Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House has been photographed countless times, but few photos evoke the mood of Edmund Teske’s photographs, some of which will be exhibited in Milwaukee this spring, along with preliminary sketches and drawings of the project by Wright.
The exhibition, "Hollyhock House and Olive Hill: Frank Lloyd Wright and Edmund Teske," will run from April 19-June 15, at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum north of downtown. The museum is in an Italian Renaissance-style villa, designed by David Adler in 1923, as the home of Lloyd Smith, a prominent industrialist. It sits on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. The photos and drawings are on a three year tour. They were last at Wright’s Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Hollyhock House, or the Aline Barnsdall Residence, was just one part of the Olive Hill commission, which Miss Barnsdall gave Wright in 1919. The concept included a performing arts center, in which Barnsdall would have produced avant-garde plays. The other buildings on Olive Hill, a 36-acre parcel in Los Angeles, were to include two guesthouses ("A," for the theater director, and "B," a guest house), retail shops, and artists’ studios, as well as Hollyhock House, Barnsdall’s own home. However, only A, B, and Hollyhock House were completed.
Teske, who grew up in the Midwest, was smitten by Olive Hill. He was not the occasional visitor who photographs Wright’s work. Instead, he could explore Olive Hill in depth, at will, with his Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera, because he lived in Residence B, as its caretaker, from 1943, until its demolition in 1954.
Teske’s pictures are generally not as literal as the photographs we are used to seeing in books about Wright’s work. These are not the typical color photographs that show off the sand color stucco, under a brilliant blue sky.
His photos are somber black and white prints. Some are, arguably, eerie. His lighting and printing techniques often emphasize the ornamentation of the house, rather than the house itself. Shadows and his dark printing point us to the highlights he wants to emphasize.
Teske was as likely to compose in the darkroom as in his viewfinder. He sometimes made composite prints (combining several images into one), and solarized prints (this technique briefly exposes the print to room light in the darkroom).
Jeffrey Herr is curator of Olive Hill for the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Miss Barnsdall had donated the land and buildings to the city in 1927. He is delighted that the work is now on exhibit across the country. "While Wright is considered international, and everyone kind of knows about his work, in general, Hollyhock House has been a very local building in terms of its attention, when you think about exhibitions and that kind of thing.
"That doesn't mean it is not well know. That just means it has not been studied in any kind of kind exhibition context, other than maybe a single aspect, here and there. This is the largest, broadest single exhibition about Hollyhock House to make it outside of Los Angeles, so actually it’s really a thrill to see it in another context."
He spoke in February at the opening of the Price Tower exhibition. "It was great to see it in the context of another Wright building, Going there to lecture about it was doubly interesting to me."
Herr curated and wrote the exhibition catalogue (Aline Barnsdall’s Olive Hill Project, Los Angeles: Angel City Press, 2005). "I think they (the photographs) are important because they provide a dated historical context for the house. They are absolutely amazing photographs. They are very romantic, they are lyrical. They are Hollyhock House seen through the eye of an artist. Even in its derelict condition. it has this ruins of antiquity, almost, look."
He has two particularly favorite pictures in the collection. "Certainly one of my favorites is the Barbizon image of Olive Hill looking down the hill under the canopy of olive trees and you prosaically see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a romantic image, and when you see that happening in the middle of a city.
"Another favorite is the one of the inner courtyard at Hollyhock House (Plate 15).
It’s one of those images that show Hollyhock House under reconstruction. I looked at it for 10 years, and I was nearing the end of the draft for the catalogue, when it struck me this is not a candid shot. Your odds of being struck by lightning or winning big in the lottery are probably better than having those two workmen in those positions that lead your eye from that statue to the wall of the living room where that man is on the second story roof. It has that kind of typical ruins quality, yet there is light there. The foreground is undisturbed. You have all these dichotomies in one photo. It’s pretty astounding."
While Herr admires the artistry in Teske’s photographs, he says that while they were not taking for documentary purposes, they are important in tracing the history of Olive Hill. "I was looking at it from a curatorial point of view, what kind of information can it give about the house at that point in history? We have lots of photographs, but so many of them do not have a specific date attached to them."
The drawings are no less important. "This is the first time in 30 years they have all been exhibited as a group," Herr says. "These drawings are unique. There are a few very preliminary sketches, conceptual sketches of Olive Hill and different styles of a different sort of look for the residence that are unique, and are not duplicated anywhere else."
Jack Holzhueter, a Wright scholar and a board member of Frank Lloyd Wright - Wisconsin, will present a lecture on the exhibition at 1:30 p.m., Sunday April 27, following an 11:30 brunch and private viewing of the work. The cost is $35. Call Wright in Wisconsin, at 608.287.0339, for reservations.
A concurrent exhibition, A Revolutionary in Milwaukee: The Designs of George Mann Niedecken runs from April 17-July 20 at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The original museum building is by Eero Saarinen. Santiago Calatrava designed the latest addition to the building.
Afterword:
Many people have described Hollyhock House as "Mayan." Prof. Anthony Alofsin writes about the style of the house in his important study of Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 1910-1922. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1993). The Barnsdall House is discussed beginning on page 233. Prof. Alofsin’s observations include:
"Although the sloping attic bears an obvious similarity to Maya buildings, the analogies cited by historians are among the least successful attributions of Maya influence. There are other examples that would be more convincing visual analogies than the ones cited."
And, he writes, Hollyhock’s court "shares the Mediterranean tradition of the enclosed courtyard which Wright had begun using in other house during the 1910s" as well as reminding us of the quadrangle of Maya ball courts.
The book is complex. It is not one of the many books that can easily be picked up and skimmed for an overview of Wright’s work. It is the kind of book one wants to take notes from. It is well worth reading.
Incidentally, Prof. Alofsin spoke in November, at a benefit for Wright in Wisconsin, at the Bogk House, which is near Villa Terrace. He is an affable man, who has great insight into Wright’s work. This book, and his landmark five-volume compendium of Wright’s correspondence, are invaluable resources for scholars and more casual aficionados of Wright’s work.
Resources:
Frank Lloyd Wright - Wisconsin: wrightinwisconsin.org Angel City Press: angelcitypress.com
Bibliography:
Alofsin, Anthony, Edited by, and with an Introduction by, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Index to the Taliesin Correspondence in five volumes. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc..,1988)
Smith, Kathryn, Hollyhock House and Olive Hill (New York: Rizzoli International, 1992)
