wisconsin Historical Society that night, and the next morning, Tuesday, I set things in motion, with the auction closing around 9:30 p.m. on Friday. That gave us four days. Mike and I figured the value at about $22,000 for the thirty-three images, some being worth a thousand dollars each, others five hundred.

About two weeks later a dealer called me at home and said he thought a fair retail price was $60,000, and asked if I was interested in selling. [chuckles] I told him the album was now the property of the State of Wisconsin and was not for sale. He pressed a little, I was firm, and he hung up. I will tell a more complete story about the acquisition of the album at the end of this talk. The message is that the album has extremely high value because it is filled with original prints. We knew of no other collection of original prints in existence, since the Fuermann proofsheets had not yet surfaced. The images online looked very nice and appealing, filled with information. Kieran Murphy on the staff of Taliesin Preservation, Incorporated, immediately identified the photographer of many of the photographs as Taylor Woolley, who had worked with Wright on the Wasmuth Portfolio, and who also was working for him at Taliesin. Copies of some of these images were already at Taliesin, but none, of course, were original prints.

Mike is and was an expert at manipulating eBay and soon had identified the seller as Helen Conwell of Fairhope, Alabama, on Mobile Bay, a well-known retirement community. We decided to try to convince her to remove the album from eBay and sell it outright to the Wisconsin Historical Society for $20,000, giving us a month to raise the funds. It fell to me to make the call, with the blessing of the Society and its foundation. Mrs. Conwell could not have been nicer. She was a University of Wisconsin alum, a physician, and the niece of a biology professor whose bust adorns the entrance area of Birge Hall on the campus. But eBay has its rules, and Mrs. Conwell plays by rules. “Good luck in bidding,” she said. “I hope you win.” [laughter] Given the quality of the photographs, raising funds was not particularly difficult for anyone whose Rolodex, like mine, had the names of Wright enthusiasts and collectors around the country thanks to years of academic work in the Wright minefields. All I had to do was describe the images. The centerpiece was the triptych of the fireplace in the living room.

If the prospects asked for more time I sent them to the eBay site. Then I would pretty much get a pledge. The photographs in the album break down very nicely into the categories that Wright employed when designing. He began with the site, moved on to the function of the building, meaning the interior, then tackled form, or the exterior. He liked windows, terraces, and apertures to frame views as if they were paintings or photographs taken from the buildings themselves. And he liked buildings to be seen from a distance as if they were part of the earth, as if they had grown from it and always belonged there. He conceived this relationship as two forms of reciprocal conversation, one spiritual between the building and the landscape, and the other both spiritual and often actual between the occupants and passersby. Above all he wanted people to think about what they were seeing and to react to it. This is the same kind of conversation or inter-reaction that fine artists desire us all to have with their paintings, sculptures, photographs, musical compositions, ballets, and on and on.

Engage and react. Use all your senses and think. The functions Wright intended to squeeze into Taliesin were daunting, but were not all represented in the album. Notably missing is the element of agriculture. Where are the gardens, cattle, fields, chickens, workers? They are missing. Yet one of the persons for whom this album may have intended as a gift, Wright’s uncle Jenkin Lloyd Jones, was a firm believer in the farm. He was the most important Unitarian minister in the Midwest and headed the Abraham Lincoln Center in Chicago’s Hyde Park. He had a cottage a mile or two from Taliesin. And he maintained a small farm there.

He even wrote a notable article called “The Gospel of the Farm.” Whither, compiler of this album, is the farm? Chances are the compiler had little or nothing to do with the agricultural activities at Taliesin and simply did not record them. We are stuck, then, with two functions: a few suggestions about household life and architectural practice. Taylor Woolley had made three photographs of the fireplace alcove in the living room which were pasted down together to form a triptych. The image has now become rather famous, reproduced countless times. It shows Wright’s inventiveness in using a partial wall to form a barrier between an entrance corridor, a kitchen corridor, and a living space. The wall also serves as bench, bookshelf, and whatnot. It may also have been a bed. The fireplace is massive, a symbol of hearth writ large, too large, to heat a space practically, but capable of making a statement about the architectural and social significance of the hearth, something Robert Twombly emphasized in his pathbreaking dissertation about Wright in the 1960s. The large birch branches stacked on the right demonstrate the fireplace’s impractical pyrotechnical capabilities.

Its masonry is remarkable, with stones laid “on bed” as they appear in nature, something unheard of before Wright instituted this form of ashlar in this house in 1911, both inside and out. It now looks commonplace. So, too, with the strips of wood and color that emphasize the structure of the building. They were innovations, now ordinary to the eye. The dining area was equally innovative. George Niedecken of Milwaukee, one of Wright’s draftsmen and a collaborator with him on furniture and interior design, is credited with designing these tables and chairs. I don’t think he designed them. I think he perfected the designs after sketches by Wright and then built the pieces. They are far too rustic to have been designed by Niedecken.

