Frank Lloyd Wright
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The widely admired biographer of Bernard Berenson (“A triumph”—Washington Post; “A perfect riot”—Michael Holroyd; “Astonishing”—London Sunday Times) and of Kenneth Clark (“Splendid, enthralling”—The Wall Street Journal) gives us now a complete and complex portrait of an American titan, Frank Lloyd Wright.
Meryle Secrest shows us Frank Lloyd Wright in full scale—the brilliant, outrageous, fascinating man; the giant who changed modern architecture; the standard-bearer for the new, quintessentially American vision, the artist who never, during a seventy-year career, abandoned his principles of design; the radical, the Bohemian—the visionary who was one of the central figures of the twentieth-century American culture, society and politics.
Meryle Secrest is the first biographer to have full access to the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives. Her life of the architect, more than five years’ work and illustrated with 121 photographs, is a stunning feat of biographical narrative, sustained analysis and compassionate insight. With her extraordinary grasp of the man and his art, she gives us Frank Lloyd Wright close up—a creature of boundless energy and indomitable appetite for experience, a man whose limitless belief in his own rightness carried him through bankruptcy, arrest, fire, divorce, and years of social ostracism. A riveting portrait of a genius.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this superb, subtle, demythologizing biography of Wright (1869-1959), we meet a shrewd yet gullible architect who fostered a view of himself as a misunderstood, embattled genius, a narcissist who unconsciously courted catastrophe while blaming the vengeful hand of fate as he overcame accidents, bankruptcy, lawsuits and hounding by his morphine-addicted second wife. Drawing on a trove of letters, Secrest ( Salvador Dali ) traces Wright's ``secret conviction of worthlessness'' to the contradictory influences of his freethinking, erratic Welsh mother and his jealous, spendthrift father, a New England minister. She discusses the dynamics of the architect's three marriages, recounts his clashes with Louis Sullivan and Lewis Mumford, and digs beneath his ``quasi-mystical Celtic beliefs'' to pinpoint the multiple influences on his fervent quest for an organic architecture. A definitive portrait of a mercurial titan. Photos. BOMC and QPB alternates.