Time has been kind to New York’s Guggenheim. Today, it’s considered Frank Lloyd Wright’s crowning statement and an unequivocal masterpiece of modern architecture, but upon opening in 1959, its revolutionary form drew comparisons to a washing machine, marshmallow, and a giant corkscrew.
The chairs Wright designed for the museum’s café were no less futuristic. Sleek and minimalist with a spun aluminum tulip base and an eye-shaped backrest, they seem to belong on the flight deck of a ship gliding through the solar system. They were never realized. Now, nearly seven decades later, the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) has commissioned a pair as part of a new exhibition that reframes Wright’s furniture within the Wisconsinite’s practice and American modernism more broadly.
Frank Lloyd Wright Café Chairs for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: courtesy MOWA/the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ.
To produce the café chairs, curators worked with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to uncover his drawings, before sharing them with a multigenerational metal-spinning company in Milwaukee. It’s an approach organizers have taken a further 10 times working with master artisans (including Wright’s great-grandson, S. Lloyd Natof) for “Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design.” Across 40 pieces, the show highlights five distinct periods between 1911 and 1959, years in which Wright drifted from the horizontal lines and design strictures of his Prairie School.
If there’s one thing a person with even a passing interest in Wright knows, it’s his concept of organic architecture, a vision in which every element, from the carpet to the planters to, yes, the chairs, forms part of a harmonious whole. And yet, Wright’s furniture has received little attention, with few scholarly books and even fewer exhibitions on the subject.
Frank Lloyd Wright in his studio at Taliesin, Wisconsin, 1957. Photo: Tony Vaccaro / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.
This absence caught the attention of Eric Vogel, scholar-in-residence at the Taliesin Institute, who began digging into the archives and networking, a journey that led him to MOWA, which was showing a collection of Wright chairs. In Thomas Szolwinski, the museum’s curator of architecture and design, Vogel found a partner.
“I’d long been interested in curating a chair exhibition,” Szolwinski said over email. “The central premise is that Wright’s homes and studios, Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and later Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, functioned as laboratories of creative experiment.”
Frank Lloyd Wright chair and table for the Tree Room. Photo: courtesy MOWA/the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ.
Wright would design around 200 chairs and enjoyed a fraught relationship with them—at once considering them key to a room’s integrity, while also calling sitting “an unfortunate necessity.”Here, the story begins with Wright rebuilding Taliesin East following major fires in 1914 and 1925. There, he combined a new architecture with unprecedented furniture forms (ones whose originality would, in time, be rejected by clients). MOWA has recreated Wright’s armchair, which is made from sandy cypress wood that matches the building’s color and horizontal gold leaf joints that echo the exterior’s window slats. Elsewhere, there’s the triangular chair and table for the complex’s tree room that chimes with elements of the ceiling and a chair for the Hillside dining room chair.
Frank Lloyd Wright “Mori” chair for the S. Mori Oriental Art Studio and Japanese Print Shop, Chicago. Photo: courtesy MOWA/the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ.
Out west, a highlight is the origami armchair Wright designed in 1946. It sees the designer looking back to his frequent visits to Japan in the 1910s with sides like well-creased paper and arms that unfold before the sitter. Its seat takes on the copper-red tone (known as Cherokee Red) that traced throughout the property. It’s a far heftier proposition than the slender oak chair he designed for a Chicago gallery of Japanese art in 1914, which arrives at MOWA on loan from the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust in Oak Park.
At a time when the lines between architecture, interior spaces, and product design are well and truly blurred, “Modern Chair Design” is a reminder of Wright’s prescience. “Time and again, Wright was ahead of what later became standardized or popularized techniques,” Szolwinski said. “We highlight these parallels and make comparisons to global trends, showing how Wright’s furniture fits into a larger narrative of modern design.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
