Lot 26 : Frank Lloyd Wright
Auction Location: United States of America - 2004
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Artist or Maker:
A LEADED GLASS 'BUTTERFLY' HANGING LAMP, CIRCA 1903*
Title:
Frank Lloyd Wright
Description:
A Leaded Glass 'Butterfly' Hanging Lamp, circa 1903*
Executed by the Linden Glass Company, Chicago, Illinois
19 1/2 in. (49.7 cm.) high, 23 in. (58.4 cm.) wide
Provenance:
Richard Walter Bock
Thence by descent
Exhibited:
Weil am Rhein, Vitra Design Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright: Designs for The Living City, June - October 1998. Leipzig, Grassimuseum, November 1998 - January 1999. Glasgow, Hunterian Art Gallery, February - April 1999. Paris, Musée des Arts Decoratifs, September - November 1999. Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum, December 1999- February 2000
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, The Art that is Life: The Arts and Crafts Movement in America 1875-1920, March - May 1987. Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, August - November 1987. Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Art, December 1987 - February 1989. New York, The Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, April - June 1988
New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, High Styles: Eight Decades of Vanguard Design, September 1985 - January 1986
Miami Beach, The Bass Museum of Arts, Frank Lloyd Wright-Drawings, Prints & Decorative Objects, June - September 1984
Published:
David Hanks, The Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, Washington, DC, 1979, p. 80
Sharon Darling, Chicago Ceramics & Glass: an illustrated history from 1871 to 1933, Chicago, 1979, pp. 120-124
Patrick Joseph Meehan, Frank Lloyd Wright: a research guide to archival sources, New York, 1983, pp. 32-33
David A. Hanks, High Styles: Twentieth-Century American Design, New York, 1985, pp. 29-30
Wendy Kaplan, The Art that is Life The Arts & Crafts Movement in America, 1875-1920, Boston, 1987, pp. 46, 394
Vitra Design Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Living City, Weil am Rhein, 1998, p. 187
Notes:
PROPERTY FROM THE RICHARD W. BOCK SCULPTURE MUSEUM, GREENVILLE COLLEGE, GREENVILLE, ILLINOIS
Interior perspective of the Dana House dining room
(c) Frank Lloyd Wright Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York
Study for the 'Butterfly' Hanging Lamp
(c)The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
Interior view of the Dana House dining room
(c) Doug Carr, courtesy of the Dana-Thomas House, Illinois Historic Preservation Agency
Frank Lloyd Wright is one of America's greatest architects as well as one of the foremost initiators of modernism. In the revolutionary early work of his Prairie-style period (1899-1910), with the long flat landscape, tawny tones and natural surroundings of the midwestern prairie as his muse, he created a radically new language of domestic architecture and design.
In these forward-looking homes, he abolished the 19th century notion of individual, discrete rooms, creating continuous interwoven spaces in which he designed every furnishing and fitting to create a total environment. One of Wright's largest and most elaborate homes from this period was the Dana House (now known as the Dana-Thomas House), in Springfield, Illinois (1902-1904). Commissioned by the young, wealthy and deeply independent widow, Susan Lawrence Dana, Wright was charged with remodelling her parents' Italianate style home after the death of her father in 1901. Initially a "renovation," by the project's completion, Wright had erected his most exquisite and extravagant commission to date. With over 250 'light screens' and the complementary skylights, table lamps, sconces and hanging lamps, Wright created his greatest expressions in stained glass. In fact, he regarded them as among his best efforts in the medium.
In the Dana House dining room, one of the most magnificent of all Wright's interior spaces from this period, there are, suspended above the table from the lofty vaulted ceiling, four hanging 'butterfly' lamps (a fifth, ever so slightly different, hangs in a stair landing). In this breathtakingly beautiful room, situated at the north end of the house on a city street in Springfield, Illinois, Wright has reclaimed the lost prairie and, as was his eternal goal, brought the outside in. The flora of George Mann Niedecken's realistic decorative frieze of sumac, goldenrods and asters as well as Wright's stunning art glass windows, stylized forms based on the prairie sumac, are complemented by the extraordinary hanging lamps derived from Wright's abstracted vision of the prairie butterfly at rest.
Characteristic of Wright's art glass from this period, the hanging lamp is composed of clear, amber, gold and moss green glass, some iridized, in geometric shapes - rectangles, squares, triangles. The composition is symmetrical, based around a vertical axis, and, while it appears far more complex, it is fundamentally a square. There are four wings, one at each corner between which are panels, all made of glass.
Wright's choice of theme was surely influenced by the nine butterflies carved in the stone fireplace surround in the original library at the Dana House, the only part extant after Wright's "remodeling." The hanging 'butterfly' lamps, in addition to the two iconic leaded glass table lamps he designed for this house, were Wright's first forays into the creation of three dimensional art glass. It has been suggested that the hanging lamp is perhaps his most complex art glass object and he never created another like it.
The German born sculptor Richard Walter Bock first met Wright in 1891 while working on the sculptures for Louis Sullivan's Schiller Theater Building, as, at that time, Wright was the head draftsman in Adler and Sullivan's office. This meeting was the start of both a personal friendship and a working relationship which lasted for twenty years. In addition to working with Wright on projects such as the Isidore Heller house (1897), the Larkin Company Administration Building (1903), Unity Temple (1905) and the Darwin D. Martin Residence (1905), Bock designed the sculpture, Flowers in the Crannied Wall based on a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, which stands prominently at the entryway to the Dana House.
In Bock's possession was a hanging lamp so similar to those in the Dana House that it has been said they are identical. However, there a few very minor variations in the arrangement of the glass panes. Bock's lamp never had the hanging hardware or the underside panes of glass of those at the Dana House. Because of these slight differences, it is possible that Bock's hanging lamp is a prototype. According to Bock's daughter, the 'butterfly' lamp was an extra which Wright gave to Bock in lieu of payment. The lamp stayed in the Bock family and was eventually donated as part of the Richard W. Bock Sculpture Collection to Greenville College, Greenville, Illinois in 1972. Honoring the gift, The Richard W. Bock Sculpture museum was inaugurated on the college campus in 1975.
The hanging lamp, like all the art glass pieces for the Dana house, was executed by the Linden Glass Company of Chicago with the iridescent glass manufactured by the Kokomo Opalescent Glass Company of Kokomo, Indiana.
This lot may be exempt from sales tax as set forth in the Sales Tax notice at the back of the catalogue.
The title for this lot is Property from the Richard W. Bock
Sculpture Museum, Greenville College, Greenville, Illinois.
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