And they are astounding. If a Scandinavian furniture designer came up with them today, you’d pay $2,000 apiece and sit uncomfortably. I think the wood was cypress. Wright was fond of cypress at this time. That was it for living spaces in Taliesin proper. No views of bedrooms or kitchen or bathrooms or basement, although Taliesin had plenty of such spaces. Let us move on to the work and living spaces for architecture where Taylor Woolley spent his days. This part of Taliesin has never burned, but it has been altered again and again. One verity through it all has been this fireplace in the studio into which Taylor Woolley persuaded a bunch of the building crew to squish itself, evidently to celebrate completion of something.

We have not identified a single person in the image, but we have identified the stones in the fireplace. They have not moved an inch. An oil portrait of Wright’s mother, Anna Lloyd Jones Wright, has hung above it for decades, suggesting that she offers a counterbalance to this happy occasion, which occurred in 1912. Just to the left of the fireplace is what is known as the studio today, and it has been greatly expanded. It is where Wright would have worked when he was in residence, and where he greeted clients. To the right of the fireplace was the drafting room, a space which is about the same size today, although much rebuilt after having been crushed by an oak tree that fell from the Tea Circle a number of years ago. The windows on the right face north, the steady north light being the preferred light for drawing. The painting on the far wall is a landscape by George Niedecken of a scene around Spring Green. At least one of his Spring Green landscapes survives and is in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Note that these are not fancy, tilting drafting tables, but rather make-do, flat tables, built on the site. The draftsmen did not have to walk far to their sleeping quarters. They were just beyond the drafting room, a bunkroom, that slept four, two to a side, with a narrow aisle between the bunks. Gas lights illuminated the room, which was fairly spartan, relieved by another of George Niedecken’s landscapes. A T-square and table in the room evidently afforded an extra workspace depending on need. It appears that Wright had plenty of business in 1912. It may be possible that these two photographs of the draftsmen’s sleeping quarters are actually intended as record photographs of George Niedecken’s painting. A central function of Taliesin was to blend indoors and outdoors through views, terraces, ready access to gardens, walks, woods, nature in general. Merely stepping from dwelling to studio afforded such experiences-a view across the Wisconsin River valley.

Or, a view of the exterior of the dwelling itself from a terrace that afforded wider views of the entire valley to the east, south and north. Wright’s blending of the indoors and outdoors was not generally heralded in his earlier buildings, yet it is apparent at Taliesin in 1911. The inner courtyard of Taliesin has always been a refined garden, a suburban showplace for art and horticulture, and one of the least tinkered-with spots in the complex. The walls are much the same, even though many of the plants have changed. Some believe the peonies have been where they are for more than a century. The masonry walks and walls, however, desperately need repair, today. The original sculpture, “The Flower in a Crannied Wall” which stood in this spot for years had suffered considerable damage from weather and has been put under cover. A copy stands in its place. There is a monumental aspect to Taliesin’s springing from the brow of the hill, now softened by vegetation and a cantilevered deck, and further softened by the enlarged pond below created by a dam.

The dam was new construction, and the resulting lower pond was a new body of water that revised the landscape and provided a different visual platform for the dwelling. The east wall was and is indeed formidable. At this level the dwelling is two and a half stories in height, a gray mass punctuated by windows that are not rhythmic at the lower levels, not architecturally pleasing to the eye. They serve functional, practical purposes related to laundry, heating, storage, and the like; today they have been transformed into guest rooms, charming on the inside, less so on the outside, but sheltered by foliage and the cantilever. From a distance, however, Taliesin passes the test of appearing to grow from the earth. Frank Lloyd Wright was at the top of his game as these images reveal. Finally, there is this photograph of the interior of a cottage with a fireplace. The Historical Society’s processing staff has titled this image as being of a fireplace possibly designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I do not believe that caption for a moment.

Wright did not design this fireplace. It is too clumsy. It is not designed by an architect. It was merely built by a craftsman. The cottage’s windows match those of the windows of Westhope, the cottage owned by Jenkin Lloyd Jones at what is now Tower Hill State Park, but what was then a private resort owned by a group of Jenkin’s parishioners from Chicago. I believe the photographer had one or two intentions in making this image. First, he was documenting the interior of a cottage, perhaps for its owner or perhaps because someone admired the owner and Jenkin Lloyd Jones had lots of admirers. Second, he was making a record of a painting over the fireplace, just as he had made a record of two paintings by George Niedecken at Taliesin in the drafting room and in the bunkroom. In those images, too, the paintings were centered.

