“Letters from Louis H. Sullivan to R. M. Schindler”

AboutEsther McCoy presents and annotates a sequence of personal letters written by Louis Sullivan to the architect R. M. Schindler between 1920 and 1923, concerning Sullivan's repeated, increasingly anxious efforts to recover the manuscript of *Kindergarten Chats*, which he had lent to Schindler for possible European publication through Adolf Loos in Vienna and then a Berlin publishing house (Langenscheidtsche Buchdruckerei). The letters trace a failed publication scheme — including a proposal that Sullivan might join Loos in heading a new Paris art school, relayed through Schindler and Richard Neutra — and document Sullivan's worsening financial distress in his final years (accepting a $200 loan arranged through Frank Lloyd Wright via Schindler, taking on the small Krause Music Store façade commission "to turn out in a few days," and repeatedly asking after Wright's whereabouts in Los Angeles and Japan). The correspondence also touches on Schindler's supervision of the Barnsdall House and his own emerging independent practice at 835 Kings Road, and closes with Sullivan noting the serialization of his *Autobiography of an Idea* in the *Journal of the American Institute of Architects* shortly before his 1924 death.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196112%2920%3A4%3C179%3ALFLHST%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V