“The Early Drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright Reconsidered”

AboutEileen Michels re-examines Frank Lloyd Wright's account, in *An Autobiography*, of the freehand drawings of ornament he prepared to win his position with Adler and Sullivan around 1887, arguing that the surviving published record of Wright's early perspective drawings for J. L. Silsbee and for his own independent projects does not support Wright's self-portrait as an already-exceptional draftsman who dazzled Sullivan at first meeting. Comparing Wright's published drawings against contemporaries such as Paul Lautrup (Adler and Sullivan's own preferred outside renderer), Oliver Smith, Irving K. Pond, and Harvey Ellis, Michels finds Wright's early technique unremarkable and derivative of prevailing Chicago drafting-room fashions. She questions the chronology of Wright's move from Silsbee to Sullivan implied by *An Autobiography*, analyzes a surviving fragment of ornament drawing attributed to Wright's first Auditorium Building assignment (arguing its style corresponds more closely to Sullivan's ornament of 1890–91 than to his 1885–87 work, casting doubt on the attribution or its dating), and shows that Wright did not in fact draw any of the office's major published presentation renderings during his tenure, which were instead the work of other delineators. Michels concludes Wright's drawing ability was likely not what secured or sustained his position with Adler and Sullivan, and that his early Chicago years, like his later-documented Madison years, were substantially mythologized in his own retrospective writing.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28197112%2930%3A4%3C294%3ATEDOFL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7