The images recorded paintings as much, or more, than they recorded architecture, even though the details of the paintings were generally lost in the photographs. They would not have been lost on the owners of the paintings, nor on the artist. Perhaps the album was a gift to the artist, George Niedecken, or to the owner of one of the paintings, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, who loved this valley and wrote and preached about it with conviction and even fervor. Now for a whole lot of speculation about this album’s history. I would like to think that the album sat in Jenkin’s church’s library until around 1960 when a housecleaning took place. Two parishioners, Helen and Dale O’Brien, were retiring to a farm home near Taliesin. Dale had been very active in Jenkin’s old parish and was a Chicago advertising man; Helen did theater in a big way. What a nice gift for them from an appreciative congregation. In Spring Green they were active in the arts.

Helen helped get local theater going, including the creation of a community company; there’s a plaque on the wall of the theater downtown with her picture engraved on it. After about twenty years, they left Spring Green for Fairhope, Alabama. Warmer winters. They passed on. Their kids held an estate sale. One of their parents’ friends bought the album for $30 or so. The kids said it was full of pictures of their parents’ house in Wisconsin, and that their parents had sold their property to the group of persons who started American Players Theatre. That part is true, and what follows is true. The woman who bought the album left it to her sister in Fairhope, one Helen Conwell, who at age 82 was persuaded by her children to start paring down by selling things on eBay.

Among the things she chose to sell was this album, for which she specified an opening bid of $19.95. [laughter] She knew it depicted Taliesin because it said so on the cover, and she knew about Frank Lloyd Wright’s connection to Taliesin. Someone bid $25; then someone bid $500. And Helen began to suspect the album was special. [laughter] I learned about the album around 8 o’clock Monday night. From Tuesday through Thursday I raised $16,000 to buy it on behalf of the Wisconsin Historical Society. I knew I needed at least $22,000, and perhaps $32,000. I had until 9 that fourth night, Friday, when bidding closed, and by that time, after an extremely hectic day on the phone and on email, I had $28,200 in pledges. At the pre-appointed hour I made the phone call to the head of the Historical Society’s archives who was having dinner at a restaurant.

He in turn made the authorizing call to Andy Kraushaar who would place the bid with his sniper ware. With 20 seconds to go before the auction closed, Andy bid the farm. We won for $22,100 against two other bidders. We identified one as the owner of the Willey House in Minneapolis who had somehow missed all the emails about making pledges sent by the Wright Building Conservancy of which he was a member. [laughter] The other guy we never identified, but I’ve got a hunch. Our sniper bid was bigger than his sniper bid. I called Andy first and thanked him. He wanted to know how Mike Lilek and I had pegged the sale price so closely. I said we were smart.

[laughter] Then I called Mike and we discussed how to maximize publicity; I told him the Historical Society would try to control release of the news and would drag its feet until it had the album in hand; he said there could be other approaches and the next Wednesday it was all over the front page of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel which had forced the Historical Society’s hand. Then I called Helen Conwell, and she read me the text of an email she was composing. We both cried. [chuckling] We were happy, but the release of tension overcame us. And then I went to bed because I had to spend the weekend at my church job as an organist and choir director and also preparing a highly detailed and accurate list of the pledgers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and the amounts pledged. Sure enough, on Monday morning at 8 o’clock, the Historical Society financial people were bugging me for just that information, and they seemed a little unhappy that I could supply it without further nagging. We tussled about the issue of a discount. I wanted them to hold back some funds for expenses and contingencies, since I anticipated that offers of more material would pop up quickly. I was vetoed.

Pledges were billed at 76 percent since I had raised more than we needed. Within days it developed that we needed $600 to fly an employee to Fairhope to pick up the album because shipping costs were much higher than airfare. And then someone offered some rare images of Wright in Washington, D.C., for $3,000. Could I raise those sums? [chuckling] Fortunately friends and neighbors whom I had not asked for money had been calling me with offers of funds should opportunities like this arise again. Little did they know that within less than a month that I would be on the phone. Since 2005 I have raised funds to buy more Wright material on several occasions. I have bragging rights for the acquisition of a cardboard model of a Wright house published by Life magazine, several hundred rare postcards and some drawings, the Fuermann proofsheets of Taliesin I, and a set of 30-some promotional prints that Wright designed for his American System Built dwellings in 1915-16. I am very proud and I am never embarrassed about asking for help to acquire such rarities. And you are just plain lucky that the Historical Society has not sent me on a mission this evening or I would be passing the hat or asking for pledges right now.

Thank you.