Woodblock prints, textiles, folding screens, hanging scrolls, rugs, ceramics, wood sculptures, stone sculptures. Long before we started collecting Frank Lloyd Wright’s furniture and houses, Wright collected his own art. And while his collection of Japanese prints has been studied extensively, there’s another thematic collection of his that’s relatively unexplored: 32 prints by German and Austrian Secessionists collected during his time in Europe with his mistress Mamah Borthwick Cheney. As author Anthony Alofsin writes in Frank Lloyd Wright Collector, “his work of the decade shared many of the values and aesthetics important to Secessionists: a reliance on pure forms with roots in the origins of art, an appreciation of primitivist culture in the non-Western world, and the inspiration to take these pure sources as the basis for a new language of design.” Collectively the prints—some of architecture—explore a rebellion against academic traditions. Or what modernism was before it got a capital “M.” • $40; University of Texas Press, April 2012
In Frank Lloyd Wright’s Collected Art, the Budding of Modernism
Collected prints display the diversity of directions Modernism was taking before the philosophy became codified.
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